Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS

Miran Božovič (b. 1957 in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is Professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. Closely related to the so-called Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, his research focuses primarily on 17^th- and 18^th -Century Philosophy.

Božovič received a BA in Comparative Literature (1980), a BA in Philosophy (1981), an MA in Philosophy (1984) as well as a PhD in Philosophy (1991), all from the University of Ljubljana.

Since the 1980s Božovič has published numerous books, book chapters, and articles, including An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2000), which “examines the elusive status of the body in early modern European philosophy by examining its various encounters with the gaze. Its range is impressive, moving from the Greek philosophers and theorists of the body (Aristotle, Plato, Hippocratic medical writers) to early modern thinkers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Descartes, Bentham) to modern figures including Jon Elster, Lacan, Althusser, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen J. Gould, and others […] The perspective is Lacanian, but Bozovic explores the idiosyncrasies of his material […] with an attention to detail that is exceptional among Lacanian theorists.”

In addition to the books Der große Andere: Gotteskonzepte in der Philosophie der Neuzeit (Turia & Kant, 1993) and Utilitarismus (edited with Jacques Alain Miller and Renata Salecl; Turia & Kant, 1996) Božovič also edited (and introduced) Jeremy Bentham’s “The Panopticon Writings” (Verso, 1995): “The Panopticon writings are frequently cited, rarely read […] A comprehensive introduction by Miran Bozovic explores the place of Panopticon in contemporary theoretical debate.”

Among his articles are “The man behind his own retina” (in Slavoj Žižek (Ed.), Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock), Verso, 1992); “Malebranche’s Occasionalism, or, Philosophy in the Garden of Eden“ (in Slavoj Žižek (Ed.), Cogito and the Unconscious, Duke University Press, 1998); “The Omniscient Body” (in Slavoj Žižek (Ed.), Lacan: The Silent Partners (Verso 2006), and “The Body and Psycho; Or, of ‘Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living’” (in Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious: Science and Truth, 2000)

More recent publications include the book Filozofija na Luni (Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2019), the books chapters “Tolstoy and Diderot on women as ‘dangerous objects’ (in Predrag Cicovacki / Heidi Nada Grek (Eds.), Tolstoy and spirituality, Academic Studies Press, 2018) , “Seeing it all : Bentham’s Panopticon and the dark spots of enlightenment” (in Emmanuel Alloa / Dieter Thomä (Eds.), Transparency, Society and Subjectivity : Critical Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), as well as the article “Diderot on Nature and Pantomime” (The European Legacy, 23:6, 2018): “By focusing on Diderot’s novel Rameau’s Nephew (1805)” Božovič “argue[s] that the lesson of the numerous mimes its eponymous hero performs in the novel is that the dynamics of nature can perhaps only be captured by mime rather than on canvas or in stone, both of which, as Diderot puts it, can represent only a fleeting moment.”