The Odd One In

This September 24th, the Slovenian School Reading Group led by Dimitri Crooijmans and hosted at Philosophy Portal will be resuming. Throughout September, October, November and December, we will be reading The Odd One In by Alenka Zupančič. To get involved, you can sign up as a member of The Portal (giving you access to this reading group, plus four other live events monthly, and access the history of our recordings); or you can sign up to Crooijmans Actual Spirit Patreon or Substack.

On the Slovenian School Reading Group

The Slovenian School Reading Group is a monthly reading group. Throughout late 2025 the reading group will be focused on Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy. This work hones in on comedy with a Hegelian and Freudo-Lacanian lens. In this work, Zupančič goes into the political and subversive nature of comedy, and juxtaposes it to its ideological forms.

Those who sign up will get access to all the live reading group sessions, as well as our recordings. The recordings currently include an in-depth analysis of Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More. In this work, Dolar grounds his philosophical theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause (objet petit a). The book traverses different disciplines to delve into this underexplored terrain of philosophy and psychoanalysis, including linguistics, metaphysics, physics, ethics, and politics of the voice.

Both these understudied works of the Slovenian School will help us to think the politics of subjectivity. The goal of the study group is to come to a refined understanding of the dialectical and unconscious dimensions of the subject's life in regards to the voice and comedy. Both of these books are urgent in today's world that is decidedly in need of psychoanalytically informed theory.

Reading Group Leader

Dimitri Crooijmans is a philosopher and artist from the Netherlands. Ever since the beginning of Philosophy Portal, he has been publishing articles, short stories and songs inspired by an array of themes spanning metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics. His writings, video-essays and podcasts can be found on his platform Actual Spirit. He sings and raps under the name Objet lil a. By bringing the highly extimate domains of music, literature and philosophy together he's embarking on a path that takes much repetition to bring about creative novelty. The result is both estranging and connective.

Schedule:

Wednesday September 24th / Reading Group 7: The Odd One In / The Concrete Universal

Monday October 27th / Reading Group 8: The Odd One In / Figures of Comedy

Monday November 24th / Reading Group 9: The Odd One In / Conceptualisations

Monday December 22nd / Reading Group 10: The Odd One In / The Phallus