Rastko Močnik

Rastko Močnik (b. August 27 1944) is a Slovenian sociologist, literary theorist, translator and political activist. Together with Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Rado Riha, he is considered one of the co-founders of the so-called Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis.

He was born as Josip Rastko Močnik in a middle-class family in Ljubljana. He studied sociology and history of literature at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1968. Between 1968 and 1970 he worked as a journalist at the journal "Delo". He later studied at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, where he obtained a PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Algirdas Julien Greimas.

After returning to Ljubljana, he became the editor of the alternative journal "Problemi". During this period, he started a close collaboration with the Lacanian scholar Slavoj Žižek and philosopher Mladen Dolar. Since 1984, Močnik is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.

Močnik was among the first Slovene theorists who introduced structuralism and the theories of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in Slovenian academia. He has written on several subjets invluding theory of ideology, theoretical psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics and epistemology of humanities and social sciences. He has also translated works of Jacques Lacan, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss into Slovene.

Močnik has also been active in several civil and political movements in Slovenia. In the early 1980s, he was one of the most ouspoken opponents of a high school education reform, carried out by the Communist Party, in which the classical grammar schools (the so-called gymnasium) were abolished as a supposed remainder of old burgeoise elitism. In 1982, he was wrote a petition against such reform, together with editor Braco Rotar, social theorist Neda Pagon and jurist Matevž Krivic. The petition was signed by over 600 intellectuals, and was one of the first wide and openly critical civil society iniciatives in Socialist Slovenia. In the early 1990s, he opposed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, was critical of the DEMOS coalition and Slovenian independence. In the late 1990s, he opposed the Slovenian entry in NATO. He is also highly critical of the Bologna process.

Močnik also writes weekly columns in the Slovene radical journal "Mladina" and is a member of the Advisory Board of the regional left-wing magazine "Novi Plamen".