Rastko Močnik, Date of Birth, Place of Birth

    

Rastko Močnik

sociologist, literary theorist, translator and political activist

Date of Birth: 27-Aug-1944

Place of Birth: Ljubljana, Ljubljana City Municipality, Slovenia

Profession: translator, journalist, sociologist, philosopher, linguist

Nationality: Slovenia

Zodiac Sign: Virgo


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About Rastko Močnik

  • Rastko Mocnik (born 27 August 1944) is a Slovenian sociologist, psychoanalyst, literary theorist, translator and political activist.
  • Together with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, he is considered one of the co-founders of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. He was born as Josip Rastko Mocnik in a middle-class family in Ljubljana.
  • He studied sociology and history of literature at the University of Ljubljana, graduating in 1968 under the supervision of Dušan Pirjevec.
  • During his student years, he was active in several avant-garde literary movements.
  • In 1964, he became the last co-editor (together with the poet Tomaž Šalamun) of the alternative journal Perspektive, before it was closed down by the Communist regime.
  • 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 Marxist philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar.
  • Since 1984, Mocnik is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.
  • Mocnik 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 subjects including theory of ideology, theoretical psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics and epistemology of humanities and social sciences.
  • He has also translated works of Jacques Lacan, Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss into Slovene. Mocnik has also been active in several civil and political movements in Slovenia.
  • In the early 1980s, he was one of the most outspoken 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 bourgeois elitism.
  • In 1982, he also 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 initiatives in Socialist Slovenia.
  • Between 1988 and 1990, he served on the board of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, the main civil society organization in Slovenia during the process of democratization.
  • In the early 1990s, he opposed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, was critical of the DEMOS coalition and Slovenian independence.
  • In 1990, Mocnik was elected president of a small extra-parliamentary party, called Social Democratic Union (Socialdemokratska unija, SDU), which was linked to Ante Markovic's Union of Reform Forces.
  • The party failed to win any significant popular support, and remained outside of the Slovenian Parliament.
  • After its dissolution in the early 1990s, Mocnik left party politics, but continued to participate in the public debate.
  • He was one of the few Slovenian public intellectuals who opposed the unilateral declaration of Slovenian independence.
  • In the late 1990s, he opposed the Slovenian entry in NATO.
  • He has also been highly critical of the Bologna process. Mocnik also writes weekly columns in the Slovene leftist journal Mladina and is a member of the Advisory Board of the regional left-wing magazine Novi Plamen.In 2017, Mocnik has signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

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