The Offline Dream Program: Three Takes on Film, the Internet, and Instanternity

As part of their Repetition and Contingency series, held across U.S. universities, Bara Kolenc, Gregor Moder, and Jure Simoniti (Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana) explore pressing questions concerning the shifting relationship between media, reality, and human agency. In today’s age, when artificial intelligence dreams of cinema and the internet shapes our desires as so many permutations of ideology, the panel asks: Where is subjectivity to be located and what functions does it perform? This panel is moderated by Pavle Levi, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University.

RSVP here.

Presentation Abstracts
Lubitsch, Shakespeare and the Theatricality of Power, Gregor Moder
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) was filmed during World War II and takes place in the early period of the Nazi occupation of Poland, yet the film focuses on the story of a theatre group, on actors, and on the metaphysical question of what makes up a convincing performance. Some early critics suggested that this is not the way to tackle a dire political situation, and that the portrayal of Nazis as humans, with their own sense of humor and theatre, was disrespectful to the plight of the Poles and Polish Jewry. For the film, however, the political action and the metaphysical implications of a theatrical performance are not alternative procedures, but are rather closely linked to one another, and in this respect Lubitsch follows Shakespeare’s own staging of power. The film seems to suggest that there is no defeating Nazism without a thorough understanding of the theatricality of power as such – a Shakespearean lesson that is vital also for our contemporary conjuncture.

Image and Narrative: The Difference between American and European Cinema, Jure Simoniti
Film is the art of the transcendental, that is, irresolvable dialectic between image and narrative. On this basis, the talk proposes a distinction between American and European cinema: American cinema employs the image to produce a narrative, while European cinema employs narrative to produce an image. The burning sled at the end of Welles’s Citizen Kane is an image that seeks to suture the film’s disparate elements into a single narrative; the dead fish, or turbot, at the end of Fellini’s La dolce vita, by contrast, persists in its non-narrative, iconic presence. Within this framework, the American “woman’s film” might be understood as incapable of sustaining the pure image of Woman, submitting it instead to the mechanism of narrativization, whereas European “woman’s films,” such as Bergman’s Persona or Chéreau’s Queen Margot, can elevate the woman into an auratic Icon that no narrative can resolve.

Welcome to Instanternity: Who's the Real Alien Today? Bara Kolenc
There are three impossible things in this world: a pervert without a body. Consumerism without desire. And ideology without a sublime object. The true question of posthumanism is therefore not: Will the human disappear with the cybernetic revolution? but rather: If the human goes extinct, will the subject survive? Or, which is the flip side of the same question: does artificial intelligence enjoy? With internet, not only have the times changed—what has changed is time itself. Bara Kolenc will introduce her original concept of instanternity, a term for the subject’s distinctive relationship to time and the world in the age of the internet—and, perhaps, for the digital age itself. Her talk will examine the changing forms of subjectivity and the structuring of reality, alongside questions of intersolation, self-modelling, and the transformations of ideology and capitalism under the conditions of artificial intelligence.

About the Panelists
Gregor Moder is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (NUP 2017), and Antigone as Political Philosophy (NUP 2026).

Jure Simoniti is a Research Associate at the Philosophy department, University of Ljubljana. His latest and publications include The Untruth of Reality: The Unacknowledged Realism of Modern Philosophy (Lexington Books 2016), Indirectness. A Plea for Truth in Times of Post-Truth (co-ed. with Jela Krečič, Edinburgh University Press 2026), and The Contingent Universality. A New Ontology (Bloomsbury 2026).

Bara Kolenc is a Research Associate at the Philosophy department, University of Ljubljana. Her recent publications include Repetition and Subjectivity: Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2026) and The Internet and the Subject: Reflections on Desire, Ideology, and Time in the Age of Instanternity (Analecta, 2025, in Slovenian).

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and Stanford-Berkeley New Yugoslav Studies.

This event is organized within the framework of the research projects “Universality and Contingency” (J6-70235) and “The Paradox of Repetition: Towards a New Ontology” (J6-70238), as well as the research program “Philosophical Investigations” (P6-0252), funded by ARIS, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.