Jelica Šumič Riha
Jelica Šumič Riha (born 1958) is a Slovenian philosopher, political theorist, and translator connected to the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. She studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1983. In October 1988 she left the League of Communists of Slovenia with 32 other left-wing intellectuals in protest after the Ljubljana trial, where four civilians were arrested and tried by a Yugoslav military court. In 1989 she co-founded Debate Club 89, which became the core of the Liberal Democratic Party.
From 1995 to 2005 she taught philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. She is now a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and also teaches at the University of Nova Gorica. She is married to philosopher Rado Riha.
Her work covers ethics, political theory, and psychoanalysis. She has written about how legal systems relate to ethics and politics, and she has written on the ideas of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Giorgio Agamben, as well as the political theories of Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen. She has translated works by Freud, Marx, Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Lacan, Claude Lefort, Lyotard, and others.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:19 (CET).