Reason Plus Enjoyment Conference
Never Stand Still Arts & Social Sciences School of the Arts & Media
10-14 July Robert Webster Building UNSW Australia . Kensington Campus rpeii.wordpress.com
The Reason Plus Enjoyment Conference invites you to join us in reading the vanishing futures of to phronein (thinking) and to khairein (enjoyment) in the twilight of what Derrida called the great Western metaphysical adventure.
Keynote speakers: Joan Copjec . Brown University Carol Jacobs . Yale University Juliet Flower MacCannell . UC Irvine Jelica Šumič Riha . Slovene Academy of Sciences Henry Sussman . Yale University
Supported by UNSW Arts and Social Sciences Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia Sydney School of Continental Philosophy Schedule
Friday, 10th July Page 1.30–2 Registration and Coffee + Tea Webster Level 3
2–3 Master Class | Carol Jacobs Webster 306 6 Atom Egoyan's Artaud Double Bill
3–4 Master Class | Jelica Šumič Riha Webster 306 6 The Role of Time in Psychoanalysis and Politics
4–4.30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
4.30–5.30 Public Lecture | Rado Riha Webster 327 6 The Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s Philosophy
Saturday, 11th July Page 9–9:30 Registration and Coffee + Tea Webster Level 3
9:30–11 Opening Plenary | Jelica Šumič Riha Webster Lecture B 7 Est Deus in nobis, or the Will to Enjoy
11–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
11:30–1 Discomforting Reasons Webster 332 7 Remy Low | The Pleasures of Beheading, or, what ISIS can teach us about the political Katharine Hawkins | Unnatural Selection: Monstrous identity and the evolution of difference Edwin Ng | Do you have anything to declare? Epistemological border control and the religious contraband of Buddhist critical theory Tracey Pahor | People are not stupid even though my paper is ridiculous
Performing Enjoyment Webster 306 9 Ben Hjorth | How to act as if one were mourning: working through Melancholia with Hegel Ed Scheer | Cooking with a see saw: the recomposition of the drama analogy Elizabeth Pulie | Seduction of the end of the end
Spectres of Cinema Webster 327 10 James Donald | Life in the Old Vampire Yet Mark Steven | Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore Films Robert Sinnerbrink | Anatomy of Melancholia
1–2:30 Lunch (self-foraging)
1 Saturday, 11th July Page 2:30–4 Intervallic Times Webster 332 11 Julian Murphet | Rosa Plus Emma: revolutionary rationality and pleasurable revolt Knox Peden | Cruel Radiance: Rancière and Michaels on Agee and Evans Laurence Simmons | Reasoning the Disaster: Catastrophe; Žižek; Dupuy; luck; time
The Specular Reflex Webster 306 12 Michael Potts | The Limits of Liberal Rationalism and the Return of Anti-Materialism Kevin Wilson | The Euthanasia of Pleasure: Guy Debord’s concept of the Spectacle and the absolute realisation of the commodity form Yen-Chen Chuang | Becoming Spectres in Cinema
Endgames Webster 327 14 Thomas Apperley | The rise of 'nerdcore' porn: Digital gaming as a technology of the body Mahli-Ann Butt | The Elizabeth-Anna Illusion: Refuting mimesis with BioShock Infinite Kyle Moore | All Work and No Play Makes Ingress a Surprisingly Fun Game
4–4:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
4:30–6 Plenary | Henry Sussman Webster Lecture B 15 Parables of Playful Intelligence
6 Drinks at the Doncaster
Sunday, 12th July Page
10.30-12 Master class | The Open Ego: Woolf, Joyce and the ‘Mad’ Subject Webster 327 16 Juliet Flower MacCannell
1.30 Beach walk from Coogee to Bondi (weather permitting)
4-6 Book launches Minerva Gallery 16 Lacan Deleuze Badiou | A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Jon Roffe Painting is a Critical Form | Helen Johnson
Monday, 13th July Page
9–9:30 Registration and Coffee +Tea Webster Level 3
9:30–11 Plenary | Carol Jacobs Webster Lecture B 17 A Tripp to the London National Gallery
11–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
2 Monday, 13th July Page
11:30–1 Narcotheory Webster 332 17 Chris Rudge | Incomplete Projects and their Dark Partial Pleasures: Psychopolitics and the Professional Constraints of Science Alejandro Cerda Rueda | An incurable subject, or why the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Ben Gook | Melancholic-ecstatic: Between Ecstasy and the Comedown (1989-90)
Logics of Poetics Webster 306 19 Chris Oakey | Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Poetic Excess Arka Chattopadhyay | The Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company: The Un-Reasonable Real in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is Elise Addlem | Poetic thinking and aletheia in the thought of Heidegger
More Than One Webster 327 20 Tadej Troha | What is a Collective Subject? Freudian Massenpsychologie Revisited Sigi Jottkandt | Marque et plus: On Prime Zero Rex Butler | On Two Essays by Joan Copjec
1–2 Lunch (self-foraging)
2–3.30 Witches, Novels, and the Archive Webster 306 21 Joshua Comyn | Fiction and Concept: The Novel’s Supplementation of Philosophy in Late Twentieth Century America Thomas Sutherland | Sacrifice on the altar of history: Mediation and the corrosive teleology of rationalized efficiency Lauren Bliss | The European Witch-hunts and pre-cinema: A Reading of the Unconscious in Aesthetic Film Theory
The Intractable Webster 327 22 Bryan Cooke | “A sort of Sade, but funnier” : Lacan’s Plato in the light of Badiou Robert Boncardo | “Dialectical poetry is the reverse of dialectical politics”: Art and Politics in Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject Jon Roffe Deleuze | melancholia: object, world, cinema
3.30–4 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
4–5.30 Harnessing Jouissance Webster 332 23 Andrew Dickson and Cindy Zeiher | How Are We Enjoying: Harnessing Feminine Jouissance Sharon Mee | Jean-François Lyotard’s dispositif: expenditure in cinema
Mutiny of Enjoyment Webster 306 24 Adam Bartlett | Failing to Enjoy: the Thought of Education Today Nicholas Heron | The Homonymous Image Gregor Moder | Phallus and the Fall of Man: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve
3 Monday, 13th July Page
Pure and Flawless Law Webster 327 25 Jessica Whyte | Aquinas at the US Military Academy: The Laws of Armed Conduct and the Genealogy of Morals Kim White | Agamben’s Moods: Shoah, Spectacle, and the Kafkan liberation of shame as the stimmung proper to ethical modernity Marco Grosoli | Fantasy Unchains: Discipline and Enjoyment in Quentin Tarantino’s Latest Film
6–6:30 Drinks Reception Tyree Room John Niland Scientia Building
6:30–7:30 So What? Plenary Lecture | Joan Copjec Tyree Room 27 John Niland The Images Wars and the Modern State: Kiarostami's Zig Zag Scientia Building
8 Conference Dinner Bistro Avoca
Tuesday, 14th July Page
9–9:30 Registration and Coffee + Tea Webster Level 3
9:30–11 Closing Plenary | Juliet Flower MacCannell Webster Lecture B 28 Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary
11–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
11:30–1 Obscuring the good line: Mallarmé Today Webster 332 28 Justin Clemens | A Superior Surface Christian R. Gelder | The Boy Who Lived and the Poet Who Should Die Robert Boncardo | Comrade Mallarmé?
Transmission Webster 306 29 Grace Hellyer | Reason and Enjoyment in Jacques Rancière's critical pedagogy Diana Shahinyan | Trials in the 21st Century: what Serial's technology can teach us about law, narrative, and Baltimore as a ‘State of Exception’ Ari Mattes | ‘No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom’: Pedagogy in the Age of Revolution without Reason
Unmasterable Subjects Webster 327 30 Russell Smith | ‘They’re only letters’: Textuality and Vitality from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Spike Jonze’s Her Joanne Faulkner | Inarticulate Wounds of Colonialism: Mute children and savages in Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Coetzee’s Foe Tamlyn Avery | ‘From Another Distanced Mind': Monstrous Self- Representation in Plath’s The Bell Jar
1–2 Lunch (catered) Webster Level 3
4 Tuesday, 14th July Page
2–3.30 A Single Abstract Animal Webster 332 32 Erin Brannigan | Talking Back: What Dance might make of Badiou’s philosophical project Ehsan Azari Stanizai | Ecstasies of Unreason: Lacan and Mystical jouissance Karen-Anne Wong | Child’s Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children’s Yoga Classes
Distinct Forms Webster 306 33 Prue Gibson | Earth Voice Jessica Marian | Desire, Rationality and Style in Derrida’s Glas Lucille Holmes | Proposal for an Aesthetics of Ethics
Calculus of the Endarkenment Webster 327 34 Ivan Niccolai | Bureaucracy and its Discontents Alan Cholodenko | ‘Computer Says No’, or: The Erasure of the Human
3.30–4 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 3
4–5.30 Theory Today Roundtable: What is to be Done? Webster 327 35 Copjec, MacCannell, Šumič Riha, Sussman
5.30 Drinks at the Doncaster
5 Friday 10 July
Master Classes Webster 327 | 2–4
Carol Jacobs | Atom Egoyan’s ‘Artaud Double Bill’ Jelica Šumič Riha | Lacan’s ‘Logical Time’ and Badiou’s Theory of the Subject
Public Lecture | Rado Riha Webster 327 | 4.30–5:30
The Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s Philosophy (in French, translation provided) In the conclusion to his Second Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou presents the difference between this manifesto and the first as follows: if the first manifesto reaffirmed the possibility and necessity of the continuing existence of philosophy, the second is dedicated to its 'revolutionary pertinence'. In the passage from 'a separating doctrine of Being' to 'an integrative doctrine of doing' of the first Manifesto, one can isolate two theses in the second Manifesto: with regard to the contemporary world, it's a question of the 'renewal of the communist hypothesis.' This question is inseparable from the theme of the 'true life', which is nothing other than 'life under the sign of the Idea'. Here I will advance the following thesis which will be the main thread of my intervention: the task of the Idea that operates philosophy is to reinforce the materialist orientation of this philosophy.
Rado Riha is a Slovene philosopher. He is a senior research fellow and currently the head of the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coordinator of the philosophy module at the post-graduate study programme of the University of Nova Gorica. Riha's research topics include ethics, epistemology, contemporary French philosophy, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. From 1996 to 2003 he has been the editor-in-chief of the journal Filozofski vestnik, and since 1993 a member of its editorial board.
6 Saturday 11 July
Opening Plenary | Jelica Šumič Riha Webster Lecture B | 9.30–11
Est Deus in nobis or The Will to Enjoy In “Kant with Sade”, Lacan stages two incompatible couples, incompatible precisely to the extent that they bring together reason and jouissance: Kant and Sade on the one hand and Sade with Epictetus on the other. If Sade is coupled with Kant in order to reveal a hidden driving force behind Kant’s moral law, Epictetus’ joining Sade is revelatory of Sade’s deficiency as a desiring subject. Following Lacan’s indications concerning the radical change of the status of the subject resulting from the establishment of a new relationship between desire and will at the end of analysis, this paper examines two modalities of the subject’s confrontation with the Other’s will to enjoy: Sade’s and the Stoics’. Insisting of a few crucial points of convergence and divergence of these two modalities of the subject’s coming to terms with the will to jouissance, this paper’s aim is to explore the conditions of possibility of an ethics without the Other, an ethics of the drive that allows for a non- perverse transgression of the pleasure principle.
Jelica Šumič Riha is Professor of Philosophy at the Postgraduate School of Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was visiting professor at the University of Essex, University Paris 8 and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politik der Wahrheit (with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Rado Riha /Turia + Kant, Vienna 1997/), Universel, Singulier, Sujet (with Alain Badiou, et. al, Kimé; Paris 2000, Mutations of Ethics (Zalozba ZRC, 2002) and Eternity and Change. Philosophy in the Worldless Times (Zalozba ZRC, 2012). Currently she is working on a forthcoming volume entitled Volonté et Désir (Harmattan, Paris).
SESSION 1 | 11.30–1 Panel 1 — Discomforting Reasons Jess Whyte (Chair) | University of Western Sydney Webster 332 | 11.30-1
The Pleasures of Beheading, or, what ISIS can teach us about the political Remy Low | University of Sydney The widely circulated videos of captive beheadings by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) have triggered simultaneous reactions of horror and morbid fascination across the globe. In liberal societies like Australia, the extremity of such images have led to the framing of ISIS as an emergent “Absolute Other” to civility and normal life; a barbaric “death cult” that appeals to a few isolated individuals with histories of social isolation, mental health problems and/or criminal tendencies who are liable to be indoctrinated or seduced by Islamic extremism. In this paper, I tease out the possibility that, for those who sympathise with ISIS, the opposite may be the case: that in fact it is the politics of liberal societies in the Global North that are barbaric and that against them, the rhetoric of ISIS is eminently reasonable. If ISIS can be understood as an instance of what Chantal Mouffe calls “the return of the political” that is parasitic on the hegemony of “politics as usual” in liberal societies of the Global North, then what is ignored in the guttural rush to pathological explanations of its sympathisers? Drawing on images disseminated by ISIS’s Al-Hayat media arm and statements from its self- declared caliph Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, I present a narrative thought experiment on how ISIS’s offer of a type of political agency and enjoyment otherwise unavailable can be powerfully persuasive.
7 Unnatural Selection: Monstrous identity and the evolution of difference Katherine Hawkins | Macquarie University By nature, the female Monster flouts convention. She has come to represent a gleefully vulgar, defiant and deliberately excessive mockery of patriarchal and heteronormative dogmas, embodying all that is repressed and abjected within male-dominated society. But she is more than just a discursive tool, or a symbolic dumping ground for social anxieties. For those marginalised by patriarchal cruelty, the monster may represent a welcome alternative and comfort: a decidedly unpious patron saint. For some, the Monster may serve as a totemic figure of 'reclaimed Otherness' and a signifier of outsider identity and pride (Russo, 1994: 62). But what does this dedication to the monstrous tell us about the perceived boundaries between 'normal/respectable/accepted' and the 'unusual/excluded/abjected?' The Monster may demonstrate the existence of boundaries, even defy them. However, simply existing between boundaries still acknowledges that they are there, however arbitrarily. By identifying with the Monster, are we involuntarily strengthening harmful social dichotomies? (Shildrick, 2001: 80). Critics of feminist and Queer theorists are often quick to warn of the dangers of emphasising difference, when egalitarian emphasis on commonality would be a far less divisive goal. Baudrillard's 'Catastrophe' would seem to provide an attractive ideological concept–the removal of all individualistic identities in favour of one transcendent state of being that renders the 'Other' irrelevant. (Toffoletti, 2004: 9). This paper will explain the value of difference as more than reactionary forms of opposition, but as an important part of social transformation. Within the context of Queer/Feminist discourse, the Monster may serve as an important advocate for equality while simultaneously resisting the erasure of experience and coercion into sameness. The following questions are asked: How can the monstrous be reconciled with egalitarianism, and can Baudrillard's 'Catastrophe' be embraced within this framework of thought?
Do you have anything to declare? Epistemological border control and the religious contraband of Buddhist critical theory Edwin Ng | Deakin University In recent years, the Buddhist-derived practice of mindfulness meditation has been adapted across diverse contexts, including the staff training programs of Google and the US Military. This has provoked concerns about the need for a critical theory of mindfulness. Taking the normative standpoint of a Buddhist ethos of care and engagement for self and others, this paper will explore what a Buddhist critical theory might look like. This emergent discourse and practice turns on the Buddhist scholar-practitioner's own pursuit of Buddhist teachings. At base, it involves certain commitments of faith in Buddhist truth claims about the transformative potential of spiritual self-cultivation via ethical conduct, attention training, and contemplative inquiry. I will outline very schematically some potential lines of dialogue between Buddhist teachings and current enquiries on the affective and visceral registers or micropolitics of an ontology of becoming. The main issue to address, however, is whether there exist barriers, like discursive habits conditioned by unacknowledged Euro-Christian-centrism, which might prevent reciprocal learning between Buddhist and Western systems of understanding. Is there an epistemological 'Homeland Security' office or 'border control' function in prevailing regimes of reason that would demand a non-Western tradition like Buddhism to declare and surrender its perceived 'religious contraband' before being allowed into intellectual debates as an object of study rather than a subject of conversation? But why should Buddhism accede to this demand that it negates its difference and specificity, when the regulatory concept of ‘religion’ by which it is being policed is a Euro- Christian invention that has been imposed upon the world but which is often not recognised as such in our secular age of globalatinisation? Who or what exactly is the source of discomfort? Who or what is being un/reasonable? Who or what has something to hide? Who or what has something to declare? The Western cultural heritage or its other?
People are not stupid even though my paper is ridiculous Tracey Pahor | University of Melbourne In this paper, I attend to the ideas of Jacques Rancière and a story I was told. The story itself was told to (and has frequently been told by) me for enjoyment; it is a ridiculous story about a workshop for mental health professionals in which a woman gets dried apricot stuck in her ear. I consider the role of the audience in this workshop and in my telling of this story over the years. The workshop was supposed to teach participants to pay attention to their senses in order to develop ‘mindfulness’ — a therapeutic technique marketed in Australia (e.g. ReachOut.org). According to Rancière, not just our interpretations, but our sensory experiences of the world, are configured by the regimes of social order.
8 Yet Rancière argues against social order being natural or deterministic, instead presupposing that people have the capacity to understand. I argue that the mindfulness workshop, like the performance of any story, is only possible on the basis that there were things people were presumed to already understand. Whether or not you think it was a good idea for the woman to stick dried apricot in her ear (or that I have told an entertaining story), Rancière’s presupposition of equality ends up being verified. I do not defend my approach in this paper as a sensible one. When attention is paid to the details, only equality, not the division between what is and is not sensible, can stand up to reason.
Panel 2 — Performing Enjoyment Christian R. Gelder (Chair) | UNSW Webster 306 | 11.30-1
How to act as if one were mourning: working through Melancholia with Hegel Ben Hjorth | Monash University Classicist, essayist and poet Anne Carson is, perhaps unexpectedly, emerging as one of our most intriguing readers of Hegel. From Antigonick (2012), the transgressive 'translation' of Sophokles in which Hegel is anachronistically, repeatedly and ambiguously cited, to the recent essay-poem 'Merry Christmas from Hegel' (2014) which, the poet states towards the end of the text, has 'nothing to do with Hegel', Carson's engagement (or playful 'decreation') of this figure is suggestively aligned to some more explicitly philosophical discourses, along axes of speculation and performance. Those I am most interested in here are the 'non-deflationary'–if not also inflationary–readings of Rebecca Comay and Slavoj Žižek. Underlying all of these approaches to Hegel are an engagement with both psychoanalytic theory, and the work of Walter Benjamin, around the concepts of melancholia and mourning and their relation to thought or 'philosophy'. In this paper I read Lars von Trier's recent film Melancholia alongside these readings of Hegel, in seeking to understand the philosophical (rather than the clinical) function and value of these concepts. Carson, Comay and Žižek all outline, in their various ways, a figure of Hegel committed to speculative thought, which becomes imbued with a sense of performance. For this Hegel, read back via psychoanalysis and Benjamin, a certain melancholia does stubbornly remain constitutive of subjectivity, but the bitter labour of a speculative, conceptual negation– that is, an 'act' or 'work' of mourning–must nonetheless be performed or attempted ('essayed') in spite of its apparent impossibility. This 'acting as if one were mourning', as if one could mourn, as if mourning were possible–such as allegorically presented in von Trier's film–is at once an ethical and a logical imperative for Hegel, and emerges as the very structure of speculative negation, the engine of philosophical thought, itself. Philosophy, the 'science' of reason, has its beginning in a paradoxical, melancholic affect: one in which any beginning can feel as impossible and as pointless as any ending. Hegel's wager is to jump-start philosophy, not to 'escape' its constitutive melancholia by having done with death in a final and complete mourning-work, but rather to sublate the apparent tension between these two 'sad passions' via the speculative movement of the dialectic. The transvaluation of the value of melancholy–perhaps, indeed, into something like the queer 'joy' that Nietzsche came to describe as the real index of truth–requires, for Hegel, neither a disavowal nor a violent totalisation, but instead a performative 'leap': a speculative, even quasi-fictional investment in the very possibility of such a leap beyond the melancholic limits of thought.
Cooking with a see saw: the recomposition of the drama analogy Ed Scheer | UNSW
‘The woods are full of eager interpreters’. —Clifford Geertz.‘ 'In a first meaning, compositionism could stand as an alternative to critique’. —Bruno Latour
Latour’s famous claim that ‘Critique’ has run out of steam is based on a move that sociologists call ‘the drama analogy’. Along with Goffman, Turner and others, even Barthes in Death of the Author, he gestures towards a dramaturgical model for his argument. Critique is ‘This beautiful staging’ and forms a part of the ‘modernist mise-en-scène’ in which ‘you may debunk, reveal, unveil, but only as long as you establish, through this process of creative destruction, a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances.’ (475) He wants to substitute ‘composition’ for critique, affirming a creative, pleasurable, playful sensibility, a practice of nurturing and constructing alternatives over the stern and rigorous scientific theatricality of critique.
9 In this spirit we should ask whether the structures of the drama analogy hold up in the age of the postdramatic. For example, is it meaningful to speak of a social drama if the stage drama is itself ossified as a form? To put the question differently, is a liquid state of modernity still amenable to such a linear pattern of events? And how might we recompose these terms?
Seduction of the end of the end Elizabeth Pulie | The University of Sydney A view of modern art as the historical progression of art movements, each arising in relation to that preceding, can be found in the discourse surrounding these movements as well as embodied by the evolving permutations of art as form. The cascading effect of the development of these forms leads to its final disappearance: from representational oil painting and sculpture through the adventures of abstraction, arriving (arguably) ultimately at two extremes of abstraction of form: the non-form of conceptual art and the degradation of the significance of form via Pop. In the 1980s, post the disappearance or dematerialisation of the art object, artists such as Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons made a return to the object in a brief movement variously referred to as ‘simulationism’, ‘commodity art’, or–identified by Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh in Art Since 1900–‘endism’. Here, the notion of endgame art is lent cursory importance as a minor movement in the dying days of modern art (or the burgeoning of the postmodern): in reality however, the entire movement of modern art may be characterised as a move towards its end, each style taking up the anti-art mantle until art objects so closely resemble the ordinary and mundane that they blend perfectly with the everyday world. This paper examines the idea of the end of art through modernism as parallel to the ‘endgames of Reason’ in Western metaphysics, positing the radically open state of contemporary art, in its seemingly homogenising indefinability, not so much as the end of art, but a potential end of the end of art. What is the function of art once the ontological adventure of its dematerialisation is complete? Despite the recent disappearance of the art object, art’s embodiment by objects seems today to grow exponentially, via the increasing (and disconcerting) commercialisation of contemporary art and in discourses such as object oriented ontology. Eva Geulen, in The End of Art, Readings in a Rumour After Hegel (2006), describes art as a privileged site for the exploration of ‘problems of the end’ more generally, since aesthetics can handle these problems as ‘questions of form’. She suggests that a ‘programmatic rehabilitation of aesthetics and even of the beautiful seems imminent: art instead of the end’. This paper will raise the question of the potential for contemporary art to embrace its status–as the end of the end of art–in relation to the pure enjoyment of aesthetic form.
Panel 3 — Spectres of Cinema Julian Murphet (Chair) | UNSW Webster 327 | 11.30-1
Life in the Old Vampire Yet James Donald | UNSW In 1989, I published an article entitled ‘The Fantastic, the Sublime and the Popular; Or, What’s at Stake in Vampire Films?’ Part of my argument there was that we enjoy vampires, ghosts, zombies, aliens, cyborgs and other such ambiguous figures because they enable us to reflect on the finitude of human existence and the limits of the human without having to ‘think' about them. A quarter of a century on, those figures still haunt us and thinking about them seems to have spawned the new disciplinary field of Posthumanities, and also informs the study of Biopolitics. Reflecting on these developments, in this talk I’ll focus on two recent films: Let the Right One In and Under the Skin.
Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore Films Mark Steven | UNSW This talk shows how a popular sub-genre of horror films has developed a uniquely sensitive perspective on the cyclic structure of capitalism. That sub-genre is the splatter film, whose various iterations all visually and narratively privilege the abject moment when human bodies are destroyed irreparably. Splatter was popularized in the 1960s by the exploitation films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and then fully commercialized in the 1970s by George A. Romero. It has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the first decades of the twenty-
10 first century, with the Hostel and Saw films grossing millions, and has found an audience in multiple national cinemas. The talk will provide an account of the political economy that underwrites cinematic gore of this type. Combining macroscopic economic history with the close analysis of film, the talk’s objective is to sift through the shambles, exploring splatter for both its consistencies and its derivations, whose interplay will be made to serve as a source of both theoretical and practical lessons for navigating the horror movie we all collectively inhabit.
Anatomy of Melancholia Robert Sinnerbrink | Macquarie University This paper analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars on Trier’s Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film’s remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of Enlightenment rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-romantic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds—cinematic but also cultural and natural—that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman’s Shame [Skammen] (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986). All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation to Melancholia we can trace the logic of this loss, culminating in Melancholia’s radical gesture of world-sacrifice. This ‘tragic’ aestheticisation of world- destruction has the paradoxical ethical meaning, I suggest, of preparing for a post-humanist beginning.
SESSION 2 | 2.30–4 Panel 1 — Intervallic Times Carol Jacobs (Chair) | Yale University Webster 332 | 2.30- 4
Rosa Plus Emma: revolutionary rationality and pleasurable revolt Julian Murphet | UNSW In 2015, we face broadly the return of an old tension internal to Left politics: a prodigious and rather pleasureless theoretical resurgence of Marxian categories and economic analyses, alongside a febrile activist political culture of occupations, flash mobs and riots. Rather than look to the tired pantheon of usual suspects in conflict (Marx vs Bakunin, Lenin vs Gesell, etc), this paper excavates a pseudo-couple of the far more enabling Deleuzian “and…and..” type, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, to see what their juxtaposition might have to offer contemporary debates and disagreements. In focus will be the distinctive part reserved for pleasure—physical, aesthetic, sexual, and sensual—in both their writings, and the structural relationship between it and revolutionary politics as a way of life. The paper seeks to imagine a sustainable left resource of ‘reason plus enjoyment’ that can think against capital whilst persevering with the unconditional demands of a generalised libidinal insurgency. Rosa + Emma = death to Left Puritanism!
Cruel Radiance: Rancière and Michaels on Agee and Evans Knox Peden | Australian National University Jacques Rancière’s reconfiguration of aesthetic modernism as a site of egalitarian verification has recently come under fire from the American literature scholar Walter Benn Michaels, who sees in it yet another iteration of a materialist aesthetics that obscures inequality by privileging perspective over structure or form. The contrast between the two thinkers is given stark expression in their contending interpretations of the American classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. The text and photoessay recounting the lives of three Southern sharecropper families is a masterpiece saturated in failure–Agee’s failure to produce the piece of reportage that Fortune magazine commissioned; his failure, dramatized in the text, to stabilize the work’s representational form or genre; the work’s failure to find a coherent reception in its initial publication, in the context of the Second World War and the postwar boom. Failure is central to
11 Rancière’s and Michaels’s respective interpretations as well. Rancière reads Agee’s failure to respect genre conventions and modernist norms as an aesthetic virtue; its failure as art (Greenberg saw in Agee’s writing a tendency toward kitsch) is integral to the emancipatory scene it stages. For Michaels, the failure of the families to appreciate or even perceive the aesthetic qualities of the work is the index of the economic inequality that separates the subjects of the work from the artists who made it and the spectators who appreciate it. This paper will assess these failures, as well as the possibility that the failure to reconcile Rancière’s and Michaels’s approaches would be a valediction of both projects.
Reasoning the Disaster: Catastrophe; Žižek; Dupuy; luck; time Laurence Simmons | University of Auckland How do we think the disaster? Think towards or against the coming disaster? Natural disaster, industrial and technological disaster, moral disaster, and now economic and financial disaster. This paper starts from the issue of our relationship with catastrophes that have not yet happened and it is based on the work of cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek and French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy. The essence of catastrophe has become normal for what Žižek calls our Western administered world — we now govern according to scenarios of war, terror, ecological disasters etc; the normal run of our societies is continually threatened by these things. However, since he insists that catastrophe involves the notion of ‘luck’ can it be reasoned? It would appear not because we can only answer when we learn the outcome of some event. So are we justified in taking preventative action against global warming? If we do the catastrophe might not occur? But can we be sure that it would have anyway? And if we don’t take action will it occur? And what is the role of luck in both cases? Is it just a matter of ‘bad luck’? We know that the catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen. Can we make a rational choice before the apocalypse? If we are to confront the threat of a catastrophe Dupuy believes we need to break out of a historical, linear notion of time. The new notion of time (what Dupuy calls ‘the time of a project’) is not a line between past and future; it is a closed circuit. The future is casually produced by our actions in the past but the way we act is determined by how we anticipate the future, and how we react to this anticipation. As he thinks through the relationship between the crisis of the sacred and our inability to imagine and avoid a catastrophic future, Dupuy develops the idea of an enlightened catastrophism as an alternative to the principle of reasoned precaution.
Panel 2 — The Specular Reflex Robert Sinnerbrink (Chair) | Macquarie University Webster 306 | 2.30- 4
The Limits of Liberal Rationalism and the Return of Anti-Materialism Michael Potts | University of Canterbury Our civilization understands itself not as a product of history and maker of future history but as a facilitation–like a big shopping mall with a legal system. —Michel Houellebecq, Atomised.
In the years since its first publication Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club has inspired much critical attention and has come to be seen by many critics as a seminal novel of struggle against the alienation and anomie of modern capitalist society. It has also been criticized by Henry Giroux (who condemned it as “a morally bankrupt and politically reactionary film”) and others who detect something of a fascist aesthetic under the anti-capitalist overtones. Jennifer Baker (2008) comments that “Fight Club has the appearance of a liberal agenda advocating a revolutionary fervour against oppressive fascistic forces, but actually masks an ideology similar to early forms of fascism”. What these criticisms have in common is that, focusing on the film adaptation of the novel, they identify the overt or superficial elements of fascism therein, such as the black uniforms, the crew-cut hair, the cult of personality and the glorification of violence. However, the fascistic elements so readily apparent in the film adaptation rely on a deeper, more fundamental logic in the novel which explores the limits of rationalism, individuality and liberalism in late capitalist society and revolts against it. It is not just consumerism and faceless corporations that the novel rejects but -- ultimately–the enlightenment conception of the individual and society. It rejects the rationalistic judico-legal conception of the individual in society and instead seeks to break down and break through this conception to something more real, more rooted and more authentic.
12 My paper will look at the crisis of identity in late capitalist society as exemplified in texts such as Fight Club. It will examine how they manifest a paradox inherent in the liberal Enlightenment conception of the individual as an entity able and entitled to shape their own destiny according to their will, instead of being defined and conceived of as a member of a particular society, culture, and ethnicity. With reference to Zeev Sternhell’s The Counter-Enlightenment Tradition (2010), Slavoj Zizek’s “From Politics to Biopolitics” (2004) and Paul Monaco’s European Culture and Consciousness: 1870-1980 (1983) it will seek to explore the representation in contemporary film and literature of the dichotomy between people’s desire to be free agents, able to pursue their own ends, and the need for authenticity, for the feeling that we have particular roots and connections that are real and meaningful rather than simply contingent. The criticisms of modernity implicit in texts by writers such as Palahniuk and Houellebecq have been condemned as reactionary, yet they also seem to delineate a lacuna or contradiction with Western society that is becoming increasingly pressing. Are we witnessing the breakdown of the liberal Enlightenment conception of individuality and the return of anti-materialism and irrationality in film and literature, or can the contradictions and shortfallings of modernity and capitalism in Western society be contained?
The Euthanasia of Pleasure: Guy Debord’s concept of the Spectacle and the absolute realisation of the commodity form Kevin Wilson | The University of Western Australia Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle presents a Marxian critique of capitalism on the precipice of the cybernetic revolution and its encumbent technical rationalisation. Enriched by his engagement with Western Marxism and the intellectual ferment of post-war French thought, Debord set out first to reveal and then sublate the antinomies of late capitalism. I will situate Debord within this broad philosophical tradition, articulating his response to the significant categories of human experience–space, time, and pleasure–as they are shaped by the context of late capitalism. As Debord conceived of it, the spectacle represents both the “outcome and the trajectory of the existing mode of production.”[SduS §6] It is the point at which the structures of late capitalism–civil society, state, ideology, epistemology and economic relations–have become reified as a totality. Under such conditions, reason is rendered irrational and the motor of history stalled; void of both historicity and telos. In its spectacular phase, late capitalism has, according to Debord, abandoned the form of Reason which underpinned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. In its place is substituted an anti-human, ahistorical capitalist logic which, in its unceasing expansion of the cycles of commodity production and consumption drives history, by the “ruse of reason of the commodity” [SduS §66], toward the absolute realisation of the commodity form. The resultant social form is one which, Debord argues, has been thoroughly banalised under the guise of the spectacle’s “glittering diversions” [SduS §59]; a society wherein the greatest excesses of jouissance conceal a deeply repressive mechanism directed against any possibility for human self-realisation. This paper will analyse Debord’s evaluation of the historical fate of reason, pleasure and being under the conditions of the totalised commodity relations of the late capitalist spectacle.
Becoming Spectres in Cinema Yen-Chen Chuang | Tamkang University, Taiwan This paper aims to examine the afterlife of cinema in terms of the moving-images of the undying dead. Following the Derridean formula “psychoanalysis plus cinema equals the science of the ghosts,” I argue that the birth of modern cinema indeed reproduces life whose meaning needs to be redefined. While considering the production of films as a spectralization of cutting images, the movie-goers are still implicated in an experience of living on. What we call “still life” in paintings is analogous to the film bodies. In cinema, we invent a series of survived images and undergo a procedure of working through. Treating cinema as species, I make a link between the screen and the Deleuzean fold. The montage, assemblages of images, becomes a set of folding and unfolding, which evolves and reveals a certain animality. The animal is spectral, and according to Leibniz as well as Heidegger, is incapable of the experience of death. However, in cinema, the (re)production of images is seen as a deathly experience. Japanese anime, for instance, best exemplifies the link of filmic screen to the aesthetics of animality. To take Satoshi Kon as an example, in his Paprika, theater, cinema, and other kinds of media together create phosphorescent images and portray the psychic life as mechanized, non-human, and somehow animalistic bodies. It is noteworthy that Kon’s dream-space originates from a mythical animal, tapir (baku), which literally breathes life into human’s unconsciousness. Kon gives the spectators a glimpse into the virtual world synthesizing shards of images that ultimately leads to a becoming-automaton.
13 According to Bergson, livingness marks the moment of indetermination—it is a state of difference. In order for evolution to take place, there must be different species. At some level, the becoming of cinema, which introduces the evolution of images, only moves toward an aggregation of dif-ferences, a cut that refers to a space in-between, between memory and perception, present and future, life and afterlife. Eventually, cinema consists of an impersonal assemblage of images representing the undying, undecipherable, and unrepresentable.
Panel 3 — Endgames Justin Clemens (Chair) | University of Melbourne Webster 327 | 2.30- 4
The rise of 'nerdcore' porn: Digital gaming as a technology of the body Thomas Apperley | UNSW Nerdcore porn is produced and collated for the scopic pleasure of a presumably male audience, but this paper will argue that this is a result of a contemporary turn towards the spectacularization of the body of the gamer that resonates strongly with the historic roots of the science and technology of gesture that Linda Williams calls the ‘frenzy of the visible’. While nineteenth century scholars of motion from Tourette to Muybridge were concerned with capturing the truth of the human body in motion, motion- and gesture-based digital game interfaces employ the most contemporary technologies that were motivated by these earlier drives in a mundane and naturalized manner. However, the utility of the gestural interface increasingly relies on its precision in capturing and rendering the motions of the body. The emergence of nerdcore porn destabilizes the naturalization of gesture and the body in everyday computer interfaces by highlighting how unevenly these technologies produce the gendered body of the gamer. This paper examines the representation of the naked female gamer in nerdcore pornography. It argues that the naked female gamer reveals more than simply a reassertion of the male gaze, or of male dominance in the sphere of gaming, now eroded by increasingly ‘casualized’ games. Nor is it entirely a transparent rendering of a sadistic impulse in gaming. Rather, nerdcore pornography also makes visible the increasing significance of digital gaming as a technology of the body, which opens up a new approach to the material history of gaming that is both embodied and gendered. This history excavates the uneven and gendered conjunctures of bodies with the technologies of gaming.
The Elizabeth-Anna Illusion: Refuting mimesis with BioShock Infinite Mahli-Ann Butt | UNSW Your escorting companion, Elizabeth, in Irrational Game’s BioShock Infinite (2013), was notably modelled after a cosplayer, Anna Moleva, for her accurate cosplay of Elizabeth. A version of the classic Chicken-or-The-Egg causality dilemma occurs when a distinguishable sense of the original Elizabeth is dissolved in character production. I was inspired by the reactions to other cosplays of Elizabeth declaring “Don’t you know you’re cosplaying a cosplayer?” to explore the apparent investments of authenticity in gaming and cosplay cultures. Authenticity is seen in cosplay as the ultimate goal of fidelity to the original character, and appears in gaming culture in the assessment of being a real gamer. Theories of mimesis, as seen since Plato, are based on a mistaken premise: there is a pure original to begin with. By critiquing theories of mimesis and–by conjunction– the investments of authenticity, I hope to contribute an argument against gender-exclusivity and nerd- credential elitism (as manifested in Gamergate). Predominantly, the focus of this paper is a case study of Elizabeth and BioShock Infinite. Though, at its heart, is the first person perspective of a female, philosophy/media major and aspiring games studies academic, who also has cosplayed Elizabeth. Therefore, this paper is, in its essence, a narration of these experiences–only additionally is it an excuse to wax lyrical about BioShock Infinite.
All Work and No Play Makes Ingress a Surprisingly Fun Game Kyle Moore | University of Sydney Mobile gaming relocates the practice of digital game play from the private, or semi-private, location of the home or the arcade to public locations. As the technological capabilities of devices increase, mobile games are able to engage with these public spaces in more sophisticated ways. Niantic Labs popular alternate-reality
14 game Ingress divides players into two factions, tasking them with hacking locations for dominance of public spaces. Ingress is a game with no foreseeable end. With the ongoing practice of place hacking, and the ongoing practice of play, pleasure is derived from the player’s role within larger communities of practice. This paper argues that playing mobile games like Ingress is a situated practice. That is, the performance of play is dependent on a range of sociocultural and material circumstance, while simultaneously making meaning out of such circumstances. Such practices bring the functionality of play into question–namely where is the boundary between work and pleasure? In applying a situated approach to such mobile games, this paper argues that Ingress is best viewed as a form of productive play. Firstly, Ingress is a playful engagement with the urban environment. Players utilize existing knowledge of urban environments to locate hackable locations, pairing Ingress’ mapping of locations with their existing practices of urban mobility. Secondly, Ingress results in the tangible outcome of a user-generated mapping of locations. Ingress plays with the material constraints of the urban environment and mobile gaming technology, resulting in new shared meanings of urban environments. While data is valuable for Niatnic Labs parent company, Google, the creation of shared information and meaning is arguably key to communities of practice which form around the game. While playing Ingress is in itself a form of work, in that the physical action of play results in the valuable commodity of data, this paper argues that the process of generating meaning for communities of practice results in a pleasurable outcome for players.
Plenary | Henry Sussman Webster Lecture B | 4.30–6
Parables of Playful Intelligence One pivotal landmark of contemporary culture already in play by 2005 but by no means at its current scale or profundity was an all-absorbing involvement in and dependency on digital technologies. There was simply no way of anticipating the full degree to which cybernetic devices and ontology would not only overwhelm communications and the synthesis, archiving, formatting, and recall of information but also dominate socio- economic relations and interactions, cognition, and even psycho-motor capability. It turns out, in the hindsight afforded by 2015, that the geeks who, already in the 1970’s and 1980’s discerned the lineaments and metaphysics of the cybernetic universe, were not so far removed along the academic corridor from those wild and invariably subversive critical theorists as we might think. For one, the Anthony Wilden, whose 1972 System and Structure established definitive benchmarks for the interaction between analog and digital organization, is the same critic whose translations, e.g, of Language of the Self, introduced the English-speaking audience to the thought of Jacques Lacan. Douglas R. Hofstadter, in composing a Computer Science textbook for the general public ( Gödel, Escher Bach, 1979), synthesized a work as literarily playful as scientifically methodical. His characterization of the advances, above all by Kurt Gödel, that enabled complex strings of numbers to become operational (as in computer programs), demonstrates striking parallels to the “jumping” of theoretical levels made possible by Jacques Derrida’s inaugural, profoundly influential deconstructions (whether of presence, propriety, or Being). The university itself, in 2015, is, by dint of its own systematic digitization, embroiled in seismic, open-ended transformation. Many of the university’s operational fundaments as of 2005 are nothing if not up for grabs a decade later. It is in this sense that a “digital unconscious” entrenching and expanding itself at an inconceivable rate of acceleration presents cultural critics both with a daunting challenge and a creative opportunity. Neither high-mindedly distancing ourselves from these phenomena and their epiphenomena nor unreservedly espousing the technologies will quite do. This paper unpacks several of the memorable parables through which the avatars of the digital age prepared the public both for the technology’s creative leaps and its embedded double-binds.
Around the turn of the millennium, Henry Sussman's ongoing interests in critical theory, Romanticism, modernism, post-modernism, and psychoanalysis took a systematic turn. Much of the writing since then ( The Task of the Critic, 2005; Around the Book, 2011; Playful Intelligence, 2014) has explored the systematic and cybernetic underpinnings of a wide range of cultural artifacts, with Kafka, Benjamin, Borges, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, and psychoanalysis persistent favorites. He currently co-edits (with Bruce Clarke) the 'Meaning Systems' series at Fordham University Press; and, on a platform of indispensable encouragement and support furnished by Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina, founded and co-edits 'Feedback,' a theory-driven weblog publication out of Open Humanities Press ( www . openhumanitiespress . org / feedback). He's constantly on the lookout for new posts in 11 interrelated topical areas, including yours.
15 Sunday 12 July
Master class Webster 327, 10.30–12
Juliet Flower MacCannell | The Open Ego: Woolf, Joyce and the ‘Mad’ Subject
Beach walk – Coogee to Bondi Meet at Coogee Pavilion , 1:30
Book Launch at Minerva Gallery 4/111 Macleay Street, Potts Point | 4–6
Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou by A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe
Painting is a Critical Form by Helen Johnson
16 Monday 13th July
Plenary | Carol Jacobs Webster Lecture B | 9.30 -11
A Tripp to the London National Gallery Celebrated by Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee, and many others, W. G. Sebald has been recognized as one of our most important contemporary writers. His four major literary works (The Emigrants, Vertigo, Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz) hover between fiction and documentation, haunted as they are by visual materials that both verify and question their textual counterparts. In a brief, less-well-known, piece* Sebald assumes the voice of the art critic and takes up the images of Jan Peter Tripp. He speaks at length of what no viewer of these works can possibly remain blind to: their remarkable fidelity to reality. And yet within these pages, as we shift back and forth between the artwork and Sebald’s commentary, we are suddenly swept from a strategized position of careful reason to an exuberant performance of fictional depiction as something of a prank. Perhaps nowhere in Sebald’s writings is there a more nuanced theoretical meditation on the function of his prose, both on the relation between image and reality, and on critical precision and its ironic dissolution.
*(translated as: “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp” in Unrecounted and also as “As Day and Night . . . On the Paintings of Jan Peter Tripp” in A Place in the Country.)
Carol Jacobs is Professor of German Language & Literature and Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has written extensively on Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Wordsworth, Rilke and Paul de Man and others. Carol is the author of Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999) and Skirting the Ethical (2008).
SESSION 1 | 11.30–1 Panel 1 — Narcotheory Knox Peden (Chair) | Australian National University Webster 332 | 11.30-1
Incomplete Projects and their Dark Partial Pleasures: Psychopolitics and the Professional Constraints of Science Chris Rudge | University of Sydney A short and lacunose history of writings attests to the pleasure that Freud and his early collaborator, Josef Breuer, took in hypnotising their patients in the 1890s. But this was a shortlived series of “enjoyments” that the pair would swiftly abandon, fearing the consequences of ‘transference-countertransference,’ a phenomenon that had already made one of Breuer’s patients, Anna O, believe she was pregnant when she was not. And while Freud’s own initial confidence in hypnosis seems to have been finally attenuated by his wife’s cautious admonitions of its exploitative potential, Freud’s wife’s voice had been yet only another confirmation of danger for a neurologist who labored under a readymade aversion to controversy. If Freud had become excessively wary, and even paranoid, by 1895, it was because he had already once fallen into ignominy among his colleagues, becoming known for enjoying himself too much as he developed a new psychoanalytic episteme. Before his collaboration of the 1890s with Breuer, Freud seems something of an augury for the psychopharmacological revolution that would cascade into orthodoxy in the mid-twentieth-century. Using cocaine himself, and then experimentally prescribing the substance to his patients for varied ailments, including morphine addiction, Freud would soon find himself publically reprimanded by a prominent Berlin psychiatrist, Albert Erlenmeyer, in an embarrassing event that promptly dissuaded him from pursuing this line of research. Discontinuing work on cocaine meant that Freud could avoid being eulogised as “the man who let loose the third scourge”—an appellation that had already been imputed to him (at least apocryphally). But
17 Freud’s reputation did not entirely escape the tarnishment that comes with the unregulated, and even pleasurable prescription of medicine. Freud’s essay on cocaine, published as “Über Coca,” abides as a disreputable study, having drawn piercing criticism from psychiatrists for its imprecision, from psychoanalysts including Lacan for its poor argumentation, and from contemporary medical scholars, perhaps ironically, for its failure to identify cocaine’s “most important clinical use as a local anaesthetic.” Figuring these criticisms as kinds of biopolitical or psychopolitical dictates, my paper seeks to underscore the importance of thymos (reputation) in contouring and defining the limits of psychoanalytic and psychiatric experimentation, and constraining the extent to which enjoyment or pleasure can be taken in these practices.
An incurable subject, or why the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? Alejandro Cerda Rueda | Paradiso editores, Mexico In 2006, Umbr(a) journal published an issue contesting the notion of the incurable as the limit to psychoanalysis as both a clinical practice and a discourse. However, almost ten years have passed and our contemporary situation still places the notion of cure rotating around medical facts, diagnostic criteria, and social adaptability of individuals. The purpose of this paper, in relation to this year’s topic “Reason plus enjoyment”, tries to embark on the notion of the incurable as a negative entity in which jouissance is placed at the epicenter of our clinical practice as psychoanalysts. If it has been stated that psychoanalytical treatment tends to take too long, and maneuvers around unknown categories of knowledge, then why would someone consult a psychoanalyst in the 21st century? In this case, why would jouissance be the aim of psychoanalytical cure? What is the work that the psychoanalyst is expected to perform indicating that symptoms allude to something? However, one should be weary of such remarks that pinpoint towards a witch-hunt of psychoanalysts as disturbers of sleep, just as Freud intended The Interpretation of Dreams to be. The problem should not be focused on other practices that sympathize with health and well-being, but we should instruct our questions to psychoanalysts themselves and grant the right to respond: why doesn’t the apple fall far from the tree? In accordance to working the previous concepts, this paper will include a minor detail of a clinical case in Mexico City in relation to Freud’s notion of trauma. After the various social upheavals placed in Mexico due to corruption, drug trafficking, and insecurity issues, one patient relates her experience with a narco-threat that shook her and her family’s safety, and was only able to relate it during a session 7 years after it had happened. In this sense, can we return to Freud’s notion of trauma and its effects as the epicenter of the subject and jouissance, and if so, how does this modify our understanding of psychoanalytic clinical practice based on curability and incurability? Are new subjects emerging from the social array our contemporary world has developed into, or is our clinical listening is being modified as well? Is there a cure after all for the subject?
Melancholic-ecstatic: Between Ecstasy and the Comedown (1989-90) Ben Gook | University of Melbourne Around the Fall of the Berlin Wall, electronic music took on a new role in the lives of many people. What Deleuze calls the splendour of the impersonal, as experienced in rave’s ecstatic form, soon attracted mass audiences from eastern and western Europe as they danced on the grave of history. By 1997, the annual Love Parade in Berlin saw one-million people dancing in the city’s Tiergarten. Drug use was a strong feature of mainstream and underground dance music cultures, as also seen in “acid house” scenes in the US and UK. “Ecstasy” circulated to describe the experience of the Berlin Wall falling–a moment of absolute liberation for many, a release from stasis that would be rediscovered in cultural forms and drug use over the coming years. “Ecstasy” also emerges as a figure of these music subcultures that flourished in Berlin–and that now form a huge part of the local tourist industry and the city’s self-image as a place of commodified, ecstatic weekend encounters. This contemporary manifestation of ecstatic experience can be linked to the long history of ecstasy, including its religious history, such as that of mystics and pilgrimages, as well as its link to aesthetics and intoxication. Even so, this short paper lingers on the post-1989 moment to explore, then, dual senses of ecstasy around German re-unification and electronic music. But it also draws attention to the melancholy of the comedown, integral in ecstatic experience tapering into the routines of everyday life–when one longs for ecstasy to return, that lost moment, the memory of subjective emancipation tinged with an awareness of history’s indifference. We likewise live between the ecstatic irruption and the (un)dead boredom of late-capitalist routines. I will take up aspects of Andrew Gibson’s work in Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy (2012) plus a subsequent critique of Gibson’s argument by Benjamin Noys. Like Noys, I find
18 Gibson’s ‘melancholic-ecstatic’ coupling suggestive for thinking the present and life after 1989. I explore this moment within the context of the German Spaßgesellschaft–the hedonistic society. This was the pejorative broadsheet term for what commentators in the 1990s interpreted as contemporary Germany’s dedication to (bodily) pleasure beyond West Germany’s sober economic reason after World War II, where economics had secured geopolitical and moral legitimacy for the state after the catastrophe of Nazism. What this contemporary reportage missed was a sense of hope and pleasure-seeking after 1989, not only in Germany. It overlooked the hunger for ecstasy, the search for new shapes of self, other and society. This paper will account for (some of) the draw of ecstatic experiences (with and without drugs) in the decades since the Fall of the Wall–but also the disaffection that has become a remarkable feature of affective life in the last decade.
Panel 2 — Logics of Poetics Julliet Flower MacCannell (Chair) | UC Irvine Webster 306 | 11.30-1
Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Poetic Excess Chris Oakey | UNSW In the Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a new and intriguing way of questioning the ‘meaning’ of language. What is meaningful, he posits, is really quite a narrow band of language-use: language that is used between persons and which is put towards purposive ends. Language, that is, whose linguistic materiality is subsumed within the action that it is meant to perform. His own philosophical language, however, language about language, is not ‘meaningful’ but rather ‘grammatical’, language concerned with what the forms of language itself make possible for sense. Wittgenstein’s Investigations, in separating meaning (use) from sense (grammatical possibility), opens up a new way of reading literature. That is, reading not for the meaning or even the action of a particular work, but for the grammatical possibilities of language, possibilities that become even more powerful the more they break away from quotidian employment. This paper follows the pioneering work of James Guetti to investigate the manner in which the rigorous logical investigations of Wittgenstein can be turned towards those moments in poetic texts that revel in grammatical excess, breakdown, and pure linguistic pleasure. It examines the force and role of such moments in examples from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams.
The Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company: The Un-Reasonable Real in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is Arka Chattopadhyay | University of Western Sydney The paper will explore the Borromean logic of Lacanian knots in the impossible co-existence of solitude and company in Samuel Beckett’s 1964 novel How It Is. Instead of reading the (in)famous Borromean knot into Beckett’s fictional universe as a metaphor, the paper will make use of the knotty Borromean logic to illumine the operation of Beckett’s text with special emphasis on the strict equivalence in Lacan’s rings and Beckett’s crawlers, the function of the third in bringing one and two together and the passage of the infinite straight line into a circle (i.e. the fundamental principle of the Borromean knot) in the dialogue between the form of Beckett’s book and an image of form within the book. Just as the three rings of string in a Borromean chain are individually alone and yet knotted together by the third ring which knots up the other two through a twist around a hole; in Beckett’s text, the crawlers in the infinite mud oscillate between solitude and company through a rigorously logical play of imagination. I would argue that the Borromean logic which makes things hang together for the subject only at the level of a hole is consistent with Beckett’s aporetics, thriving on the contradiction that the subject is alone and not alone but part of a chain of infinite multiplicity at the same time. I will demonstrate how the Borromean logic of the Real, grounded on the mathematical integrity of the self- same letter, bores holes into Reason in Beckett’s novel. This hole of the Real collapses Reason and reveals a layer of subjective enjoyment which is irreducible to rationality and yet not without its own knotty logic. I would argue that logic as a Lacanian ‘science of the Real’ interrupts and jettisons logo-centric Reason in How It Is and opens up a subjectivity of enjoyment understood in the Lacanian sense of jouissance when writing is envisaged as a writing by a body part (nails) on another body part (the other’s back). This writing on the flesh by the flesh along with the corporeal inscription of the moving body in How It Is finally produce a complex writing where the body of the signifier i.e. the letter writes against the sense of the signifier. The impossible writing of Real Jouissance permeates the closure of Beckett’s text where the insistence of what cannot be written is felt in the gap between the spoken and the written. This dialectical split between typography and
19 invocation in Beckett’s text produces the Lacanian modality of the ‘impossible’ as a signature of the Real which How It Is transfixes as its final frontier beyond which there is neither hearing nor saying.
Poetic thinking and aletheia in the thought of Heidegger Elise Addlem | University of Melbourne Focusing on Heidegger’s analyses of Hölderlin, wherein he explicates his conception of poetic thinking as dwelling historically, I will argue that it is possible to conceive of poetry as a place of historical truth, and moreover, of emancipatory exigency. Thought as the bringing closer of truth, which is the revelation of being, is largely a forgotten conception of truth today. Thus is Heidegger’s stance, though it is often taken to be nothing more than the hubristic fancy of an old-fashioned philosopher. Heidegger’s ontological, rather than literary, analysis of poetry offers a conception of truth, as well as that of the place of the poet, that diverges radically from the contemporary conception of the writer as entertainer. I will look at the extent to which Heidegger’s is an analysis via which we can resuscitate truth in the context of an ahistorical presentism.
Panel 3 — More Than One Joan Copjec (Chair) | Brown University Webster 327 | 11.30-1
What is a Collective Subject? Freudian Massenpsychologie Revisited Tadej Troha | Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts In the introduction to Massenpsychologie und die Ichanalyse, Freud presents a thesis which is a necessary starting point of every psychoanalytic attempt to approach the problem of mass psychology, that is, the thesis of a specific type of identity between individual and social psychology. The first logical conclusion, drawn by Freud himself, is well known. Since individual psychology is “only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions … in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others”, it is “from the very first … social psychology as well”. Would it be possible, however, to draw a second, much less evident and much more paradoxical but nevertheless equally logical conclusion? Would it be possible to argue that identity is to be read also in the other direction and to claim that social psychology, too, is from the very first, vom Anfang an, individual psychology as well? Would it be possible to claim that it is precisely the second equation that is the reason behind Freud’s engagement with mass phenomena in the first place? In order to support this reading, the paper argues that it is necessary to focus on Freud’s account of the emergence of mass phenomena and the transformation that occurs in such instances. In this view, mass phenomena must be approached from two perspectives. In the first perspective, we are interested in the transformation of an individual and the conditions under which some hitherto non-related to-be-members form mass phenomena. But from another perspective, mass phenomena are something else as well–a peculiar manifestation of society in which the latter gets condensed into a concrete phenomenon that “for the moment replaces the whole of human society”. The paper argues that, in the formation of a group that begins to represent the entire society, there must be preserved or, better yet, repeated a dimension of the subject that cannot be reduced to the hypostasized Massenseele. If in the formation of a group not only the individual, but also the social bond is transformed, condensed, then the miraculous “disappearance… of individual acquirements” of its members must in a way be inscribed into group–some form of subject must emerge.
Marque et plus: On Prime Zero Sigi Jöttkandt | UNSW Are we labouring today under a new form of political inscription that draws itself on a different scale and with a dynamism very different from the Symbolic Law of the past? One could describe the sites it traces not so much as an 'non place' as an antopos–if in this we can hear the anxious double negative of a 'not without a place'. The word border comes from Old High German bort, the side of a ship, and also in Sanskrit, a 'cutting off'. This paper suggests that today's antopos exposes the logic of the border-cut as extinct–an antiquated fiction that takes down with it the entire logico-epistemological system we have inherited from the Greeks. If as philosophers from Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, to Badiou have shown, the concept of the border entails
20 a logic of exclusion that sustains itself on an empty place–historically troped as the zero–what does the contemporary experience of being 'without boundaries' imply mathematically? One often talks loosely about the 'perversity' of the Law, but an analysis of three parables of climate change helps us to pinpoint more precisely how the structure of how the political lends itself to us today. For there is a masculine and a feminine logic to every inscription of the Symbolic Law. To try to 'diagnose' our contemporary experience of the Symbolic Law, we should look not to perversion but to the Prime Zero of a specifically 'feminine' psychosis.
On Two Essays by Joan Copjec Rex Butler | University of Queensland In her 'Cutting Up', now included in the collection Read My Desire, Joan Copjec puts forward a critique of deconstruction through a reading of a 1980 essay by Samuel Weber entitled 'Closure and Exclusion'. Her point against deconstruction is that, due to its commitment to undoing every totality, it is unable to account for the fact of closure and totality. As Copjec writes, what deconstruction is incapable of grasping is 'a more complex notion of closure and totality that was not simply illusory and that, far from suppressing difference, was the very condition of its possibility'. In many ways, Copjec's critique echoes that of Slavoj Zizek in his 'Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at its Destination?', and similarly we might say that the paradoxical effect of Copjec's critique of Weber is to show that Weber (and deconstruction more generally) is already saying what she is saying. But, beyond pointing out this similarity -- a mere academic point-scoring exercise or effect of the arrival of the letter -- we might look at how the kind of 'coincidence' raised here is played out in another of Copjec's great essays, which takes up the work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, 'The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act'.
SESSION 2 | 2- 3.30 Panel 1 — Witches, Novels, and the Archive Prue Gibson (Chair) | UNSW Webster 306 | 2-3.30
Fiction and Concept: The Novel’s Supplementation of Philosophy in Late Twentieth-Century America Joshua Comyn | University of Melbourne Leaving off from a statement by Alain Badiou that the novel has stood in for philosophy when the latter has found itself weak—the 19th century Realist Novel for example supplementing the weakness of philosophy between Hegel and Nietzsche—I would like to think the status of the novelistic Fiction in relation to that of the philosophical Concept as a to phronein that is also a to khairein. To do this I propose to discuss the work of three American novelists, William Burroughs, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, and the manner in which their works perform a trial—a pre-eminently philosophical drama—of the becoming subject of the reader of these works. Given that the novel is the preeminent art of the modern subject qua individual, I will seek to elaborate the manner in which the Fiction of these works performs the pleasure of thinking and the thinking of pleasure insofar as these concern the question of the (merely possible) becoming subject of the reader.
Sacrifice on the altar of history: Mediation and the corrosive teleology of rationalized efficiency Thomas Sutherland | University of Melbourne ‘If we consider the mass of individual happenings,’ writes Hegel, ‘history appears as an altar on which individuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed’. For Hegel, this ephemeral character of history is the concrete image of evil, the negation that drives the affirmative character of reason onward, submerging all particular ends within the universal end of history itself. In other words, the progress of the spirit of world history necessitates the tragic ruination of the past, and through this gradual and repeated sacrifice the universal principles of this process of mediation emerges. This image of history as a process of continual immolation in the name of a larger rational purpose, effectively representing the movement of history in the terms of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, preservation and destruction, is
21 perfectly suited to a philosopher such as Hegel torn between the utopian hopes of Enlightenment progressivism and the intuitionist aesthetics of Romantic irrationalism. What I wish to examine in this paper, however, is the way in which this account prefigures the normalization of so-called creative destruction in our present age, and in particular, the perceived necessity of sacrifice (of traditions, norms, institutions, and so on) in the name of efficiency as rational end. Looking specifically at the entropic nature of the digital archive, which operates not so much to preserve data as to ensure its continued circulation and regeneration (contra the negentropic design that motivated prior forms of archival), I will argue that we must pay more careful attention to the technical ephemerality of contemporary media, and the presupposition of an inherently rational and teleological end that motivates their presumed disposability. Given the extent to which history (as an object) is conditioned by the media with which it is recorded, do we risk sacrificing history itself to the ‘pragmatic’ exigencies of an ossified economic rationalism that strives to preserve little other than the perpetual need for its own recapitulation?
The European Witch-hunts and pre-cinema: A Reading of the Unconscious in Aesthetic Film Theory Lauren Bliss | University of Melbourne This paper will develop the early modern witch-hunts as a pre-cinematic phenomenon. Pre-cinema typically refers to the invention of devices such as the magic lantern, camera obscura and trick mirror; however in this paper I will consider the figuration of the witch, whose crime was the manipulation of the image of the body, and will contextualise it with the archaic belief in the maternal imaginary to ‘naturally’ shape or mutate the appearance of the foetus through vision alone. Posing the hunts as a pre-cinematic phenomenon bounded by both unreason and desire, this paper will aim to open up reformulated questions for Susan Buck-Morss’ widely accepted thesis of cinema’s aesthetic disconnection between the ‘natural’ body and perception.
Panel 2 — The Intractable Jelica Šumič Riha (Chair) | Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Webster 327 | 2-3.30
“A sort of Sade, but funnier.”: Lacan’s Plato in the light of Badiou Bryan Cooke | University of Melbourne Alain Badiou famously remarked that “the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the renaissance of philosophy.” That psychonalysis is, in Badiou’s sense, an anti-philosophy, is something that I take (following Justin Clemens' recent work) to be uncontroversial. But what exactly is so essential about anti-philosophy for philosophy? What is the proper relationship of the former to the latter and vice versa? This paper will take up these questions in relation to Lacan’s 1958 seminar on “transference” and, in particular, that seminar’s engagement with a text that seems to explicitly occupy the threshold between philosophy and its anti- philosophical counterpart: Plato’s Symposium. In reading Lacan reading Plato, I will attempt to show how Badiou’s reference to the connection between philosophy and anti-philosophy finds itself already staged in Plato’s dialogue as a problem arising out of the complicated circuit between reason and enjoyment. In discussing how Lacan, Plato and Badiou conceive of this circuit, I will try show how a reading of the Symposium which revolves around the Platonic tension between eros (love) and aidos (pious shame) ultimately opens up the question of a political-philosophical force-field in which philosophy and law, shame and love, political affect and intellectual jouissance come together in a kind of perpetual stasis. However, while such a reading of Plato is not unique to Lacan (for example it can be found among the disciples of Leo Strauss) it is the question of how this force-field is reconfigured in the modern period which, I argue, comes increasingly to occupy Lacan in the later seminars, a preoccupation which (I shall attempt to show) provides perhaps unexpected insights into the fragile nature of subjectivation in the age of digital capitalism.
“Dialectical poetry is the reverse of dialectical politics”: Art and Politics in Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject Robert Boncardo | University of Sydney With its infuriatingly complex prose, its intricate philosophical constructions, its outbursts of real rhetorical violence and its unapologetic commitment to French Maoism, Alain Badiou’s 1982 book Theory of the Subject
22 remains today something of an embarrassing enigma, even for the most sympathetic of his readers. Indeed, for his numerous enemies, Theory of the Subject is proof that Badiou is fatally flawed both politically and ethically, and perhaps even philosophically unhinged. In this talk, I will attempt to reconstruct the philosophical and political project that Badiou pursues in Theory of the Subject. I will do so by focusing on the first two sections, which are devoted to Hegel and Mallarmé respectively, and by following the red thread of the relation–which is here entirely re-imagined by Badiou– between art and politics. Given the centrality of this relation for many French thinkers in the aftermath of May 68, Theory of the Subject constitutes a unique intervention into a key debate. And despite Badiou having prised apart the autonomous spheres of art and politics in his post-Being and Event work, a close reading of Theory of the Subject suggests that something of the relation forged between them in his early work remains and continues to give his work its singular force.
Deleuze melancholia: object, world, cinema Jon Roffe | UNSW Despite the fact that serious and important engagements with psychological and psychoanalytic categories run through Deleuze’s work from beginning to end, there is at least one striking omission: melancholia. At first blush, this is not surprising, given his general hostility towards both neuropaths and the kind of egocentric approaches to psychopathology also mercilessly attacked by Lacan. However, in light of recent work that challenges Freud’s intertwining of mourning and melancholia, which locates the latter instead under the heading of psychosis, it has become possible to construct a Deleuzean point of view on the concept. After recasting the theory of melancholia as a form of psychosis in relation to the Deleuzean theory of the object-cause of desire in Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus (which are, orthodoxy aside, remarkably close), the paper will consider the modern ‘loss of the world’ that orients the Cinema books as ethical and political documents. In sum, I will argue that there is a powerful Lacanian-inflected concept of melancholia to be developed on the basis of Deleuze’s work.
SESSION 3 | 4 -5.30 Panel 1 — Harnessing Jouissance Arka Chattopadhyay (Chair) | University of Western Sydney Webster 332 | 4-5.30
How Are We Enjoying: Harnessing Feminine Jouissance Andrew Dickson | Massey University Cindy Zeiher | University of Canterbury It could be argued that how we enjoy is uncontrollable. The importance of enjoyment via the Other is central not only to enjoyment itself, but also to one being able to enjoy that which is out of grasp and not fully recognisable. The obligation to enjoy even that which one does not want to enjoy is stronger than ever. This manifests most obviously when one feels disgust at accepting and being seen as accepting enjoyment which is being imposed. Such an obligatory compulsion to enjoy demarcates the excess of violence which, it could be argued, is institutional, managerial and bureaucratic. This enjoyment, far from being a space for social transformation, sustains the status quo. How we enjoy is socially transmitted yet for the subject the obligation to enjoy becomes an embodied event that may not necessarily be desired. Jouissance here is in a dialectic relationship with desire, and it is from this conjuncture that a claim to control might emerge. In harnessing feminine jouissance (whereby the subject is not subjected completely by the phallus, but has a potential beyond it) through the logic of a literacy of desire, one might create a transformational space from which the experience of enjoyment can be differentiated from its context. We offer the example of the modern managerial super-ego as exhibiting a logic which navigates firstly, how we enjoy and secondly, how a dialectic between desire and feminine jouissance might simultaneously reveal and harness the horror of pleasure.
23 Jean-François Lyotard’s dispositif: expenditure in cinema Sharon Mee | UNSW In lighting the match the child enjoys this diversion (détournement, a word dear to Klossowski) that misspends energy —Lyotard, ‘Acinema’: 171.
This paper makes a reading of Lyotard’s essays ‘Fiscourse Digure: The Utopia behind the Scenes of the Phantasy’ (1971) and ‘Acinema’ (1973) to analyse the force of ecstasy or jouissance that is both in the body and in the image. This paper asks: what are the expenditures that are channelled and exploited by the dispositif, and what does this mean for the enjoyment of exploitation cinema and cinema more broadly? In the essay ‘Acinema’, Lyotard describes two different kinds of movement. The first is the inscription of cinematographic movement which sees the valuable ‘return and profit’ of movement in the production of cinema. The second kind of movement that Lyotard describes has two poles—‘immobility and excessive movement’—and incites an expenditure that has no reproductive return or propagative function (Lyotard, ‘Acinema’: 171-172). This second form is what Lyotard calls ‘acinema’: a cinema in which movement generates ‘uncompensated losses’ in consumption because it enacts a spectatorship comprised of ‘intense enjoyment and sexual pleasure (la jouissance)’ (Lyotard, ‘Acinema’: 171). And yet, although the intensities of ecstasy or jouissance see ‘uncompensated losses’ in consumption, the dispositif of cinema seeks to bind and exploit intensities nonetheless. In this sense, the dispositif can be seen as the structures, arrangements or dispositions that bind and exploit the intensities of ecstasy or jouissance. Ecstasy or jouissance is predicated on (affective) proximity and ‘uncompensated losses’ for the subject in the expenditure of energy. In regards to cinema, ecstasy or jouissance has an affective force. Distance and mastery is lost in relation to jouissance. It is not that the spectator has mastery over space and time from this point to that, rather, the spectator loses herself in the difference between a charge and discharge, and in doing so, subject and object mean nothing other than the operation of and for expenditure: it is the misspending of energy. Such expenditure is, in a sense, beyond enjoyment and beyond (the structures that bind and exploit the) subject, which is what this paper will examine.
Panel 2 — Mutiny of Enjoyment Jon Roffe (Chair) | UNSW Webster 306 | 4-5.30
Failing to Enjoy: the Thought of Education Today Adam Bartlett | Monash University Plato's Apology stages a scene reminiscent of Lacan’s impromptu at Vincennes whereat Lacan famously tells the protesting students that the regime is putting you on display, saying 'look at them enjoying'. The effect, he says, will be to deliver yourselves over to the master, once again. In Plato’s case, three figures Meletus, Anytus and Lycon, representing respectively, the poets-teachers, businessmen-politicians and orators of the law and thus the state as such accuse Socrates of failing to enjoy in the prescribed way. In other words, Socrates is accused of harbouring, of practicing, an impossible desire for thought. To think, then, is to corrupt, to pass through enjoyment as its radical impossibility. Plato's entire problematic in the dialogues, exemplified in the Apology, is to think the question of educational corruption against these ubiquitous and determinative performances of pedagogical enjoyment. This paper will consider these several points and connections and draw some consequences for the thought of education today.
The Homonymous Image Nicholas Heron | University of Queensland Long before being taken up within the tradition of the Christian West, Aristotle figured significantly in the writings of the Christian East, where language obviously presented no obstacle to his reception. But here it was his logic, rather than his metaphysics, that was decisive. At the inception of this logic stands the distinction between homonymy and synonymy, between the discourse pertaining to things which have the name in common but not the definition corresponding to that name and the discourse pertaining to things which have both the name and the definition corresponding to that name in common; a distinction which, as Marie-José Mondzain (and others) have shown, would prove decisive in the sophisticated proto-scholasticism of the victorious iconophiles of the second Byzantine iconoclasm crisis and in ways that remain pertinent for a
24 consideration of the hegemony of the contemporary “iconomy.” By integrating the historical example of the mobilisation of this distinction into a larger interpretative context, this paper will consider the significant role performed by the doctrine of the homonymous image in the elaboration of what has recently been termed an “economic theology”.
Phallus and the Fall of Man: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve Gregor Moder | University of Ljubljana, Slovenia In Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell begins the analysis of what he calls the Hollywood comedy of remarriage by inspecting Preston Sturges’ classic The Lady Eve (1941). In the first part of this paper we will highlight two moments of the film and argue that Cavell's genre of “remarriage” should be interpreted as a genuine concept of repetition where repetition functions on the level of the original itself. Firstly, we will analyze the reason why the male protagonist, Charles, can't believe that the beautiful lady Eve is the same woman as the con-artist Jean whom he met some time ago and fell in love with: they look too much alike to be the same. It is as if she is deceiving (him) by revealing herself; as if being were only a function of its appearance; as if the original were just an effect of the repetition. Secondly, we will comment on the framework of the film and its constant reference point, the myth of Adam and Eve and the fall of man. We will argue that Sturges brilliantly transforms the myth by pointing out that “fall of man” is not a singular, primordial event that marks human existence as tragically “fallen”, but rather shows us the man, Charles, falling all the time, serially and comically. The second part of the paper will explicitly address the question of the sexual difference and its economy in the film; we will attempt to read the film with the aid of the Lacanian concept of phallus, especially as it is used by Alenka Zupančič in her Sexuality and Ontology (Ljubljana 2011).
Panel 3 — Pure and Flawless Law Dan McLaughlin (Chair) | UNSW Webster 327 | 4–5.30
Aquinas at the US Military Academy: The Laws of Armed Conduct and the Genealogy of Morals Jessica Whyte | University of Western Sydney In the course of the twentieth century, the revival of just war theory saw contemporary variations on Thomas Aquinas, embodied in what moral philosophers have termed the ‘principle of double effect’, inform much philosophical reflection on the killing of civilians in war. More recently, US military lawyers have referred to Aquinas in interpreting the laws of armed combat, and in attempting to reconcile tensions between the principle of ‘humanity’, and the principle of ‘military necessity’. If we accept Quentin Skinner’s argument that the classic texts of political thought do not provide answers to ‘timeless questions’, then it remains for us to ask what work the reference to Aquinas does at our own historical moment. How are we to understand the recourse to Scholastic theology in contemporary struggles to define the moral and legal limits of acceptable killing? For a contemporary Just War theorist like Michael Walzer, the contemporary “triumph of just war theory” is a product of the Vietnam War, which revealed the inadequacy of non-moralising languages in articulating (and denouncing) the brutality of US military conduct. Seen from the perspective of recent historical research on human rights and the rise of moral politics in the 1970s, however, the moralization of political language in the wake of the Vietnam War appears instead as a means to cleanse the United States of the stain of its wartime conduct, and thus to ‘reclaim American virtue’, as Barbara Keys puts it. In this paper, I aim to interrogate the relation between international law and morality, and between the history of international law and the ‘genealogy of morals’. In doing so, I suggest that neither a strict contextualism nor a teleological account of the progressive refinement of moral sensibilities over time is adequate in understanding the contemporary prestige of Aquinas in debates about the killing of civilians. Instead, I suggest that Walter Benjamin’s remarks on the philosophy of history provide resources that can help us decipher the ‘constellation’ that a moment of the past forms with the present.
25 Agamen’s Moods: Shoah, Spectacle, and the Kafkan liberation of shame as the stimmung proper to ethical modernity Kim White | UNSW In the English commentary on Heidegger, Stimmung is frequently translated as mood. One of the overlooked aspects of Agamben's relation to Heidegger is his radicalization of this concept. While in Heidegger the phenomenology of moods categorizes ecstatic openings onto ontological possibility that make decisions and destinies possible for the individual in relation to a worldhood of others and nations, in Agamben mood becomes the ontological foundation for an ecumenical relation to language and the multitude of all others qua speaking beings incapable of appropriating any local or ultimate destiny. This entails a being-with-all-others fraught with the need to evade eschatological machinery that, in Hegel and in Heidegger, ensnares human thought in a double bind that both insists that the catastrophes of human history find legitimation in a suprasensuous origin and finds itself lacking any proper logos by which to translate the edicts by which such calamities are putatively vindicated. The Stimmung proper to this double bind is, Agamben says, shame. This paper aims to reconstruct Agamben's genealogy of shame in modernity in relation to three central co- ordinates: the petty bourgeoisie who in the age of mediatized spectacle have displaced the proletariat as the residuum of ecumenical human potentiality and are captured in the eschatological machinery by their interminable oscillation between the moods shame and arrogance; the encounter between the Muselmänner and the liberators of Auschwitz, in which the blush of shame among the latter implies the possibility of the appropriation of the inappropriable; and Kafka, who seeks to liberate the shame of humanity from its agon with arrogance in order to render inoperative the eschatological machinery that perpetuates the banality of evil under the sign of redemption.
Fantasy Unchains: Discipline and Enjoyment in Quentin Tarantino’s Latest Film Marco Grosoli | University of Kent Following Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek has famously and frequently stated that cinema tells the viewer “how to desire”–that is, how to articulate desire by means of fantasy. In recent times, the closest illustration of this maxim has probably been Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012). Therein, one of the characters (Schulz, a German immigrant) teaches the hero (Django, a black slave in 1858 North America–and arguably an epitome of contemporary, destitute, postmodern global proletariat), precisely, how to desire freedom, and how to attain it. What is more, his recipe coincides with standard Hollywood narrative. First of all, Schulz helps Django clarify his main goal: to rejoin his wife Broomhilde (the final embrace between the hero and his lover being of course the traditional Hollywood happy ending); then, he introduces the slave to the most basic tenets of Hollywood storytelling, by condensing the whole German Ring Cycle in a succinct boy-Siegfried meets girl-Brunhilde kind of three-acts over-simple narration (and here one is easily led to think of how much classical Hollywood owed to German intellectuals and artists who migrated to the States between WW1 and WW2); ultimately, he teaches his protégé how to fit in that basic structure (“Don't break your character!”)–that is, how to be the hero of a Hollywood story. And indeed, Django plays a role, during most of the film. Encouraged by Schulz, he impersonates a black slaver in order to infiltrate the milieus of white men, so that he can find and save his beloved Broomhilde. Django Unchained insists a great deal on Schulz's rhetorical mastery: he is blatantly the voice of reason. The most important lesson he teaches Django is how to handle one's own enjoyment (as an essential part of the aforementioned “role-playing”): how to react to the pleasure (and pain) generated by violence, how not to lose one's temper in critical situations, and so on and so forth. Fantasy, the articulation of desire and of its pursuit, is a matter of discipline. And indeed, the crucial question around which Django Unchained revolves is: what kind of discipline belongs to the path of fantasy (which the film identifies tout court with the path of freedom)? Not incidentally, Django's arch-enemy (the very last man standing between himself and freedom in the final scene of the film–the man he has to kill in the final duel) embodies discipline as well–but in an entirely different way. It's Stephen–not a white man, but another black man (Django's double, as it were). He is a cunning slave owing his considerable power and influence to the recognition he gets from his master–a recognition due to the innumerable series of micro-practices whereby he disciplines the enjoyment pervading daily life in his master's household (he entertains the other slaves with complicit dirty jokes, he maintains a familiar atmosphere around thanks to a wealth of micro-rituals and so on and so forth). His is, as it were, a “Kojevian/Foucauldian” discipline deeply at odds with Django's, which is probably more “Debordian”, closer to Guy Debord's art of detournement, in that he uses a shallow, fictitious appearance to defeat a world of fictitious appearances.
26 By means of a close reading of Django Unchained, my paper aims to highlight how reason, enjoyment, fantasy and discipline are articulated in the film–and also, how the form of the film itself articulates them, by constantly playing with classical writing/filmmaking and the “figural” excess thereof.
So what? Plenary Lecture | Joan Copjec Tyree Room, John Niland Scientia Building | 6- 7.30
The Images Wars and the Modern State: Kiarostami's Zig Zag One of the recurrent, signature images in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's premier director, is that of a path which zigzags across the landscape. This paper argues that this path -- a figure of what Henry Corbin (the well-known French philosopher, Islamicist, and colleague of Jacques Lacan) named the 'imaginal world' -- opens a new chapter in the study of Islam, and of cinema. Covering, incidentally, some of the same ground as the recent work of Agamben on 'the Kingdom and the Glory,' the paper offers a significantly different view of political economy.
Joan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she is also the Chester- Mallow Senior Faculty Research Fellow at the Pembroke Centre and an affiliated member on Middle East Studies. She is the author of many books including Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994, re-issued Verso 2015), and Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2002), as well as of numerous articles and the edited collections Penumbra (with Sigi Jöttkandt, 2013), Giving Ground: the Politics of Propinquity (with Michael Sorkin, 1999), Radical Evil (1996), Supposing the Subject (1994), and Shades of Noir (1993). Her forthcoming book is titled Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (MIT Press).
27 Tuesday, 14th July
Closing Plenary | Juliet Flower MacCannell Webster Lecture B | 9.30- 11
Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the Imaginary
Juliet Flower MacCannell is Outstanding Emeritus Professor at UC Irvine and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, University of London. Also currently co-chairing the California Psychoanalytic Circle, and co-editor of ( a ): the journal of culture and the unconscious. Juliet is author of numerous books on psychoanalysis and philosophy in a social and political frame, including: Figuring Lacan: Criticism & the Cultural Unconscious (1986; reissued 2014, Routledge), The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (1991), The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject (2000), and over ninety articles. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Slovenian and French. She is also an artist.
SESSION 1 — 11.30- 1 Panel 1 — Obscuring the good line: Mallarmé Today Sigi Jöttkandt (Chair) | UNSW Webster 332 | 11.30-1
A Superior Surface Justin Clemens | University of Melbourne Un Coup de dés is one of the masterworks of modern literature, and a kind of summa of Mallarmé's lifework. It could not have been better served by writers and thinkers: on the one hand, it immediately transformed poetics for poets as different as Paul Valery and Christopher Brennan; on the other, one of the strongest lineages of European philosophy registered the poem as an event for thought, encompassing Maurice Blanchot, J.-P. Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, J.-C. Milner, Quentin Meillassoux, and many others. Confronted by this sequence of commentaries by great poets and philosophers, a contemporary reader could be forgiven for experiencing the torment of a methodological and intellectual impasse. How could one add to this sequence of readings except as a supernumerary number that could always be another? Yet how could one also not feel that the sequence itself demands another numbering or enumeration of the operations of the poem? Even more tormentingly, does not this double address itself mimic the structure of the limit as delivered by Mallarme himself: the crowd of history erupting spontaneously and simultaneously to which one cannot add except by subtracting oneself, as per the disappearance of the author, the purification of the verse, the becoming-abyssal of content? This paper will take the route of a speculative reconstruction of a covert sequence of thought that must have taken place for Un Coup de dés to become what it is, along the lines of the familiar paradox that can only find its own conditions of possibility following the act that retrospectively creates those very conditions.
The Boy Who Lived and the Poet Who Should Die Christian R. Gelder | UNSW In 1999, renegade philosopher, linguist, and political theorist Jean-Claude Milner published a literally insane account of the 19th century poet Stéphane Mallarmé under the title Mallarmé au tombeau. For Milner, contrary to a century's worth of scholarship, the political doctrine of Mallarmé’s poetry can be summed up in a single statement: nothing takes place. Born out of a reading of a lesser-known sonnet Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, Milner reads the figure of the swan in Mallarmé’s oeuvre to suggest that the poet denounced the 19th century’s revolutionary potential and its accompanying poetics to revel in nothing but nihilistic nothingness. Milner’s “meeting with Mallarmé” thus carries a strong polemical injunction, asking its reader to leave the poet behind to die in his tombeau once and for all.
28 Since the publication of the book in France, Milner has turned his gaze to a wide variety of topics: painting, European democracy and Roland Barthes and structuralism, etc. However, the only distinctly literary work Milner has pronounced upon since 1999 is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In distinct contrast to the contemptuous political nihilism of Mallarmé’s poetry, Milner reads the Harry Potter movies as an example of post-Thatcherite Britain’s revolutionary potential. He suggests that the “lessons” given by Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Aunty Marge tell readers that the relationship between power and knowledge can be negotiated by way of an essential, perhaps even magical, ideal: tolerance. This paper will rehearse the somewhat unknown arguments of both books, situating them against Milner’s larger project. In so doing, I shall offer a critique of the former book on Mallarmé, while also outlining what is at stake in leaving a dead poet behind to focus instead on the boy who lived.
Comrade Mallarmé? Robert Boncardo | University of Sydney Throughout his posthumous reception, and in particular in the post-War period, the late-19th century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has been a privileged object of reflection for French intellectuals. Crucially, however, his writings have not only been drawn on to lend support to specific positions in philosophy or poetics, but also in politics. From Sartre’s reflections on the possibility of a politically-committed poetry; to the theory of the revolutionary virtues of poetic language proposed by the Telquellians; to the election of Mallarmé as a figure of political endurance by Alain Badiou; and finally to the recent speculations on the politics of literature proffered by Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé has been at the centre of political thought in 20th century French intellectual life. This talk will sketch the main interpretative positions that have been taken up on the political significance of Mallarmé and his work, and will explain why one question in particular has persistently troubled the above- mentioned French thinkers: namely, is Mallarmé camarade Mallarmé, or not?
Panel 2 — Transmission Ben Gook (Chair) | University of Melbourne Webster 306 | 11.30-1
Reason and Enjoyment in Jacques Rancière's critical pedagogy Grace Hellyer | Sydney School of Continental Philosophy In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière offers a reframing of the pedagogical encounter that de- privileges academic institutions and the role of the instructor by foregrounding the will of the student. This paper will attempt to complicate and develop his account of the emancipated student as 'a will served by an intelligence' by exploring the more specific account of the will that emerges in his accounts of aesthetic experience. I will explore Rancière's reading of Schiller's play impulse and argue that this aspect of Rancière's broader account of the aesthetic regime is crucial to the way in which writing as a medium of both rationality and a particularly defined mode of enjoyment takes center stage in his conception of an emancipatory pedagogical practice.
Trials in the 21st Century: what Serial's technology can teach us about law, narrative, and Baltimore as a ‘State of Exception’ Diana Shahinyan | University of Sydney In the American imaginary Baltimore has come to signify a space in which the law routinely fails to both represent and protect its urban citizens. This paper will examine the 2014 podcast series hit Serial: downloaded over 68 million times, it follows a journalistic investigation into the botched trial of high school student Adnan Masud Syed, found guilty of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, and convicted to a life sentence. Similar to TV shows such as The Wire, also set in Baltimore, Serial purports to, through its unwavering commitment to realism, demystify the law, lay bare the law’s mechanism, and unravel its process: the podcast week-by-week exposes an evidentiary process gone awry, corruption, the disturbing ways in which ‘doubt’ is either manufactured or quelled, and the fabrication of not factual but rather only necessarily unimpregnable narratives fit for trial. But are the legal narratives that aestheticise Baltimore as a space in which the law habitually fails actually complicit with the forces that uphold an unremitting and uninterrupted picture of American sovereignty based
29 on rule of law? From my analysis of Serial I will argue that narrative attempts to unmask or lay bare the law’s most troubling flaws in fact uphold the rule of law, by preventing the kind of radical scrutiny that would see the law’s wholesale suspension in Baltimore. Drawing on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, this paper will make a case for the city of Baltimore as a hidden state of exception within an imagined picture of American federalism and sovereignty, and examine the new possibilities and directions of the study of law and literature that emerge from this analysis.
'No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom': Pedagogy in the Age of Revolution without Reason Ari Mattes | University of Notre Dame What gives the teacher–human, computer, text–its authority? Is it its superior knowledge, intelligence and processing capacity, its capacity for analysis and synthesis both more acute and faster than that of the humble student-being? Is it simply a matter of force, the cane replaced in the contemporary classroom by forms of control such as isolation and neglect? Is it a matter of psychology, a commitment on the part of both master and student to sustain the pleasure of displeasure for as long as possible? Is it, as Jacques Rancière suggests in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, always an arbitrary authority based on acts of faith on the part of both “master” and “student”–and is education, then, reducible to the provision of materials on the part of the master coupled with the policing of the concentration and engagement of the student? In an age in which both high schools and universities are explicitly presented as apparatuses for the creation of pliant, docile and “creative” workers–at UNDA, for example, “work-integrated learning” is the current buzz-phrase, and terms like “innovation” are frequently bandied about in the same sentences as “education” in the popular press–and if education is ever to move towards the genuine emancipation of the individual–then (once again) addressing this simple question of authority is of paramount importance.
Panel 3 — Unmasterable Subjects Chris Oakey (Chair) | UNSW Webster 327 | 11.30-1
‘They’re only letters’: Textuality and Vitality from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Spike Jonze’s Her Russell Smith | Australian National University Roland Barthes’ famous characterisation of the literary text as a ‘tissue of quotations’ is nowhere more exemplified than in the case of Frankenstein, where, as Chris Baldick notes, Mary Shelley ‘made a living book out of pieces of other books, just as her hero made a living body out of pieces of other bodies’. ‘Tissue’ and ‘text’ share an etymological root, and as Stefan Helmreich notes, ‘Twentieth century biology … under the spell of understanding DNA as a code-script, often conflated vitality and textuality’. This paper explores the legacy of the scientific metaphor of life as text. The first part involves a reading of Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), which follows the arc of a male writer’s love-relationship with ‘Samantha’, his computer’s ‘lifelike’ artificially-intelligent operating system (OS). Friedrich Kittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, traces the role of typewriter in enabling a rethinking of language as cybernetic code. Of particular interest is Kittler’s analysis of how the typewriter reconfigures relations between the sexes, and the typewriter’s uncanny role as a kind of desiring-machine. For Kittler, the modern ‘desk couple’ represents a technical-libidinal pairing in which ‘writing in the age of media has always been a short circuit between brain physiology and communications technologies—bypassing humans and even love’ (216). In Her, its protagonist Theodore voices a suspicion of textuality by deprecating his role as a professional writer of other people’s love-letters by repeatedly saying ‘they’re just letters’. The end of the film, when Theodore seeks the comfort of his best friend Amy after they have both been jilted by their respective OS-lovers, thus performs an anxious reassertion of embodied heterosexual intimacy, invoking a nostalgic distinction between ‘real’ embodied life and the ‘artificial life’ of textuality. The second part returns to Frankenstein, a novel that is, importantly, ‘just letters’ (in both alphabetic and epistolary senses). We can read the creature’s third-hand autobiographical discourse at the centre of the novel as a forerunner of the Turing Test, the famous thought-experiment in which, on the basis of a typed exchange of messages, a computer program is challenged to prove itself indistinguishable from a human respondent. What Frankenstein uncannily foreshadows is a future discourse network in which the production and reproduction of living texts has decisively shifted from exclusively human control.
30 Inarticulate Wounds of Colonialism: Mute children and savages in Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Coetzee’s Foe Joanne Faulkner | UNSW The paper examines the significance for Australian settler subjectivity of two uncanny figures of postcolonial literature: David Malouf’s ‘Gemmy” in Remembering Babylon and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Friday,’ of Foe. Each of these characters exerts a powerful influence on the white colonials with whom they share a fictive universe; and each is also rendered without speech (in-fans, or infant), either through the loss of language, in the case of Gemmy, or, for Friday, through the violent and mysterious loss of his tongue. They are also both displace, or have strayed from their original community in a way that renders them homeless and dependent, and which poignantly mirror their colonial antagonists’ own defensive sense of homelessness. I argue that in their inarticulateness to the colonials, these figures express, or reflect, the ambivalence and illegitimacy through which the colonial claim to land is instituted. By connecting Gemmy and Friday to a genealogy of lost and mute children/savages (enfants sauvages) within colonial imagination, we can begin to excavate this unacknowledged ambivalence regarding white sovereignty.
‘From Another Distanced Mind': Monstrous Self-Representation in Plath’s The Bell Jar Tamlyn Avery | UNSW This paper discusses elements of feminine monstrosity in Sylvia Plath’s standalone novel and Bildungsroman, The Bell Jar. Plath’s ‘development of the artist novel’ inverts comfortable understandings of female pleasure and rationality through explicit recitation of unspeakable facets of womanhood. By inverting the traditional hierarchy of binaries such as beauty and monstrosity, masculine and feminine, or pleasure and pain, Plath shockingly inserts the monstrous feminine into the traditional 1950s scene of the American everyday. Esther Greenwood forms the bipolaric self-representation of early womanhood, in which any stabilised concept of her ‘true’ subjectivity is distanced through the patchwork of past tense narration. One of these pasts represents the portrait of the quotidian American belle, a beautiful and civilized socialite. However, the protagonist feels deeply disconnected from this designer self; she chooses to reject becoming the acceptable definition of ‘woman’ through the patriarchal path of appropriate education, socially advantageous marriage, and motherhood. There is systemic obstruction; the reader’s expectations of ‘Esther’, as our generic prototype, are broken down through an inverse and perverse series of rites of passages: social eccentricity, suicide, premarital sex, menstruation, disordered eating, and aberrant sexuality. A second Esther slowly emerges, reborn after symbolic suicide, transmogrifying into the bodily, dangerous, unkempt “madwoman in the attic”: the female novelist. In the post-trauma of Esther’s violent breakdown, the protagonist disconnects from the predestined harmonious maturation expected of the genre, aborting her own womanhood in becoming some other unclassifiable, fluid reckoning of subjectivity. It is only through embracing the abject self that the female artist figure is brought to the brink of her creative potential. This paper shall ask: what are the literary ethics of approaching the American Bildungsroman after the event of such a subversive generic contribution, and how might we continue to read the future of the genre once all of its traditions and paradigms have been broken down?
SESSION 2 — 2-3.30 Panel 1 — A Single Abstract Animal Adam Bartlett (Chair) | Monash University Webster 332
Talking Back: What Dance might make of Badiou’s philosophical project Erin Brannigan | UNSW Alain Badiou states that ‘philosophy depends on art and not the reverse,’ so it follows that the encounter between philosophy and art occurs in the field of aesthetics where art becomes inscribed in philosophical strategies. (2014) In ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,’ (2005) Badiou mobilises dance as a metaphor or ‘instrument’ to arrive at a model of thought. (2014) So Badiou’s essay does not seek to define or describe the artistic activity of dance, but to turn the ‘subjective potency’ of the art form toward the task of defining a
31 particular type of thinking. (2014) This distinction has been missed by some of the rather prickly responses to his essay coming from Dance Studies. (Cjevic 2014: 148, Clark 2011) In a recent paper I considered another essay on thought–Jeremy Prynne’s account of what he calls, ‘poetic thought.’ Prynne, a progressive and experimental poet, describes a type of thought that is active, processual, directed, and applied; ‘the active process of thinking, mental energy shaped to some purpose or tendency: I think of it as poetic work.’ (595) His is a treatise on thinking as a creative act, bound to the conditions of the mode of art to which it is applied. Further back in my research history I turned to Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the philosopher’s attempt to respond to the work of art (in this case painting) in the face of its assault upon thought. (1993) Both writers speak of the labour of translating an act of thought into language. Their descriptions of this process in terms of movement and force resonate with my interest in the nexus between seeing, feeling, thinking and writing, dealing–as I do–with a work of art that is ‘danced.’ The act of thought that Badiou is reaching towards shares corporeal characteristics of dance such as mobility, restraint and weightlessness. Unlike Prynne and Lyotard, Badiou is not confronting the struggle of transmission from one modality (thinking) to another (language) in the context of an aesthetic encounter. He is also not interested in marrying his model of thought to the contemplation of specific creative objects or modes. He is following Nietzsche and Mallarmé in an exercise–perhaps inspired by specific dances, perhaps not–that would find in dancing a strategy, model or ideal for his own disciplinary labour. Dance becomes an instrument amongst his philosophical project just as dance became an ideal strategy amongst Mallarmé’s poetic practice. If this is a case of dance being inscribed into the philosophical labour of Badiou, and if dance could talk back, what would it have to say in response? What would the dance of the early 21 st century make of his description of the art form? Of its many forms, the dancing Badiou has in mind is specific. What does Badiou’s philosophic ‘strategy’ want from dance? That is, what is the nature of the relationship put into play between the model of thinking described and the creative practice of dance? And finally, what is this thinking that approaches the character of dance in comparison to other modes such as Prynne’s poetic thought or Lyotard’s thought under the affective thrall of the work of art?
Ecstasies of Unreason: Lacan and Mystical jouissance Ehsan Azari Stanizai | University of Western Sydney The primary intent of this paper is to investigate the construal definition of mystical experience as flight from the body and ascension into a spiritual union with divinity. This notion will be analysed in a mystic/philosophical context. As a point of departure, I will discuss mysticism as a path to knowledge of the divine in Rumi, St. Augustine and Meister Eckhart and Hegel’s notion of Absolute Knowledge through which the truth of God is exposed in its pure essence. For Hegel, a philosopher was a “mystai that has been present at the decision in the innermost sanctuary.' Lacan was keen to call his Écrits a mystical text. I will also touch upon Deleuze’s ontology of virtual that enables a naturalistic interpretation of the function of mysticism as a sum of concept, precept and affect. Deleuze’s ontology has been positioned against the background of French feminization of mysticism from Simone de Beauvoir to Lacan. At such a mystic-philosophical background, I try to offer a demystification of mystical experience. By focusing on Rumi’s love poems and reviewing his Whirling Dervishes, I argue that mystical ascension is, in fact, dissension in the body and living wholly in the body. The mystical apoplectic ecstasy is, thus a sensuous experience within the boundaries of the corporeal body. A mystic will need a body to enjoy and run through mystical experience by leaving reason and dwelling in jouissance.
Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga Classes Karen-Anne Wong | University of Sydney To date there has been little theoretical consideration of how children's yoga affects students' ways of thinking and being. Using interviews with child students of yoga and my own participant observation as a children’s yoga teacher, this paper focuses on how a theoretical understanding of narrative may illuminate our perceptions of how children learn to think and feel during yoga practice. Narrative is considered a tool for students’ to view their own bodies as vehicles for storytelling, producing new conceptions of self. I read children’s yoga practices through Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of the body, I suggest that in a yoga class, children are not imagining themselves to become other, such as a dog or tree. Instead, children are actually becoming a new entity, a mediated body that lies somewhere between self and other (such as a dog or tree). By listening to children and engaging with theory this research brings greater understanding of children’s experiences. Ways of being on the yoga mat may provide a window into the ways that individuals experience childhood.
32 Panel 2 — Distinct Forms Russell Smith (Chair) | Australian National University Webster 307 | 2-3.30
Earth Voice Prue Gibson | UNSW Evie Wyld’s 2014 book All the Birds Singing investigates the dual landscapes of Australia and the UK as places of suspended reason in space and time. The chronology of her narration is modified and despite the calm self- assurance of the first person narration, the protagonist is troubled by dark forms that rush through the trees. She is burdened by past events, in the bush, that exist in the narrative future. The natural landscape is not an idyllic backdrop to thought, it is a means of extenuating human time and augmenting human thought via nature. This paper applies Ian Hamilton Grant's concepts of materiality over transcendentalism, whereby there is no separation between the biotic and abiotic. The landscape is more than a surrounding environment, it is vital. This risks casting ‘nature' as an anthropomorphic subject, however, Grant reminds us that it is an “artificial earth.”
Desire, Rationality and Style in Derrida’s Glas Jessica Marian | University of Melbourne It is well known that Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974) departs from the more staid conventions of philosophical writing, that it blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature. The relationship staged between the text’s two columns is regularly understood as one of Hegel against Genet and Genet against Hegel. This opposition is then readily imbued with a range of implied binary oppositions such as absolute/fragmentary, hetero-normative/homosexual, Christian/criminal and so on. Taking Derrida’s discussion of the word ‘contre’ (counter or against) in “Countersignature” (2004) (Derrida’s first text on Genet since Glas) as a starting point, this paper will consider how the notion of Glas’ two columns against–as in, opposed to–one another is repeatedly undermined by an inseparable relation of the two columns against–as in, in near proximity to or contact with–one another. This argument will be focussed through an extensive engagement with key passages concerning the relation of desire and rationality in Hegel, Genet and Derrida and the recurring allusions to the names of fathers and mothers found throughout Glas. In this light the paper hopes to also offer some consideration of the role and impact of Glas’ stylistic aberrances and bi-columnar textual layout.
Proposal for an Aesthetics of Ethics Lucille Holmes | Elam School of Fine Arts By comparison with other subject areas, the creative arts are relatively new research disciplines where the ethical implications of research in the creative arts have only recently begun to be addressed, and these initial studies demonstrate a negative characterisation of ethics as a significant institutional limitation to artistic research in universities. Taking these criticisms into account, this paper will explore the possibility for artistic research ethics to critically address, rather than reject, the operations of control, regulation and censorship in research ethics, and in that process to position those limitations in relation to the question of the desire of the researcher. That is, how could ethics as the obligation to act in the right way have a place in art research not solely as a controlling force but more importantly as a force in the service of the singularity of desire. Jacques Lacan has proposed an ethics which promotes the singularity of each person in terms of the universal particularity of human desire. How could Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis provide a theoretical framework for artistic research and its aims to establish its own set of methodological approaches? The question of an ethics of singularity for artistic practices was initially advanced by Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells (2012), who argued against the ethical imperative for art to contribute to the social Good and proposed a more aesthetically attuned ethics, based in part on a Lacanian ethics, where the dimension of desire beyond the Good is positioned as the ethical foundation of artistic endeavour. This paper will develop Bishop’s proposal for an ethic of art that takes into account the fidelity to a singular desire, as that which supports the openness of desire inherent to art, while also retaining an ethical position towards artistic research participants.
33 Panel 3 — Calculus of the Endarkenment Henry Sussman (Chair) | Yale University Webster 327 | 2-3.30
Bureaucracy and its Discontents Ivan Niccolai | University of Sydney This paper examines bureaucracy as the political manifestation of reason as first described by Max Weber, and the tracing of its evolution in both public institutions and corporations to highlight the ubiquity of bureaucracy across all private and public sectors. The paper seeks to examine problems of scale and power concentrations that prompted the explosion of the use of processes and frameworks broadly grouped under the term bureaucracy, and to that end will describe common traits of bureaucracy in Australian government institutions and large corporations. The perverse pleasure in the following of impersonal processes and rules will be examined and the apotheosis of that impersonal bureaucratic enjoyment shown to lie the dream of a form of algorithmic governance impregnable to political manipulation, exemplified by techno-libertarian projects such as bitcoin and public key cryptography. The similarities of ends but antagonisms of means between the radical left and these American libertarian projects will also be examined.
‘Computer Says No’, or: The Erasure of the Human Alan Cholodenko | University of Sydney In my Introduction to The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007), I proposed: ‘Animation—indeed, what I call the animatic—has increasingly come forward, presented itself, as the most compelling, indeed singular process of not only contemporary film but the contemporary world’. Drawing forth from my work on the theory of animation over the past 24 years, my paper speculates on key disciplinary, institutional, scientific and technological aspects and implications of that singular relevance of animation, including foregrounding the impact of the ‘defining’ technology reanimating everything (for technologies are animators)—the computer—and ‘the accountability regime’, as I call it, of hyperreason, hyperrationalism, that it animates and operates. The paper will also propose the singular relevance of animation for theory, including recent theory, marking major currents at the ‘heart’ of which lies the unacknowledged, almost universal ‘blind spot’ of theoretical inquiry across the disciplines—animation. Or what animation has morphed into, reanimated as—hyperanimation—the hyperlifedeath, hyperanimatic, metastatic, not hauntological nor ontological but oncological form of animation commensurate with what reality has morphed into, reanimated as, that is, Baudrillardian hyperreality, virtual reality, the pure and empty form of reality, a ‘reality’ marked by the extreme, ecstatic processes of the viral, the fractal, the clonal, the quantum, the transdevaluation of all values, the cyborg, the replicant, the hyperzombie, what I call the ‘hyperCryptic hyperComplex’ of ‘hyperpsuché’—Telematic Man, ‘Homo computans’. Hyperanimatic hyperreality has the most seismic repercussions for all the pertinences of second order reality, including for all second order theory, marking the morphing of the subject into hypersubject, the object into hyperobject and theory into hypertheory, key of which repercussions will, if time allows, be charted in this walk with Rick and Michonne, Carol and Daryl, and others, through the ‘contemporary’, endarkened, holocaustal landscape, where the human ‘lives on’ in its ‘self-euthanised’, hyperreal pure and empty form, the hyperhuman.
Theory Today Roundtable | What is to be Done? Copjec, MacCannell, Šumič Riha, Sussman Webster 327 | 4-5.30
34 Biographies
Addlem, Elise is a philosophy honours student at Melbourne University, researching the ontological significance of Heidegger's work on poetry. Her research interests include German philosophy, phenomenology and critical theory. She also co-runs Women and Philosophy, a group dedicated to the thought of female philosophers.
Apperley, Thomas Ph.D. is an ethnographer that specializes in researching digital media technologies. His previous writing has covered broadband policy, digital games, digital literacies and pedagogies, mobile media, and social inclusion. Tom is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His open access print-on-demand book Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global, was published by The Institute of Network Cultures in 2010. Tom’s more recent work has appeared in Digital Creativity, eLearning and Digital Media, and Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication. With Associate Professor Justin Clemens and Professor John Frow he is the Co-Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Grant Avatars and Identity (DP140101503).
Avery, Tamlyn is a third year PhD student at UNSW, whose research interests include twentieth century American literature and Bildungsroman studies.
Bartlett, A.J. teaches philosophy in Melbourne, has published widely in contemporary philosophy and education and is the author of Badiou & Plato: An Education by Truths (EUP 2011) and co-author (with Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe) of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2014). He is also the editor of several essay collections and co-translator of Alain Badiou's Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury 2014). He co- edits the philosophy series Insolubilia for Rowman and Littlefield.
Bliss, Lauren is a PhD Candidate within the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne. Her research interests include Australian Studies, Cinema and Embodiment, Simone de Beauvoir, Women & Film and Figural Film Theory.
Boncardo, Robert recently completed a PhD thesis in French studies at the University of Sydney and L'Université d'Aix-Marseille 1. His thesis dealt with the political reception of the late-19th century poet Stéphane Mallarmé by 20th century French intellectuals, including Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou and Rancière. He has given courses on Sartre, Rancière and French literary theory at the Melbourne School of Philosophy. He is currently expanding his thesis to include the interventions of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux.
Brannigan, Erin is a Lecturer in Dance in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW and works in the fields of dance and film as an academic and curator. Her current research explores the condition of dance within the broader field of the performing arts through its relationship with other art forms in interdisciplinary practices. She is author of Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (OUP, 2011), co- editor with V. Baxter of Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (2014) and editor of AP Movement and Performance Symposium Papers (2009).
Butler, Rex is an art historian, writer and Professor of Art History at Monash University. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney. His research interests include contemporary Australian art and art criticism, post-war American art, and postmodernism. He is the author six books including What is Appropriation? (1996), Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), A Secret History of Australian Art (2002),and Borges’s Short Stories: A Reader’s Guide (2010). He has a forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?'
Butt, Mahli-Ann enjoys philosophy and videogames. As an undergraduate at UNSW, she has recently discovered the free catering of academia (the cheese and wine sections are her favourite).
35 Chattopadhyay, Arka is an M.A, MPhil in English Literature, Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. Having finished his MPhil on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou, he is now pursuing his PHD at Writing and Society at University of Western Sydney on Samuel Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Uhlmann and Dr. Alex Ling. He has presented in conferences like 2010 and 2011 NEMLA Conventions, 2012 International Samuel Beckett Working Group and the 2014 Oxford Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies Symposium. He has published himself in books, anthologies and journals like Miranda and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui and edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature with James Martell, published by Roman Books, London in 2013. He has a chapter titled ‘“I switch off”: Towards a Beckettian Minority of Theatrical Event’, forthcoming in Palgrave MacMillan’s 2015 reader on Beckett and Deleuze edited by Stephen Wilmer.
Cholodenko, Alan is an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney, prior to which he was Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies in what is now known as the Department of Art History and Film Studies at that university. He has pioneered in the articulation of film theory, animation theory and ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ French thought, especially the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. He is the editor of The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, the world’s first book of scholarly essays theorizing animation (1991); Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996); and The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007).
Chuang, Yen-Chen is an assistant professor at Tamkang University. She is currently working on film theory and continental philosophy, especially in Deleuze and Derrida.
Clemens, Justin is the author of many books and papers on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and early modern literature. He has recently published Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh UP 2013) and, with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh UP 2014). He is currently working on a number of projects, including an ARC Discovery Grant with Tom Apperley and John Frow on the use of avatars in new media. He teaches at the University of Melbourne.
Comyn, Joshua is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation research concerns the manner in which the prose fiction works of William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy address the question of subjectivity in the social, political and economic contexts in which those works were produced.
Cooke, Bryan is the Secretary of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and a Leading Tutor in Philosophy and the Humanities at Ormond College, University of Melbourne.
Copjec, Joan is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she is also the Chester- Mallow Senior Faculty Research Fellow at the Pembroke Centre and an affiliated member on Middle East Studies. She is the author of many books including Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994, re-issued Verso 2015), and Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2002), as well as of numerous articles and the edited collections Penumbra (with Sigi Jöttkandt, 2013), Giving Ground: the Politics of Propinquity (with Michael Sorkin, 1999), Radical Evil (1996), Supposing the Subject (1994), and Shades of Noir (1993). Her forthcoming book is titled Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (MIT Press).
Dickson, Andrew is organisational sociologist at Massey University, New Zealand. He is a graduate of biochemistry and business. His research expertise is in critical health studies, focusing mainly on the wider weight-loss industry and nutritionism, but also in applying a psychoanalytic lens to other 'health' industry topics including: the impact of managerial ideology on work; gender relations; and embodied alienation in the sport sector.
Donald, James is Professor of Film Studies at UNSW in Australia. His books include Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture, Imagining the Modern City and Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation of Liberty.
36 Faulkner, Joanne is an ARC DECRA fellow in Philosophy, in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW. She is also Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy; Member of Council for the Australasian Association of Philosophy and Co-Editor of the Series in Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia with Rowman & Littlefield. Jo's books include The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Dead Letters to Nietzsche: Or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Ohio University Press, 2010), and co-author (with Matthew Sharpe) of Understanding Psychoanalysis (Acumen, 2008).
Gelder, Christian is a Master of Arts by research student in English at UNSW. He is interested in Mallarmé and mathematics.
Gibson, Prudence is an arts and fiction writer. She has published fiction in Antipodes, Eureka Street, Etchings Journal and Blood. She is author of the art book The Rapture of Death and has had over 200 art essays/articles published in Heat, The Australian, Vogue, Australian Art Collector and Art Monthly etc. Her next book is called Janet Laurence: Enchanting the Environment forthcoming November 2015.
Gook, Ben is an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne. He has lectured in the Schools of Social & Political Sciences and Culture & Communication at the University of Melbourne. His first book Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield (International) in September in the Place, Memory, Affect series.
Grosoli, Marco is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Kent, where he is completing a monograph on the “Politique des auteurs”. He earned a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Bologna, with a dissertation on André Bazin's integral corpus of writings (2600 articles). He has co-edited (with Monica Dall'Asta) a collection on Guy Debord's cinema, and one (with Jean-Baptiste Massuet) on the cinematic uses of motion/performance capture devices. He also collaborates with several movie journals and websites, including Film Comment, FilmIdee.it, and La Furia Umana.
Hawkins, Katharine is a PhD candidate from Macquarie University, Sydney. At the time of publication, she is in her first year of candidacy with a background in Sociology. Her study is interdisciplinary – being largely informed by Feminist and Queer studies as well as other intersectional aspects of social justice. Katharine's current research concerns the nature of the Female Monster, gendered 'Otherness' and subcultural identity, having completed a Masters thesis concerning the relationship between gender, stigma and extreme body modification in 2014. Katharine is currently a gender studies tutor at Macquarie, and feels awkward referring to herself in the third person.
Hellyer, Grace completed her PhD at The University of New South Wales on Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of radical equality and aesthetic modernity and the nineteenth century American novel. She has taught philosophy and critical theory at NIDA and literature at the University of New South Wales and is continuing her research on Jacques Rancière’s philosophical intervention into literary theory.
Heron, Nicholas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm.
Hjorth, Ben is a Masters (Research) candidate at Monash University, and a practicing performance maker, currently based between Melbourne and Berlin. His research is broadly concerned with the relationships between philosophy, performance and politics, with a current focus on Hegel, Walter Benjamin, psychoanalysis, and contemporary poetic and performance practices. He has published articles in Performance Research and Senses of Cinema, with a forthcoming article in Crisis & Critique. Most recently he has directed investigative public readings of Anne Carson's Antigonick in Melbourne (ArtsHouse Meat Market, 2013) and Paris ('Theatre, Performance, Philosophy' conference, Sorbonne, 2014). In 2016 he will co-curate a festival / conference of performance and philosophy in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He holds a Bachelor of Dramatic
37 Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA / University of Melbourne), and an Honours Degree of Bachelor of Arts from Monash University.
Holmes, Lucille PhD is a senior lecturer in Elam School of Fine Arts, and an ethics advisor in the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the application and development of psychoanalytic theory in the visual arts and education.
Jacobs, Carol is Professor of German Language & Literature and Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has written extensively on Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Wordsworth, Rilke and Paul de Man and others. Carol is the author of Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999) and Skirting the Ethical (2008).
Jöttkandt, Sigi is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic, First Love: A Phenomenology of the One and numerous articles on literature and psychoanalysis. A co-founding editor of S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, she is also a co-founding co-director of Open Humanities Press.
Low, Remy is a scholarly teaching fellow in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. His research interests lie in the identities produced through the pedagogical practices of cultural institutions, subcultures and social movements. He is also interested in fictional and narrative approaches to social science research.
MacCannell, Juliet Flower is the Outstanding Emeritus Professor at UC Irvine and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, University of London. Also currently co-chairing the California Psychoanalytic Circle, and co-editor of (a): the journal of culture and the unconscious. Juliet is author of numerous books on psychoanalysis and philosophy in a social and political frame, including: Figuring Lacan: Criticism & the Cultural Unconscious (1986; reissued 2014, Routledge), The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (1991), The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject (2000), and over ninety articles. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, Slovenian and French. She is also an artist.
Marian, Jessica is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on the concept of style in philosophical and literary texts, in particular the work of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. She has research interests in literature and philosophy, continental philosophy, literary theory, French literature and literary modernism.
Mattes, Ari is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2010 for a thesis tracing the development between classic American literature and Hollywood action cinema. He has had short fiction and academic articles published in Australian and international journals, and is currently editing a book about film and urban space, Filming the City (Intellect, 2016).
Mee, Sharon Jane is a PhD research candidate at UNSW. She is writing her dissertation on the cinematic pulse in horror and horror erotic film using theorists Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille. She has presented at national and international academic conferences. Her areas of interest are aesthetics, psychoanalytic philosophy and poststructuralism.
Moder, Gregor teaches philosophy of art and works as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He published many scholarly articles on sexual and political implications of comedy, edited comedy-sections for journals Problemi, Dialogi and S, and contributed to Lubitsch Can’t Wait collection (SK 2014, distributed by Columbia UP).
38 Moore, Kyle is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney from the Department of Media and Communications. His current research explores the ways play is situated within urban environments, focusing on the sociocultural and material circumstance which frame our understanding of play.
Murphet, Julian is Scientia Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Ng, Edwin is a sessional academic at Deakin University. He has two main research interests: to explore the reciprocity between Buddhist understandings and cultural theory, and to interrogate the Euro-Christian and secularist conceits in the emergent ‘Western Buddhism’ and wider debates about religion, culture, and society. Edwin has two forthcoming books, one on the role of faith in a Buddhist-inflected cultural studies, and the other on the cultural politics of mindfulness.
Niccolai, Ivan is a Master of Arts by research candidate in political economy at the University of Sydney, researching computational reason and contingency in financial markets. He is also a certificate student at the New Centre for Research and Practice. He works as an information security architect and holds a Master of IT Management from the University of Wollongong.
Oakey, Christopher is a Postgraduate Researcher and Postgraduate Teaching Fellow at the University of New South Wales. His current research addresses the intersection between Modernist and Post-Modernist American poetry as it intersects with its contemporary philosophies. He is currently completing a PhD addressing the poetry of George Oppen and Ron Silliman, as well as the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Pahor, Tracey is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD project draws on place-based ethnographic fieldwork in the suburb of Port Melbourne and the work of Jacques Rancière.
Peden, Knox is an ARC Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and the co-editor, with Peter Hallward, of a two-volume work devoted to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Verso, 2012). His work has also appeared in Modern Intellectual History, History & Theory, Radical Philosophy, History of European Ideas, and Continental Philosophy Review.
Potts, Michael’s doctoral thesis was entitled “Progressive and Reactionary Attitudes Towards Technology in the Literature of the Twentieth Century, 1937-2013” and looked at the way reactions towards modernity and its perceived materialism often allowed for a cross-fertilisation of ideas and ideals between reactionary and progressive ideologies and movements. He completed his PhD in July 2014 at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and has since been working on a number of papers and projects. His research interests are literature, culture and ecology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As well as various conference presentations and papers, he is contributing chapters to various collections including “Violence Against Black and Brown Bodies”, edited by Dr Sandra Weissinger of Southern Illinois University, and “Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Culture and Literature”, edited by Dr Richard Schneider of Wartburg College, Iowa. Currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch.
Pulie, Elizabeth is an artist based in Sydney. She has been exhibiting her work since 1989, which is represented in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Daimler Foundation, New York. In 2002 and 2003 she ran Front Room, an artist run space in the front room of her house, and from 2002 to 2005 she wrote, edited and published the magazine Lives of the Artists. She is currently undertaking her PhD at Sydney College of the Arts (The University of Sydney), researching the end of art in relation to contemporary art discourse and practice. Pulie is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney and Neon Parc in Melbourne.
39 Rueda, Alejandro Cerda is a practising psychoanalyst in Mexico City. He is a professor at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico), and the senior editor for Paradiso editores. He has a PhD from the European Graduate School (Switzerland) and has previously edited Schreber: Los archivos de la locura (2009) and Sex and Nothing. From Ljubljana to Elsewhere (Karnac, 2015).
Riha, Rado is a Slovene philosopher. He is a senior research fellow and currently the head of the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coordinator of the philosophy module at the post-graduate study programme of the University of Nova Gorica. Riha's research topics include ethics, epistemology, contemporary French philosophy, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. From 1996 to 2003 he has been the editor-in-chief of the journal Filozofski vestnik, and since 1993 a member of its editorial board.
Roffe, Jon is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UNSW and the original convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and editor of the journal Parrhesia. His books include Abstract Market Theory (2015), Lacan Deleuze Badiou (with Clemens and Bartlett, 2014), Badiou's Deleuze (2014), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (2012), Muttering for the Sake of Stars (2012), Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (2012) and numerous other publications.
Rudge, Chris is a researcher at the University of Sydney’s Department of English and a member of the Biopolitics of Science Research Network. In December 2014, Chris submitted his PhD thesis, titled “Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley, Herman Melville, and Philip K. Dick.” Heavily influenced by those working within the philosophy of psychiatry and the medical humanities, Chris’s writing also addresses psychopharmacology and what he calls, after Peter Sedgwick, ‘psychopolitics.’ Recent publications include a chapter in the edited volume The World According to Philip K. Dick, where Chris’s essay sits alongside articles by Laurence A. Rickels, Richard Doyle, and Marcus Boon, and an essay on Henri Bergson and Bruno Latour in Philament. Chris is currently editor and designer of Philament.
Scheer, Ed is Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He has published articles on performance art and aesthetics in TDR, PAJ, Parkett and Performance Research and has written numerous catalogue essays for the AGNSW, Documenta (12), the Biennale of Sydney (2006) and the Auckland Triennial (2010) as well as pieces on arts and culture in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Monthly. Author of Scenario, a study of new work from the iCinema Project (UNSW Press and ZKM, 2011), his latest book is entitled Multimedia Performance (Palgrave 2012) with Rosie Klich. Scheer’s study of Mike Parr's performance art, The Infinity Machine (Schwartz City Press, 2010) is the first comprehensive account of this aspect of the artist’s practice.
Shahinyan, Diana received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2014. Her thesis looked at the legal fictions of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner against the backdrop of American jurisprudential changes in the modern period. She is currently teaching at The University of Sydney.
Simmons, Laurence is Associate Dean (Postgraduate) and Professor of Film Studies in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Auckland. He is the co-editor of Derrida Downunder (2001), Baudrillard West of the Dateline (2003) and From Z to A: Zizek at the Antipodes (2005) and published a book on Freud’s papers on art and aesthetics and his relationship with Italy entitled Freud’s Italian Journey in 2006. His latest book, Tuhituhi (2011), is on the painter William Hodges who journeyed with Captain James Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific.
Sinnerbrink, Robert is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum, 2011), Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Film- Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between film and philosophy in journals such as Angelaki, Film-Philosophy, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Screen, and Screening the Past. He is currently completing a book on Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge 2015).
40 Smith, Russell lectures in modernist literature and literary theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is currently completing a monograph on Samuel Beckett entitled Beckett’s Sensibility, and his next project, Frankenstein: A Life in Theory, is a reading of the history of literary theory its responses to Mary Shelley’s novel. He is also co-editor of Australian Humanities Review: www.australianhumanitiesreview.org.
Stanizai, Ehsan Azari is an Adjunct Fellow with Writing and Society Research Centre, UWS, He also lectures at NIDA (UNSW). His most recent book is Lacan & the Destiny of Literature: Desire, jouissance and the Sinthome in Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery (Continuum 2009).
Steven, Mark is a Research Fellow in Film at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, based at the University of New South Wales. He has published chapters and articles on the intersections of literature, film, and the economy. His research is motivated by an abiding interest in the antagonisms between communism and capitalism. He is the co-editor of Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Continuum, 2012) and The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh UP, 2015), and the author of a forthcoming book on horror films (Repeater, 2016).
Šumič Riha, Jelica is Professor of Philosophy at the Postgraduate School of Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was visiting professor at the University of Essex, University Paris 8 and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politik der Wahrheit (with Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Rado Riha /Turia + Kant, Vienna 1997/), Universel, Singulier, Sujet (with Alain Badiou, et. al, Kimé; Paris 2000, Mutations of Ethics (Zalozba ZRC, 2002) and Eternity and Change. Philosophy in the Worldless Times (Zalozba ZRC, 2012). Currently she is working on a forthcoming volume entitled Volonté et Désir (Harmattan, Paris).
Sussman, Henry Around the turn of the millennium, Henry Sussman's ongoing interests in critical theory, Romanticism, modernism, post-modernism, and psychoanalysis took a systematic turn. Much of the writing since then (The Task of the Critic, 2005; Around the Book, 2011; Playful Intelligence, 2014) has explored the systematic and cybernetic underpinnings of a wide range of cultural artifacts, with Kafka, Benjamin, Borges, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, and psychoanalysis persistent favorites. He currently co-edits (with Bruce Clarke) the 'Meaning Systems' series at Fordham University Press; and, on a platform of indispensable encouragement and support furnished by Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina, founded and co-edits 'Feedback,' a theory-driven weblog publication out of Open Humanities Press ( www . openhumanitiespress . org / feedback). He's constantly on the lookout for new posts in 11 interrelated topical areas, including yours.
Sutherland, Thomas is a PhD candidate in media and communications at the University of Melbourne, his research focusing on the interstices between metaphysics and media theory.
Troha, Tadej is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana. His research interests include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, literature (Kafka, Beckett, Kristof), and philosophical aspects of current political and economic issues. He is the author of Neither Miracle Nor Miracle (2010, in Slovenian) and The Figures of the End (2015, forthcoming).
White, Kim is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His doctoral research concerns the political ontology of figurations of the sacred in the literatures of the American Renaissance and the late twentieth century. In particular his thesis examines how canonical writers in each period responded to crises of political legitimacy in their respective eras by using figures of the sacred to illuminate or obfuscate the degree to which such crises stem from a failure to reckon with the founding states of exception of the American polity - the colonial expropriation of Indigenous Americans and Afro-American slavery - and to consider the manner in which such injustices can be said to persist to this day.
Whyte, Jessica is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She has published widely on theories of sovereignty and biopolitics, critical legal theory, critiques of human rights and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly Agamben and Foucault. She is the author
41 of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2013).
Wilson, Kevin is currently completing his Masters at the University of Western Australia, entitled 'Workers Must Become Dialecticians: Guy Debord, Western Marxism and the Society of the Spectacle.' He previously completed an Honours dissertation on the literary work of Andre Malraux, and has taught a number of courses in 'European Studies' at UWA, touching on literature, history and philosophy.
Wong, Karen-Ann is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research is an ethnographic study of children's yoga, investigating how paradigms of childhood are represented in the yoga classroom. Karen has a Bachelor of Arts (English)/Bachelor of Art Theory (Hons 1) from the University of New South Wales. Karen has been teaching adults' and children's yoga since 2011.
Zeiher, Cindy is a sessional lecturer and visiting scholar in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Her interests focus on how the experience of subjective desire can be understood within contemporary ideological, social and cultural systems. Theoretically she draws upon those authors, especially Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec, who employ Lacanian psychoanalysis in critical social research, feminist scholarship and cinema theory. She is presently the manager editor for the International Journal of Zizek Studies.
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