Research Seminars
Semester Two, 2008
Unless otherwise indicated, all seminars are held on Wednesdays from 3.00 to 5.00 p.m.,
in SG02, Building 11 (Menzies Building), Monash University, Clayton.
All are welcome.
July 30
Professor Jay Geller (Professor of Modern Jewish Culture, Department of Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University)
No Longer Circumspect: Speaking of Freud and "Circumcision".
ABSTRACT: After situating the development of social relations and disciplinary discourses along gendered, sexual, ethnic, racial lines and the emergence of everyday antisemitism in Freud's Central Europe, the paper examines the crucial role that the dispositive "circumcision" played in the formation of both Jewish identifications and psychoanalytic constructions. Recent scholarship on the Jewish Freud and questions of method will also be addressed.
This seminar is being co-sponsored by the Australian Centre for The Study of Jewish Civilization. (School of Historical Studies, Monash University)
August 13
Gerald Frederic (Centre for CL&CS, Monash University)
In Praise of Mixing: Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Philosophy of Negritude in Dialectical Perspective.
ABSTRACT: This paper will perform an analysis of the operation of the concept of race in Senghor’s philosophy of Negritude, bringing to bear the significance of the dialectical nature of his thinking of the phenomenon of métissage, that is, the inter-mixing of races and cultures.
August 27
Dr Jack Reynolds (Philosophy, Latrobe)
Time and Politics: Chronopathologies and Violence.
ABSTRACT: In this paper, it will be argued that most of the major 'continental' philosophers maintain that a close relationship obtains between conceptions of time (and experiential relations to time) and socio-political life. Despite the diversity within this tradition, violence is generally understood, as David Wood suggests, as involving a 'chronopathology'. In conclusion, this letter position will be contrasted with some of the major directions in contemporary analytic philosophy.
September 3
Professor Andrew Milner (Centre for CL&CS, Monash University)
Tales of Resonance and Wonder: Locating Science Fiction.
ABSTRACT: Raymond Williams's 1978 essay on 'Utopia and Science Fiction', first published by the journal 'Science Fiction Studies', is one of the classic theoretical statements on science fiction in utopian studies. Like Darko Suvin's 'Metamorphoses of Science Fiction' (1979), Tom Moylan's 'Demand the Impossible' (1986) and Fredric Jameson's 'Archaeologies of the Future' (2005), it stresses the close kinship between the two genres but, unlike them, it nonetheless insists on their conceptual separateness. For Williams, these are different but cognate genres. This paper uses the categories of Williams's cultural materialism - especially 'selective tradition', 'structure of feeling' and 'emergent, residual and dominant' - to interrogate, not only Suvin's, Moylan's and Jameson's understandings of the relationship between utopia and science fiction, but also Williams's own.
September 10
Dr James Phillips (Philosophy, University of New South Wales)
Wordsworth and Fraternity
ABSTRACT: Wordsworth’s poetry is an attempt to think through the promise and the failure of fraternity in the French Revolution. This involves redefining the role of the poet and the character of community: the poet is neither priest nor creator nor legislator, but a brother to people, places, animals and things. Wordsworth’s alleged pantheism invites reconsideration as a dismantling of exclusionist conceptions of community.
September 24
Professor Simon Goldhill (Kings College, Cambridge)
Who killed Chevalier Gluck?
ABSTRACT: This paper starts from the extraordinary claim made by Jean-Baptiste Leclerc in 1797 that Gluck was the cause of the French Revolution. How could a German composer, tutor to Marie-Antoinette, knighted by the Pope, be seen as a revolutionary hero? Answering this question leads into the heart of neo-classicism -- and what it means to cry in public. But the second half of the paper is concerned with what happened to Gluck in the 19th century and how -- by 1910 -- Gluck could become a byword for traditionalism and the safe alternative to modernism. Gluck's reception turns out to tell us a great deal about the changing role of classics in the 19th century -- and a fascinating theoretical test case for how to think about reception history.
October 6
Professor Ewa Ziarek (Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo)
Marx ‘avec’ Freud: Praxis, Dispossession, and Melancholia
(NB: This seminar is on a Monday – venue to be arranged.)
December 1 Workshop: Hans Blumenberg: Anthropology, Modernity, Rhetoric
Venue: Caulfield campus, Room H222
Keynote speaker: Engelhard Weigl, University of Adelaide
Confirmed speakers:
Suzi Adams, Monash
Geoff Berry, Monash
Axel Fliethmann, Monash
Mark Hewson, Melbourne
Alison Ross, Monash
Robert Savage, Monash
Walter Veit, Monash