CCLCS Postgraduate Colloquium 2004
Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 November, 9.00 am -5.00 pm
SG01 and SG03, Manton Rooms
Ground Floor, Robert Menzies Building
Monash University,
Clayton Campus.
The Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies organises an annual Colloquium, where postgraduate students from the Centre and the wider Faculty can share ideas and expertise. Postgraduate students and academic staff working in either literary and cultural studies or critical theory, either in the Centre or elsewhere in the Faculty of Arts, are welcome.
The Colloquium will include a special presentation on The Ister , a film made by local film- makers Daniel Ross and David Barison as an accompaniment to Heidegger's lectures on Hlderlin's poem, 'Der Ister'. The film follows the Danube through central Europe, exploring the relationship of ancient and modern around the timeless feature of the river. Daniel Ross will speak about his film.
Programme
Tuesday, 16th November
OPENING ADDRESS: 9.15 - 9.25
Professor Andrew Milner
(Graduate Coordinator,
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies)
SESSION 1: 9.30-11.00
Stream
1: SG01
Gerald Frederic
Philosophy and the music
of Cecil Taylor
Sam Everingham
Interpretation
and the Judicial Opinion
Som Sengmany
From Object to Subject:
Positioning the 'Asian' in Asian-Australian Studies
Stream 2: SG03
Erica
Hateley
Authorised
Readers: Jane Austen's Anxious Shakespearean Dissemination
Dunya Lindsey
Reading the Reading Subject: Henry Handel
Richardson's Myself When Young
Sharon Bickle
'Kick[ing] Against the Pricks':
Michael Field's Lucretia as 'New Woman'
Morning Tea
SESSION 2: 11.30-1.00
Carlo Salzani
Mephistopheles' Riddles:
Dialectics and Redemption in Benjamin-Adorno's Correspondence
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Give Nothing Up!
Tamara Pallos
Plato, Deleuze and Walter Benjamin's
'Work of Art' Essay: Exploring Benjamin's Metaphysical
Subversions
Lunch
SESSION 3: 2.00-3.00
Robert
Savage
Whose
Antigone?
Sabina Sestigiani
The Half-Disclosed Sources
of Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily: Leonardo
Sciascia's Detective Stories in Italics
Afternoon Tea
SESSION 4: 3.20-4.50
Stream 1: SG01
Leah
Gerber
Identity
and Australia
Jacqui Wiegard
The Night and the Winter
are Shadows that Run: Redemption and the Child Figure in George MacDonald's
At the Back of the North Wind
Jessica Whyte
With Exceptional Speed: Flexible Accumulation
and the State of Exception
Stream
2: SG03
Lyndon Green
The Reverend and the Beachcomber
Kimberley Pearce
Theorising the Mythic Process: From Myth
to Modern Myth to Neo-myth
Michael
FitzGerald
Montaigne's
Example of the Self: Himself
Wednesday, 17th of November
SESSION 5: 10.00-11.00
Colm McNaughton
Defending the category of class and
class struggle in late-capitalism
Aurelia
Satcau
Transitional/Transactional
Romania After 1990: Between Myth & Reality
Morning Tea
SESSION 6: 11.30-1.00
Melissa Miles
The Burning Mirror: Photography
in an Ambivalent Light
Hamish
Morgan
So
let's now, get back there, to this present: presenting memory
flows in flux
James Garrett
Plato's Ideas, Being
and Becoming in the Theaetetus
Lunch
SPECIAL PRESENTATION: THE ISTER
(excerpt followed by question time).
The Ister was made by local film makers Daniel Ross and David Barison as an accompaniment to Heidegger's lectures on Hlderlin's 'Der Ister'. The film follows the Danube through central Europe, exploring the relationship of ancient and modern around the timeless feature of the river.
Afternoon Tea
SESSION 7: 3.50-4.50
Jasmin Chen
Home and Homelessness: Heidegger, Arendt
and the Threshold of Death
Daniel
Ross
Accompaniments:
On The Ister
CLOSING ADDRESS: 4.50-5.00
Dr Chris Worth
(Head, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies).
Election of CCLCS Post-Graduate Representatives for 2005.
ABSTRACTS
Tuesday
SESSION 1: 9.30-11.00
STREAM 1: SG01
Name: Gerald
Frederic
Title: Philosophy and the music of Cecil Taylor
Abstract: Almost fifty years have passed since
the pianist Cecil Taylor first emerged as a composer-musician who,
along with other notables (such as Ornette Coleman), laid out the
possibilities for a new kind of music in the mid-50s. To this day
Taylor continues to be a singular musical force in Western civilisation.
Whilst borrowing heavily from the European classical composers, at
the core of his rethinking of the nature of music is a unique approach
to rhythm that is deeply rooted in the African-American tradition
(experience). Amongst Taylor's many varied characterisations
of 'music', in his poetic prose piece accompanying his 1966
recording Unit Structures he writes:'Rhythm is life the space
of time danced thru'. This paper will examine some of Taylor's
comments on the nature of music, drawing upon both Taylor criticism
as well as ideas from the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition
to expound an approach to thinking about music. The presentation
of this paper will also feature documentary video footage of a Taylor
solo piano performance.
Name: Sam Everingham
Title: Interpretation
and the Judicial Opinion.
Abstract: The
claim that the act of adjudication is primarily an act of interpretation
is currently favoured by most contemporary legal theorists, while
the competing position - that adjudication is essentially an act
of power - has recently been forgotten. This polarity has its roots
in the debate as to whether judges 'create' or 'discover'
law. Responding to certain claims put forth through the law and literature
movement, I hope to demonstrate that, while it is true that adjudication
does require acts of interpretation (of statutes, or precedent, and
testimony, etc.), it is misrepresentative of the greater power a
judge wields to suppose that judicial interpretation is only reflective
of a pre-existing legal authority. Furthermore, when certain proponents
of the law and literature movement promote the idea that legal documents-
especially legal judgments- can be profitably read as literature
there is a conflation of the (expressive) form of such documents
with their (imperative) functions. I will argue that this potentially
critically misrepresents the law, legal criticism or both, and deflates
the capacity for radical legal criticism.
Name: Som Sengmany
Title: From Object to Subject: Positioning the 'Asian'
in Asian-Australian Studies
Abstract:
The publication of two edited books, Diaspora Negotiating
Asian-Australia (2000) and Alter/Asians Asian-Australian
identities in art, media and popular culture (2000) marked
a key point in the emergence of Asian-Australian studies. The broad
aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical framework and political
aims of this developing discipline. The first part of my paper explores
how concepts of diaspora have been deployed to reposition Asian-Australian
subjectivity. In connecting diaspora to questions of self-representation
and cultural identity I draw from the work of cultural theorist Stuart
Hall. I will argue that Hall's positioning of the 'black
experience' in British culture provides a strategic framework
to reposition the 'Asian experience' in Australia. The second
half of the paper deploys Hall's concept of diasporic hybridity
to examine the work Chinese diasporic artist Zhou Xiaoping, and addresses
how his art challenges and complicates Asian, Australian and Aboriginal
identities.
STREAM 2: SG03
Name:
Erica Hateley
Title: Authorised Readers: Jane Austen's
Anxious Shakespearean Dissemination.
Abstract:
This paper considers the issue of thematised reading in Jane Austen's
mature novels, with a particular focus on Mansfield Park
. Critics have long noted Austen's preoccupation with the reading
of novels as social practice, and the metafictional importance of
reading in her fiction. I will be taking up this trope of critical
reading, but applying it to the reading of Shakespeare in the novels,
a focus which reveals a cultural anxiety running simultaneous to,
but not identical with, novel reading in Austen's writing.
Name:
Dunya Lindsey
Title: Reading the Reading Subject: Henry
Handel Richardson's Myself When Young
Abstract: In her unfinished autobiography, Myself
When Young(1948), Henry Handel Richardson deploys the
trope of reading to mark her social and familial position, as well
as her literary development. This paper examines the Richardson's
depiction of her reading of canonical texts and sensationalist literature
as a liminal site of transgression.
Name: Sharon Bickle
Title: 'Kick[ing]
Against the Pricks:' Michael Field's Lucretia as 'New
Woman'
Abstract:
We have determined by Heaven's grace to give the English people plays - full of poetry and religion, and humour, and thought. They will not like this ... they will Kick against the pricks, but ultimately they will thankfully accept us. (Letters 238)
'Michael Field' is the identity constructed by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper in 1884, initially as a pseudonym under which to publish their collaborative works, but ultimately as a name which celebrated their personal and artistic commitment. Recently, there has been increased critical attention on their work, much of which has centred on their lyric poetry and its expression of same-sex desire rather than their verse dramas. While the articulation of lesbian desire in their lyric poetry is clearly transgressive, Bradley and Cooper are not generally regarded as polemical writers. Indeed, while the poets' interest in fin de sicle political issues, such as antivivisection, Fabianism and the woman question, are often acknowledged, there has been little written on how their early verse drama engages with the popular debates of the time. This paper examines one such verse drama,Brutus Ultor (1885) as an examination of the emergent 'New Woman' in late Nineteenth Century England.
SESSION 2: 11.30-1.00
Name:
Carlo Salzani
Title: Mephistopheles' Riddles: Dialectics
and Redemption in Benjamin-Adorno's Correspondence
Abstract: In a letter from New York on the 10th of
November 1938, Theodor W. Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin: 'Your
idea of providing a model for the Arcades study with the Baudelaire
piece was something I took extremely seriously, and I approached
the satanic scene much as Faust approached the phantasmagoria of
the Broken when he expected many a riddle to be solved at last. May
I be excused for having had to give myself the same reply as Mephistopheles,
that "many a riddle poses itself anew"?'
Playing on the fil rouge of this Faustian metaphor, this paper will argue that, from the correspondence between the two friends emerges the figure of a 'mephistophelic' Adorno constantly chasing Benjamin: Adorno, the 'dialectician', the 'spirit that denies', continuously poses new riddles to Benjamin, the 'philosopher of redemption'. Indeed around this correspondence a 'philosophical' affaire has been created, which has come to be known as the 'Adorno-Benjamin Debate'.
In this paper, using mainly their correspondence, I will highlight the differences and misunderstandings between the 'dialectician' and the 'philosopher of redemption'. These differences make Adorno's negative dialectics incommensurable to Benjamin's positive and undialectical 'redemptive critique'. I will argue that, although many of Adorno's criticisms single out objective problems and gaps in Benjamin's methodology and works, he basically underestimated the constant presence of the category of 'redemption' in his friend's writings and finally failed to grasp the intended meaning of his project.
Name: Dimitris Vardoulakis
Title: Give
Nothing Up!
Abstract: What is involved
in the imperative to forget nothing? What is at stake when nothing
is to be excluded from memory and from historical narration? Who
is the subject who imposes upon herself such an imperative? These
questions will be broached in relation to the work of Alasdair Gray
and Walter Benjamin. They both express this demand explicitly: Gray
in his novel Poor Things, in which the elusive
main character explains her behaviour with recourse to such a demand;
Benjamin in Konvolut N of the Arcades Project
where he designates such a demand as the problematic core of his
project.
Name:
Tamara Pallos
Title: Plato, Deleuze and Walter Benjamin's
'Work of Art' Essay: Exploring Benjamin's Metaphysical
Subversions
Abstract: This paper is a
reading of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technological Reproducibility" in terms of Platonism,
rather than its own declared Marxism. The paper argues that Benjamin's
essay is concerned with the subversion of two key Platonic dualisms:
unity/multiplicity and original/copy. While Plato valorised unity
over multiplicity and the original over the copy, Benjamin reverses,
and thereby subverts, these valuations, elevating the mass-produced
copy over the singular original and endowing it with positive political
power. The implicit anti-Platonism of Benjamin's essay can be
better recognised through comparison with the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze. Deleuze deploys an explicitly anti-Platonic method and,
when this is used to read Benjamin's essay, it elucidates important
aspects of its meaning. This process suggests that Benjamin's
anti-Platonism already gestures towards something like Deleuze's
notions of pure difference and repetition.
SESSION 3: 2.00-3.00
Name: Robert Savage
Title: Whose Antigone?
Abstract: In 1948, Bertolt Brecht staged a production
of 'Antigone' in the provincial theatre of Chur, Switzerland,
using Hlderlin's translation as his pre-text. It
was his first production since his return from American exile, and
his last before he moved to Berlin to found the Berliner Ensemble.
Focussing on the concept of citation, this paper considers some of
the factors that motivated him to adapt this particular play at this
stage in his career.
Name: Sabina Sestigiani
Title: The Half-Disclosed
Sources of Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily:
Leonardo Sciascia's Detective Stories in Italics
Abstract: This paper discusses the influence of Leonardo
Sciascia's detective stories on Australian Peter Robb's Midnight
in Sicily(1996). Peter Robb's Midnight in
Sicily is a metafictional account of facts of the Sicilian
mafia over the last two decades. The author/narrator Peter Robb poses
as a detective. He has gathered and ordered clues and facts concerning
the intricate plot of the Sicilian Mafia, drawing on literature to
support his analysis about the impact the Sicilian Mafia has on Italian
politics and society.
Midnight in Sicily is highly indebted to Leonardo Sciascia's detective stories. Sciascia's works are often quoted by Robb to comment on and gloss over the facts narrated in his Midnight in Sicily. The Day of the Owl (1963) The Context (1973) and Todo Modo(1977) are all detective stories where the Mafia represents the invisible evil force against which a representative of the Italian State has to fight.
My aim is to analyse the literary techniques employed by Sciascia in his detective novels in juxtaposition to the metafictional narration of Midnight in Sicily as well as to the themes and figures of speech belonging to Sciascia's detective novels that are also present in Robb's Midnight in Sicily. I will also discuss the role played by the Sicilian landscape as the carrier of a sense of ancient violence that exudes from it, 'as if orange and lemon blossom started to smell of corpses'. The Mediterranean landscape anthropomorphically speaking of death, is always described in contrast with the sea, 'a perpetual promise of escape'.
The paper will also discuss the use of metaphors such as la mattanza and the intricacies of embroidery.
SESSION 4: 3.20-4.50
STREAM 1: SG01
Name: Leah Gerber
Title: Identity and Australia
Abstract:
This paper explores identity and Australia in the greater context
of the foundation on which Australian children's literature is
based; that is, the matter expressed through the literature which
is reflective of our sense of nation and identity which, in turn,
makes the texts distinctly Australian in voice and character.
Name:
Jacqui Wiegard
Title: The Night and the Winter are Shadows
that Run: Redemption and the Child Figure in George MacDonald's
At the Back of the North Wind
Abstract:
In the Victorian Age, British fairy tale and fantasy provided many
Christian authors with a discursive space to explore the theological
anxieties of the age encoded in symbol and myth. In many cases the
child figure operates within these texts as, what James Kincaid has
described as, an 'empty vessel' which then becomes a nexus
for these anxieties.
A central concern of this paper is in exploring the importance of the redemptive child, Diamond, and his interactions with nature, particularly as embodied in the erotic 'wise woman' figure of North Wind. It is argued that MacDonald depicts a path of enlightenment some must choose to take in the hope of a better future for humanity.
Name: Jessica Whyte
Title: With Exceptional Speed: Flexible Accumulation and the
State of Exception
Abstract: For advocates
of extrajudicial detention, spaces like Guantanamo Bay represent
a juridical model that eliminates the rigidity of categories like
innocence and guilt and enables flexible categorisations and high-speed
responses to emergent threats. For Giorgio Agamben, such spaces can
be seen as camps, or spatialisations of a state of exception. For
Agamben, the current state of exception is the product of an irresolvable
crisis in the unity of state, nation (birth) and territory, traditionally
characteristic of national sovereignty. In this paper, I will argue
that the normalisation of the exception that Agamben describes can
be more fully understood if we trace the connections between the
desire for a new, fast and flexible juridical model and rise of neoliberalism
or 'flexible accumulation.' Neoliberalism, I will argue,
has dramatically altered the speed of capitalist production, creating
new demands for intervention into the future and for the pre-emption
of risk: demands that traditional legal forms have been deemed too
slow to fulfil.
SESSION 4: 3.20-4.50
STREAM 2: SG03
Name: Lyndon Green
(University of Canterbury)
Title: The Reverend and the
Beachcomber
Abstract: My research paper
deals the historical figure, William Diaper, a beachcomber. He crosses
the beach, joins nineteenth century Pacific cultures and publishes
an autobiography. This paper examines Reverend William Wyatt Gill
encounter with Diaper on the missionary vessel John Williams
in 1862.
The Reverend provides the only physical description of Diaper, in his Jottings From the Pacific , and notes that Diaper 'is somewhat below middle height [and] excited the wonder of all by the tattooing on his arm, neck and part of his face' (Gill 241). We examine this description and his reaction to Diaper in regard to Herman Melville's novel Typee : tattoos are his symbols of otherness. More significantly, Diaper claims to be a cannibal, which I analyse in regard to other cannibal encounters.
This paper reads Diaper into the greater context and tries to provide a sharper image of this savage identity.
Name:
Kimberley Pearce
Title: Theorising the Mythic Process:
From Myth to Modern Myth to Neo-myth
Abstract:
I will discuss my research project, which is interested in establishing
a model for the analysis of myth. This selectively inclusive position
is designed to explore the experience of myth, as socially and culturally
mediated yet essentially grounded in the Archetypal. I will contend
that previous examinations discount the multifaceted nature of myth
and locate it in an indeterminate past. I prefer to view myth as
a dynamic and continuing process, but further, to understand it in
terms of distinct epochal stages or cycles, which are altered in
the way they are culturally assimilated, though express their essential,
enduring nature.
I will be concerned thus, and with the establishment of a three-tiered model of myth: myth, modern myth and neo-myth. Myth represents the ancient, orally transmitted tradition: it is dynamic, ethereal and raw with powerful psychological symbols. The modern myth, the literary fairy tale, is the first instance of mass-mediation, though effected an acculturating calcification of the tale. Early writers, such as Charles Perrault, sought to capture the Geist, though adapted the tales to suit dominant social mores, thus creating the authentic standard bearers of the symbolic imaginary. The neo-myth represents a return to the multiplicity of the myth, which could not have been achieved without the wide dissemination of the modern myth. Whilst still grounded in the published media of film, television, art and fiction, the immediacy and proliferation of these texts has blurred the authentic and created a farrago of 'copies' without a definitive 'original'. Despite this apparent collapse of origin, the Archetypal kernel still exists, retaining their connection to the myth.
I will ground the discussion in 'Little Red Riding Hood', exploring its origins and modern mediation. I will approach the ambience of myth: its distinct stages of cultural mediation intertwined by its sublime archetypal resonance. I will try to imagine a model to accommodate this complex nature and which might be applied to fruitful analysis of myth, in a range of narrative frameworks.
Name: Michael
FitzGerald
Title: Montaigne's Example of the Self:
Himself
Abstract: Among the intrigues
of Montaigne's Essais is the appearance
that the project of self-portrayal gains not only in prominence,
but in accomplishment and certitude, from the supposed 'skeptical
crisis' that occurs within the author's thinking during the
1570s - as if the inward turn had secured mimetic fidelity there
where variation, mutation and movement had previously shattered all
confidence in the subject's 'communication with Being.'
This paper asks whether Montaigne indeed exempts or absolves the
representation of the self from his skeptical programme - to better
understand the latter, I consider how the Essais
subvert exemplarity and the rhetoric of the example that had been
central to humanist letters (a breakdown from which the essay-form
itself might be said to result). Turning to his problematically assured
pronouncements concerning his own self-portrait, I attempt to divulge,
from Montaigne's deepening awareness of his condition as writer,
the complex nature of his 'success' in this regard. It turns
out that this portrait accumulates around an absent centre, an 'empty
mirror', rather than referring this absence to the dead friend
(Etienne de La Botie) whose image Montaigne supposedly
set out to present to the public, only for literary politics to scuttle
this design, I argue that what proves refractory to writing is 'the'
human self - the portrait can only trace the movements of particularity.
Wednesday
SESSION 5: 10.00-11.00
Name:
Colm McNaughton
Title: Defending the category of class
and class struggle in late-capitalism. Examining Jameson's defence
of Marxism within the cultural logic of postmodernism.
Abstract: Unlike many Marxist critics Fredric Jameson
takes the challenges of post-structuralism and postmodernism seriously.
This does not mean he rejects the basic assumptions of Hegelian-Marxism,
on the contrary, what he does is attempt to incorporate the structuralist/post-structuralist
insights into a greater Hegelian whole.
In developing his comprehension of postmodernism, Jameson defends a version of the base-superstructure model to sustain a link between the workings of the economy and culture, to argue that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late-capitalism. Through this essentially Marxist logic Jameson to reveal the inner workings of postmodernism, what he refers to as 'the waning of the effect'. Throughout this fundamental reassessment Jameson never loses sight of the difficulties and possibilities of re-inventing class struggle, albeit within a radically shifting terrain. Herein lies hope for the billions of people who have nothing to sell but their bodies and the associated labour power.
Name: Aurelia Satcau
Title: Transitional/Transactional
Romania After 1990: Between Myth & Reality
Abstract:
This paper is part of a larger project - still in its incipient
phase - intended as an account of that which maintains a country
such as Romania still hovering over the ashes of a (cherished but)
failed ideal, on the one side, in strong contradistinction, on the
other, with a genuine impulse to deconstruct its own past and bring
it, bare, to face a present lingering between transition (change)
and a compulsory transaction (the price to pay) in the aftermath
of 'communism'; this is a process helped copiously by what
makes a Romanian propensity for both myth and reality.
SESSION 6: 11.30-1.00
Name:
Melissa Miles
Title: The Burning Mirror: Photography
in an Ambivalent Light
Abstract: Photography's
etymology as light-writing is characterised by certain philosophical
assumptions about the stability and transparency of light which,
in turn, underpin the relationship between light, truth and presence
that so deeply informs photography's ontology and epistemology.
Irigaray's analysis of Plato's cave simile points to a means
of critiquing this photological system and developing a more multi-dimensional
and ambivalent approach to light-writing. In Irigaray's schema,
light returns as a volatile and highly capricious agent whose very
fluidity and mutability troubles photography's claims to objectivity,
truth and presence. The photographic phenomena of lens flare, overexposure
and solarization embody points at which these multiple inscriptions
of luminosity merge, and crucially uncover an alternative approach
to photographic theory which exceeds the binary economies of positive/negative,
ontology/epistemology, representation/real and presence/absence which
have for too long dominated the field.
Name: Hamish Morgan
Title: So let's
now, get back there, to this present: presenting memory flows in
flux
Abstract: Being's expression
infinitely exceeds any one representation and is exceeded by the
infinite possibilities of representation, perception and sense that
the world makes possible, necessary and likely. Drawing on the work
of Deleuze and my own experience of living in a remote Aboriginal
community (Ululla) for two years, I consider the possibilities of
becoming between image, memory and event, between present, past and
future, and between perception, thought and sense. I diffuse any
possibility of neat distinction between these concepts through a
writing style that continually breaks with and interrupts any possibility
of re-presentation. This nonetheless, as is the way, produces the
very ground for this paper, albeit a rather deterritoriallised one.
Continuity and sense and ultimately a line of argument is sustained
through the image/metaphor/concept/experience/event of first going
to, and writing about, Ululla.
Name: James Garrett
Title: Plato's
Ideas and Being and Becoming in the Theaetetus
Abstract: The Theaetetus
includes the dialogues' most detailed confrontation with of the
theories of flux and becoming that were employed by many of Plato's
predecessors and contemporaries. By reconstructing the basis upon
which this confrontation is held, I shall try to explore the emergence
of Plato's theory of forms in the context of the challenges a
theory of knowledge must face. I argue that this confrontation is
not simply initiated by the presence of dissenting Heraclitean's,
but reveals the initial logical problematic of standing theories
of nature that provokes Plato into revolutionising logic.
SESSION 7: 3.50-4.50
Name: Jasmin Chen
Title: Home and Homelessness:
Heidegger, Arendt and the Threshold of Death.
Abstract:
As Will McNeil has argued, the question of the home [heimat] is
perhaps "second to none in Heidegger's work, not even to
the question of Being." And yet this sense of being at home
in the world is ultimately characterised by an unhomeliness [Unheimlichkeit]
which manifests itself in the experience of anxiety in the face of
death. For Hannah Arendt, the question of the home is a political
one, and whilst her life, as well as her thought, is characterised
by an experience of "not being at home", her response to
Heidegger problematises the experience of unhomeliness in its relationship
to the world, by emphasising the importance of human plurality. By
briefly outlining the positions of both thinkers, I hope to illustrate
that their differences lie in their concept of "world"
and that their dialogue may have interesting implications for the
question of the home in our contemporary political climate.
Name:
Daniel Ross
Title: Accompaniments: On The Ister
Abstract: In his 1942 lecture course,
Martin Heidegger describes Friedrich Hlderlin's
poem 'Der Ister' as being suffused with a 'countering
resonance.' What resonates in that poem is the choral ode of
Sophocles'Antigone, such that the poem and
the ode say the Same, without being identical. Heidegger describes
his own lecture course as a Beigabe - an accompaniment
to - Hlderlin's poem, which means neither that
it merely interprets the poem, nor that it simply takes its point
of departure from the poem. While Heidegger's
remarks may not be 'contained in' the poetry, he too wishes
to say the same as the poem, differently. The film The
Ister begins by adopting this description, stating that
it too is an accompaniment, to Heidegger's course and to Hlderlin's
poem. This paper - an accompaniment to The Ister
- is neither a commentary on nor an interpretation of the film. Rather,
it is a reflection on this ongoing cascade of encounters, and an
attempt to provide a few markers toward hearing Hlderlin's
hymn, reading Heidegger's lecture course, and watching The
Ister.