CCLCS Postgraduate Colloquium 2005
Thursday 8 and Friday 9 December, 9.00 am -5.00 pm
Law Building
Theatre
L2/12, Rooms TR1/12 and TR5/12
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 by keynote speaker, Professor Fredric Jameson, (Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University), who will present a paper on globalization. There will also be an opportunity for discussion with Professor Jameson at the conclusion of his paper.
Programme
Thursday, December 8
9.00 - 9.30am Welcome - Associate Professor Marko Pavlyshyn
9.30 - 11am
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Robert Savage
Capturing the Ape
Kimberley Pearce
Man versus Beast
Dimitris
Vardoulakis
Confessing
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Rhiannyn Geeson
Translating Terry Pratchett
Brigid Maher
Translation
of Humour in Literature
Leah Gerber
Children's book
production
11am Break
11.15am - 12.45pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Matthew Ryan
John
Banville's material epiphanies
James
Garrett
Homer
Philosopher
Ivar Kvistad
The Modern Medea
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Adrian
Martin
Claire
Denis and the Cinema of the Body
Claire
Perkins
Contemporary
American "smart" film
Rachel
Torbett
Hospitality
and Community in Takashi Miike
1 - 2pm Lunch
2 - 4pm
Fredric Jameson (On globalisation)
4.15pm
Colloquy launch
Friday, December 9
9.00 - 9.30am Coffee
9.30 - 11am
STREAM 1:
Room TR1/12
Rhonda Khatab
Literature and Ethics: Blanchot and Levinas
Michael Fitzgerald
Aristotle in Jest
Charlotte Setijadi
Questioning Proximity
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Hamish Morgan
The gift of representation
Peter Smith
Ambiguity in Knowing and Learning
Gerald Frederic
Science, Racism and the African point
of view
11am Break
11.15am - 12.45pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Keith Redgen
Utopia
and Enlightenment
David Jack
Robinson Crusoe to Lanzarote
Craig Pett
Jonathan Swift
STREAM
2: Room TR5/12
Jasna Novakovic
Dorothy Hewett's Circuitous Quest
Gabey Goh
Cultural Mirrors: Massive Multiplayer Online
Games
Lisa Richards
International artist workshops
1 - 2pm Lunch
2 - 3pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Sabina Sestigiani
The Inland Sea
Carlo Salzani
Black Armbands and Trash
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Jasmin Chen
Jean-Luc Nancy
Chris Bassett
Hegel and geometry
3.15 - 4.45pm
Adam Bandt
We are not all human
Jess Whyte
War on Terror as Permanent War
Sam Everingham
Is the Law Itself on Trial?
4.45pm Close - Dr Chris Worth
ABSTRACTS
Thursday
9.30 - 11am
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Name: Robert Savage
Title: Capturing the
Ape: On a Motif in Goethe and Adorno.
Abstract:
With the birth of historical anthropology in the late eighteenth
century, the ape becomes acutely relevant to discussions of what
it means to be human. Removed from its native habitat and put on
show in the travelling fairs, menageries, zoos and variety stages
of Europe, the ape presents itself as both a standing reproach and
a source of amusement, as an unwelcome reminder of the audience's
own animality and as a welcome occasion for it to reassert its superiority
over the rest of creation. Above all, the ape's remarkable capacity
to imitate human beings unnerves the philosophically minded spectator,
prompting him to articulate a new conception of humanity which constitutes
the ape as an object of ridicule, disgust, hostility, and even human
consumption. What happens, then, when the ape looks back?
Name:
Kimberley Pearce
Title: Man versus Beast. Tension, Violence,
Poverty and In Between viewing Agamben's animal to read Kafka's
Metamorphosis and Cronenberg's The
Fly.
Abstract: The beast is
one of the central symbols in the explanation of humanity. As such,
the figuration of the symbolic beast can be an important touchstone
in assessing the social and cultural context of the enunciation of
the animal. I will explore the interplay between the human and the
animal, in recognition that the human has been antagonistically articulated
in relation to the non-human. Giorgio Agamben's The
Open explores the concept of the 'anthropological
machine', mobilised in the definition of the human, by the sacrifice
of the animal, and imagines an interaction not predicated on this
logic. Further, I will illuminate these arguments by reading them
through Franz Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' and David Cronenberg's
The Fly. Both texts present the fantastic and
uncanny transformation of a man into an animal, and via this narrative
device I have speculated on this interaction between the human and
animal: the tension, violence, poverty and in-between.
Name:
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Title: Confessing.
Abstract:
Is confession possible? The argument here will be that confession
both needs a foreclosing of the future, yet at the same time the
future needs to remain inaccessible. The future is God and that's
why Augustine's confessions are written under the sign of waiting,
Lyotard has argued. The paradoxical need - the need for the future
- which does and undoes confession will be examined here through
Papadiamantes's novel Hoi emporoi ton ethnon
(The Merchants of the Nations).
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Name: Rhiannyn Geeson
Title: Trolls dat
speak / Vat did you say? Translating Terry Pratchett.
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the German translations
of the works of the English writer, Terry Pratchett, focussing on
the 'hypercultural' elements.
Many inhabitants of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, among them trolls and vampires, display certain linguistic traits used for comedic effect in Pratchett's novels. The comedy, however, stems from an appreciation of the "cultural baggage" associated with the specific dialects, as Pratchett draws on stereotypical representations to create cultural-bound identities for his characters.
This presents a problem when it comes to translation. In this analysis of "magical minorities" and translation, I will discuss the aspects of translation studies present possible solutions (and further difficulties) to the translator, exploring some of the options available to the translator offered by different translation paradigms which may assist in the translation of culturally-specific aspects of Terry Pratchett's novels.
Name: Brigid Maher
Title: Translation of Humour in Literature: The extravagant
comic style of an Italian migrant in Australia.
Abstract:
This paper will examine the translation of Rosa R. Cappiello's
Paese fortunato (Oh, Lucky Country
) (1981, trans. 1984), a partly autobiographical novel in which Rosa,
a young Italian woman, recounts her experience as a migrant in Sydney
in the early 1970s. When it was published, the book caused something
of a stir due to its unflinching portrayal of the hardships of migrant
life and its unromantic take on migrant cultural identity. It is
peppered with grotesquely comic descriptions of Rosa's world
and the misfits that people it, including some very unflattering
portraits of Anglo-Australians and of Italian migrants.
My main focus will be on the way the comic and ironic qualities pervading Rosa's narrative convey her personal, social and cultural (indeed, multicultural) identities, and the ways in which the translator, Gaetano Rando, has sought to transfer this distinctive humorous style into English. I will discuss some cultural differences between Italian and Anglo-Australian literary and comic traditions that make the translation of Rosa's identity and humour a considerable challenge, and will examine how the author's visceral style and unusual use of language, which Rando chose to preserve as far as possible, may have affected the critical reception of the novel in translation.
Name:
Leah Gerber
Title: Children's book production and
international exchange between Australia and Germany: the fate of
the text.
Abstract: Investigation into
the growth of children's literature invites the opportunity to
view the status of the children's book market world wide. This
analysis is two-fold: since the 1990s, the children's book market
has become larger and increasingly universal, matching the movement
of globalisation. Equally important is the consideration of book
production in a historical sense. As such, the formation of explicit
research questions on the subject of European book production, German
book production and international exchange calls for consideration
of two significant chapters of German history: the period of National
Socialism (1933-1945) and divided Germany (1945-1990), particularly
in regard to the question of how many Australian children's texts
were translated into German (and published) during these periods.
11.15am - 12.45pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Name: Matthew Ryan
Title: John Banville's
material epiphanies and the reterritorialisation of the self.
Abstract: In this paper it is argued that within
the novel form two forces are in tension: the expansive play of language
and the containment of the printed word. In this sense aesthetic
containment is a form of abstract integration that can efface its
own materially mediated constitution as well as its larger debt to
the social basis of language.
Analysis of John Banville's novels points to the contradictions and convergences that result from this formal tension. They provide an entry-point for the investigation of the formation of the self under the conditions of an 'ontology of placelessness'. To fashion aesthetically constructed 'portable worlds', to channel the abstracted self in an attenuated network, is not necessarily to run headlong to autonomy. There are, it seems, strong currents of less abstract social relations entwined within the intellectual form of life.
Name:
James Garrett
Title: Homer Philosopher.
Abstract:
Homer's epics were first taken as canonical during the birth
of classical literature and philosophy as is preserved from the 6th
to 4th century BC, but to what degree are the Iliad and Odyssey philosophical?
Can a philosophy be extracted from them? Can a philosophical reading
of Homer provide a way to approach pre-socratic philosophy if not
the entire history of metaphysics?
Name: Ivar Kvistad
Title: The Modern Medea:
Euripides, Anti-Imperialism and Infanticide.
Abstract:
Euripides' Medea has been reinvented several
times in the twentieth century. This paper uncovers the impetus that
informs the lineage of Medeas that are overt in their politicisation
of the problems of colonialism and/or institutionalised gender dissymmetry:
the Medeas of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heiner Mller,
Brendan Kennelly, Liz Lochhead, Christa Wolf, Diana Wakoski, Tony
Harrison - and more recently Wesley Enoch. What, however, lends the
Euripidean narrative to such politicisations? To answer this question,
the paper looks back to Euripides' play, offering a reappraisal
of its representation of infanticide. The paper argues that while
this motif is routinely dismissed in the scholarship as a demonising
representation of the cultural and sexual Other, the infanticide
motif is also the key to understanding Medea's
radicality and politicisation of rights-bearing subjectivity in its
ancient and modern incarnations.
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Name: Adrian Martin
Title: Ticket to Ride:
Claire Denis and the Cinema of the Body.
Abstract:
Claire Denis is a French filmmaker active in features since the late
'80s. Her best-known films in Australia are Beau travail
(1999) and Chocolat (1988), but all of her films
have been seen here at special events such as the Melbourne Film
Festival. My paper investigates the notion of a 'cinema of the
body' with which Denis has frequently been associated. After
outlining the critical history of this term, 'cinema of the body',
I differentiate four central ways in which Denis' intensely physical
films have approached and 'figured' the human body: as a
stake within colonial and post-colonial relations; as an object in
a quasi-ethnography of what Deleuze called 'a cinema of attitudes
and postures'; as a subject caught up in complex, ambivalent,
sometimes animalistic drives and desires; and finally as a forever
contested emblem of what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls the 'inoperable
community'. There will be several scenes from DVDs of Denis'
work screened and analysed in the course of the presentation.
Name:
Claire Perkins
Title: Minority in contemporary American
"smart" cinema.
Abstract: With
musical, literary and social references, the Deleuzean concept of
"minority" has revolutionary application in linguistics,
politics and cinema. Deleuze's own writing on minoritarian cinema
relates largely to the work of third world filmmakers and the practical
potential for a minor cinema to create a people and a consciousness
that has hitherto been missing. Working from the idea of the necessary
coexistence of minority with an abstract "majority", this
paper will attempt to relate some of the linguistic and social discussions
of minority to a contemporary sensibility within American cinema
that has been termed "smart" cinema by film theorist Jeffrey
Sconce. As intersections of commercial, art and independent cinema,
smart films are largely commercial exercises but offer a critique
of the abstract ideals upon which this "majority" - Hollywood
- is founded. Through their form and thematics, smart films by directors
such as Todd Solondz, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola seem to present
a genuine attempt to make a minor use of a major language.
Name:
Rachel Torbett
Title: Hospitable ones, Unwatchable others:
hospitality and community in Takashi Miike's Visitor
Q
Abstract: Using Takashi Miike's
film Visitor Q (2001), this paper attempts to
draw together Derrida's writings on hospitality and Blanchot's
phrase 'unavowable community.' From this theoretical standpoint,Visitor
Q becomes a film about the necessary relationship between
hospitality and community. The first part of my paper illustrates
this necessity- hospitality in Visitor Q opens
the possibility for what I will call an 'unwatchable community.'
The second part of my paper turns to show the duplicity in this relationship:
the anonymity needed for hospitality is incongruous with community,
while the reciprocity needed for community is incongruous with the
asymmetrical gesture of hospitality. In short, Visitor
Q reveals the relationship between hospitality and community
to be both necessary and impossible.
A necessary relationship, but then an impossible relationship- now Visitor Q is a film about the paradox between hospitality and community. Perhaps what is most fascinating about Visitor Q is that it never seeks to resolve this paradox, on the contrary, Visitor Q pushes paradox to its limits, intensifying it, making for fascinating viewing, making for an unwatchable film.
Friday
9.30 - 11am
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Name: Rhonda Khatab
Title: The Question
of Literature and the Problem of Ethics in Blanchot and Levinas.
Abstract: The paper considers the conditions
of possibility for communication, in terms of the question of the
ethics of interpersonal relations, which question comes to be addressed,
in particular, through the critical engagement of Maurice Blanchot
and Emmanuel Levinas. One of the questions framing this paper is
that of how ethics (which refers to the relationship of self and
other) is to be thought outside of the framework of epistemology,
and equally, without reference to theories of identity, or subjectivity.
This question is addressed with reference to Blanchot's idea
of a neutral relation in The Infinite Conversation,
by which the question of ethics is rearticulated in terms of the
question of relation as such. The question most central to this paper
would be: how would it be possible to think or to conceptualise the
factor of difference inherent to the terms of any relationship between
oneself and another, without thereby reducing the unicity of this
differential relation to theoretical presuppositions, and philosophical
rhetoric? This question is addressed in the work of Levinas, and
of Blanchot, in terms of the problem of how it would be possible
to respond responsibly to the event of singularity, or of how to
do justice to the other. To attend to this problem, Blanchot explores
the possibilities for a non-dialectical language, one that would
uphold an irreducible relation of plural speech with the other. The
literary space emerges thus as the possible site of encounter with
the other. In considering the conditions of possibility for an 'ethical',
or 'responsible' language, the complex intersections between
the spheres of ethics, literature, criticism, philosophy, and politics
are brought to the fore. The question of the ethics of relationality
pertains to the irreducibility of difference to the form of genre.
Implicit in the work of Blanchot, is a critique of the space of intersection,
as the site at which the structural conditions of limitation and
differentiation are perpetually negotiated.
Name: Michael
Fitzgerald
Title: Aristotle in Jest.
Abstract:
This paper is principally concerned with the problematic legacy
of Aristotle's discussion of eutrapelia,
or urbane wit; the passages in which Aristotle analyses this quality
represent a decisive intervention in the ethical question of the
limits of 'earnest' and 'jest.' Later Christian thinkers,
returning to this text, had to accommodate a long tradition of apostolic
and patristic severity, premised on a logic of salvation in which
the 'idle word' was radically vitiated. More is at issue
than a standard of modesty, either in behaviour or rhetoric; rather,
the controversy indicates two opposing visions of human being, two
responses to the problem of personal identity, and two versions of
the significance to be attributed to human sociality. I argue that
these coordinates are identified from the outset in Aristotle's
text.
Name:
Charlotte Setijadi
Title: Questioning Proximity: A critical
analysis of the use of the cultural proximity thesis in the analysis
of transnational cultural flows.
Abstract:
In studies of transnational cultural flows, it is often suggested
that the success of cultural exchange between countries regarded
to possess similar cultural traits is determined by the level of
"cultural proximity" that exists. This notion of cultural
proximity, or the theory that local audiences will have preference
for cultural commodities from countries with which they share cultural
ties in recognition of their own culture, has enjoyed much intellectual
currency in recent times, especially in relation to analyses of regional
media markets. Looking at some recent case studies, this paper will
argue that the cultural proximity thesis is much too simplistic and
totalising to be used as an analytical framework without further
examination of other factors and specific social and historical circumstances
that may influence audiences' acceptance of cultural commodities
from particular countries.
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Name: Hamish Morgan
Title: The gift of
representation? Writing the other, ethics and gift exchange.
Abstract: In this paper I explore the possibility
of thinking representation as gift exchange. This is largely explored
through the work of Deborah Bird Rose, an eminently 'ethical'
anthropologists, and through the work of Levinas and Derrida.
It is Rose's reference to Levinas (in her latest work) that opens a space for this gift logic. A space opened up by Levinas that brings into focus the gift of being with others, of being entangled in responsibility with others. A Responsibility that implies bind, bond, reciprocity and obligation; the knot of forces that also imply the gift, the knot of forces that energize Rose's work.
It is the aporia of the gift that will be the thread of logic, the ligature, of this response. This response will take place between a two-handed logic of the gift, one announced by Mauss the other by Derrida. Mauss argued that the gift is binding, it compels one to responsible relationships with an other, to reciprocity and entanglement. Derrida argues that this is precisely the 'economy' that annuls the gift as gift. Derrida argues that what is recognized is not the gift in-itself, but the symbolic economy (reciprocity, indebtedness etc) that allows the gift to appear and disappear at once. Thus the gift, the gift that could present, and be true to itself, is never possible, it is always contaminated and produced by the economy that makes its recognition (misrecognition) possible. Thus, the possibility of the gift is that it never names itself, but always names/marks things otherwise to gift (things like reciprocity, debt and return), things that annul gift as gift; the gift, according to this logic, can only mark the things that annul its possibility.
This gift logic (I'm making it work rather hard) also marks the problematic of representation, of naming one thing (the appearance) but of producing something else (the social reality of representation). Of responding to something, say an experience of living with other people, by giving something else, say writing/representation. What kind of exchange, what kind of transfer and economy is this? How could you use Levinas's radical ethics to represent other people? What are the possibilities of this? What kind of things does inter-cultural representation, name, annul and present?
Name: Peter Smith
Title: The Role of Ambiguity
in Knowing and Learning according to Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein:
Harmonies and Dissonances.
Abstract: Despite
coming from two divergent schools within Twentieth Century Western
Philosophy, both Merleau-Ponty and the later Wittgenstein have surprisingly
similar thoughts on the matter of knowing and learning (and so-called
cognitive processes in general) - namely that there is a performative
and functional ambiguity that inheres in these processes. There are
several articles on the similarities between these two philosophers'
discussions of ambiguity. However, there are none that compares Merleau-Ponty
and Wittgenstein's themes of ambiguity from the perspective of
knowing and learning as my honours thesis from last year does. Specifically,
Merleau-Ponty discusses the extent to which there is a necessary
ambiguity between the mind and body and world through one's
own body and habituality. Wittgenstein
also discusses ambiguity and situates it in his notion of forms
of life, which accounts for the relationship between mind,
body and world. By discussing both of these philosophers' accounts
of ambiguity in terms of learning and knowing, we can suggest some
practical applications for paedo- and andro-gogical practices as
well as indicate at least some small affinity between analytic and
continental philosophy.
Name: Gerald Frederic
Title: Science, Racism
and the African point of view.
Abstract:
Exploring issues in the emergence and development of modern conceptions
of scientific knowledge in the western world, the paper will consider
the role that racism has played in the re-shaping and re-ordering
of the metaphysical views of some key European philosophers. The
paper will address the consequences of this for the discipline of
historiography. These issues will be investigated from the point
of view of the African world. It will be argued that along with the
emergence of certain influential philosophies in the recent history
of Europe (particularly in the 19th century), there took place in
the western world a systematic distortion of the significance of
African civilization (i.e. ancient Kemet, which the Greeks later
named 'Egypt') in terms of its contribution to world culture
in the areas of philosophy, science, religion, mathematics, etc..
11.15am - 12.45pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Name: Keith Redgen
Title: Dialectic of
Utopia; Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Abstract:
There seems a curious relationship between varieties of utopian thought
and imagining and varieties of Enlightenment. On the one hand there
is the utopian imagining of the perfect or at least the best possible
world for us. This can be seen to contrast with the perpetual openness
of Enlightenment, its insistence on our freedom to decide for ourselves
at any time, unfettered by any design imposed from 'outside'.
But the contrast can be easily reversed. For utopian imagining, the
longing and hope for a better world, is needed to inspire the demand
for freedom. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment project of the correct
use of reason to decide our proper, rational, individual, and collective
direction and destination demands conformity to its conclusions,
and derision, or worse, for the rebellious. What then is the relationship
between the dialectic of utopia, and the dialectic of Enlightenment?
Name:
David Jack
Title: Islands in the Stream of Time: From
Robinson Crusoe to Lanzarote.
Abstract:
In the Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx offers a Utopian reading
of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's novel, he claims,
in no way expresses "merely a reaction against over-sophistication
and a return to a misunderstood natural life", but rather anticipates
'civil society', in which "the individual appears detached
from the natural bonds etc. in which earlier historical periods make
him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate".
Marx's reading anticipates those offered by Fredric Jameson in
which the text is read as a 'field of force', of competing
dominant, residual and emergent modes of production. Michel Houellebecq's
Lanzarote stands at the other end of a properly
bourgeois revolution of which Robinson Crusoe
is the beginning.
Name: Craig Pett
Title: "I am no inconsiderable
Shop-keeper in this Town". An Introduction to Swift's The
Drapier's Letters.
Abstract:
In 1724-5 Swift wrote a series of political tracts, in the guise
of "letters" to the people of Ireland, under the pseudonym
'M.B. Drapier'. They were an attempt to galvanise the nation
in its opposition to a proposed new coinage, specifically for Ireland,
but coined by a private businessman in England pursuant to a royal
patent fraudulently obtained.The Drapier's Letters
, then, are tied specifically to the Anglo-Irish political scene
of their time, but they are political literature, or literature within
politics, and remain a must-read for all students
of English (says T.S. Eliot).
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Name: Jasna Novakovic
Title: Dorothy Hewett's
Circuitous Quest: On Nowhere.
Abstract:
Dorothy Hewett's last play Nowhere written
in 2001 is in many respects her closing statement on life, art and
politics. It reinvents a marginalized social site in which the author
recognizes the possibility of uniting art and the praxis of life.
The goal of the historical avantgarde is, however, just a permanent
possibility, for the play is based on a mythic method, Hewett's
still unrecognized, yet all-pervading mode of dramaturgy. The problem
of subverting the affirmative function of art in the society, without
surrendering its autonomy or falling prey to the false sublation
of art offered by the culture industry and the aesthetics of consumerism,
is what Hewett kept exploring in all of her plays.
Name: Gabey Goh
Title: Cultural Mirrors: Exploring cultural exposure inherent
in the game play experience of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing
Games (MMORPGs).
Abstract: Any product
of popular culture is inherently dependant upon the culture of its
place of origin, such as anime for Japan or martial arts films for
China. As an arena in the race to accumulate 'soft power'
capital, the role that the gaming industry plays remains an untapped
area of research and analysis. Apart from research into its educational
applications and content impact on children, other questions such
as the impact cultural influences inherent in such game designs have
on its players has yet to be fully explored. With its virtual world
creations situated heavily within real-time flows, MMORPGs hold a
unique place as the most interactive and immersive. By looking specifically
at two of the currently largest commercially successful MMORPGs-
Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft- the indirect and direct reflections
of their culture of origin can be seen through the experience of
game play. Questions which then arise include how much influence
these subtle cultural influences have and whether player choice reflects
cultural preferences.
Name: Lisa Richards
Title: "We are
working together". Where self and history intersect - the short-term,
transitive and cross-cultural environments created by international
artist workshops.
Abstract: Artists working
today are tapping into global connections, establishing and using
networks to build an international audience and gain experience not
necessarily available in their own locales. Critical in facilitating
this interaction has been a series of international artist-run workshops:
the Triangle workshops first established by Anthony Caro and Robert
Loder in 1982. Starting as an experimental method of bringing artists
of various backgrounds together, Triangle has strengthened into a
worldwide network.
This paper presents a process of engagement between contemporary visual artists that has been overlooked in the art historical canon. Over the part twenty years, international and cross-cultural workshop events have provided artists working outside the European/American centre the opportunity to develop and promote their work, to encounter first-hand the work of artists from other places, either neighbouring countries or westernised urban centres, and to extend the visual arts practices of their community.
2 - 3pm
STREAM 1: Room TR1/12
Name: Sabina Sestigiani
Title: The Inland
Sea.
Abstract: This paper will discuss
the concept of wilderness and frontier as uttered in Patrick White's
Voss (1957) and Dino Buzzati's Il
Deserto dei Tartari (1940, The Tartar Steppe
). Could the idea of wilderness be interpreted as a locus of utopian
no-place? Does the notion of frontier suggest a dream or a nightmare?
This paper will bring to the fore White's and Buzzati's representation
of space beyond the boundary line of the frontier. It will discuss
the concept of unlimited landscape and its assimilation to 'featurelessness'.
Retracing Voss's search of an inland sea in the Australian continent,
the paper will argue that the oceanic image serves not only the purpose
of being the ideal metaphor for the unreadability of the landscape
perceived as devoid of signs, but also as the mental feared-desired
delimitation between known and unknown.
Name: Carlo Salzani
Title: Black Armbands and Trash: Prolegomena to a Benjaminian
Reading of the Australian Past.
Abstract:
Only tangentially touching the controversial and articulated debate
on Australian history, the paper proposes a grid of categories for
a possible reading of the Australian past. These categories are borrowed
from Walter Benjamin's methodology for the materialist historian:
the critique of progress, of history seen as a "homogeneous
and empty time," the focus on the forgotten and discarded etc.
The term "Black Armband view of History," coined by the
historian Geoffrey Blainey, has caused a heated debate, but results,
from a Benjaminian point of view, a tautology, and is therefore uninteresting.
It should at least be completed, or better substituted, by a focus
on the "trash of history," from which the historian-as-scavenger
rescues fragments of truth.
STREAM 2: Room TR5/12
Name: Jasmin Chen
Title: A Finite Thinking:
Jean Luc Nancy and the Margins of Sense.
Abstract:
What would it mean to think the finitude of thought? For Jean Luc
Nancy, this question not only points to the closure of a certain
type of philosophical thinking, but equally to an opening onto thinking,
one which not only rigorously attends to thinking the finitude of
thought, but is itself a form of finite thinking. This paper seeks
to describe the particular conception of finitude which Nancy develops
and the relationship he draws between a finite thinking and writing
itself.
Name:
Chris Bassett
Title: Hegel and Geometry.
Abstract: TO BE POSTED.
3.15 - 4.45pm
Name:
Adam Bandt
Title: We are not all human.
Abstract:
It is vital to supplement the more orthodox juridical category of
the state of exception/emergency with the exceptional created when
the 'human' is understood through holding it in a relation
of ban to its (animal) self. Agamben teaches us that the terms human,
animal, life and sovereignty have deep connections. Agamben's
understanding of the relation of ban, a term borrowed from Jean-Luc
Nancy, of including an element by means of its exclusion, is properly
understandable by considering it both in the context of the relation
between sovereignty and life, and in considering the relation between
human and animal.
These sovereignty and anthropomorphic machines produce bare life, but an ambiguity remains as to the ontological status of such vita nuda. This is clearly critically important in determining how we might develop an alternative politics that is willing to decouple biology from politics, or even ontology from ethics. But is this logic of exception sufficient for this task? And what is the political status of this excluded that is neither a Schmittian friend nor enemy?
An examination of Agamben's reading of Heidegger, together with a response to critics who accuse Agamben of universalising in 'bare life' what can only be understood as radical immanence, refute the suggestion that universality is located in an ontologically understood 'bare life'. It is at this point that, following Zizek, psychoanalytically informed social theory provides a useful mechanism for both clarifying the status of the 'excluded' and for developing a strategy for a critical jurisprudence to renegotiate and alter the exclusion.
However, in refusing to ground our politics in a falsely stable human, (e.g. as the bearer of rights) have we succumbed to the error Ranciere draws attention to, namely that the notion of the political human opens a gap which gives oxygen to political and juridical struggles? Or are we parties to the wrong which Badiou levels at Agamben, of having identified the human with its mortal elements, instead of the immortal?
Against this, we can say that it is not because of any ontological status of 'bare life' that we take it as a point of departure in beginning to reconfigure the jurisprudence of the relations between the terms sovereignty/life/ human/animal, but rather because it is the violently excluded term produced by the machines operating in this quartet, the exclusion of which is routinely disavowed but which sustains a universality.
Name: Jess Whyte
Title: "Not in our
Lifetime": The War on Terror as Permanent War.
Abstract:
In the literature on emergency powers, the key criteria agreed upon
as a measure of the constitutional legitimacy of emergency measures
is temporariness. Even amongst supporters of the notion that the
suspension of law and of fundamental rights is a legitimate response
to crisis, an awareness of the possibility for such suspensions to
spell the end and not the salvation of constitutional democracy has
lead to an emphasis on the strict temporal limitation of emergency
powers. This framework is complicated however by the use of emergency
measures in the 'war on terror', which is depicted as a new
kind of war, defined precisely by its lack of temporal boundaries,
and by the impossibility of either a negotiated settlement or a final
victory. This paper will examine the nature of the so-called war
on terror, and the way in which it disrupts the conventional paradigm
of war to which the state of emergency has traditionally corresponded.In
doing so,it will interrogate Agamben's notion that the boundary
between norm and exception, on which any defence of emergency powers
is predicated, has been replaced by a zone of indistinction, in which
the exception itself comes to coincide with normal life.
Name:
Sam Everingham
Title: Is the Law Itself on Trial? The
Discourse of Limit, and the Limits of Discourse.
Abstract:
This paper will explore the distinction drawn between law as justice
and law as discourse by certain influential thinkers in contemporary
legal theory. In response to the increasingly popular proposal that
the law may be profitably read through various, specifically non-legal
(literary, poetic, ethical, etc) lenses, such thinkers have expressed
concerns regarding what might then remain of any capacity for a critique
of legal, especially judicial, activity. In this paper I will attempt
to demonstrate that such an attitude not only misconceives and misrepresents
the intention behind such so-called 'extra-discursive' readings
of law, but also elides the ambiguity in the relationship between
law and justice.