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CCLCS Postgraduate Colloquium 2003

Tuesday 25th and Wednesday 26th November 2003
Manton Rooms, Menzies Building, Monash University

TIMETABLE

Day 1 - Tuesday 25th November

10:00 - 10:15 Welcome
10:15 - 10:30 Opening Address - Prof. Chris Worth, Head, School of Literary, Performance and Visual Studies
10:30 - 11:30 Peter Coleman - Narcissus Drowning: The Suicide of Certainty
Carolyn Daniel - Monstrous Eating in Charlotte's Web
11:30 - 12:00 Break, Refreshments
12:00 - 01:00 Chris Danta - "Who Would I Show It To": Kierkegaard and Derrida on Abraham's Reply to Isaac in Genesis 22
Michael FitzGerald - Part and Whole: Pascal and the Hermeneutics of 'Disproportion'
01:00 - 02:00 Lunch
02:00 - 03:00 Kim Edwards - Get Away From Me, You Bitch! - Demon Mothers, Psycho Sons, and the Scream Trilogy
Andrew Padgett - Authenticity and the Author, or, How Not to Study Popular Music
03:00 - 03:30 Break, Refreshments
03:30 - 04:30 Jasmin Chen - Arendt and Professional Thinking
Alex Cooke - Being Lucid About Nothing: The Phenomenology of Natalie Depraz

Day 2 - Wednesday 26th November

10:00 - 11:00 Aurelia Satcau - Schism: Between the Postmodern and the Archetypal
Louise Gray - Thinking Difference: as Trinitarian, as Sacred
11:00 - 11:30 Break, Refreshments
11:30 - 01:00 Special Presentation
"Aliens, Strangers and Monsters"
A special, Australian premiere screening of this feature-length video-seminar from the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney. Exploring and interrogating representations of 'otherness' in the Western imaginary, Kearney's film - which includes interviews with Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner and Charles Taylor - ranges over a broad array of texts, from the Aeneid to Men in Black to the 'Star Wars' speeches of the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Within our most modern myths of identity and origin, it uncovers the operation of scapegoat mechanisms, by which the diffuse violences circulating within a community are 'screened' (that is, projected onto an external surface, and thus concealed) onto the outsider.
01:00 - 02:00 Lunch
02:00 - 03:00 Sam Everingham - Luhmann, Politics, Philosophy
Michael FitzGerald - The Individual as Genre in Classical Thought
03:00 - 03:30 Break
03:30 - 04:30 Robert Savage - The Strange Case of Dr. Wiesengrund and Mr. Rottweiler
Dimitris Vardoulakis - "Nothing Around Me and Without Me Nothing as Nothing": The Unbearable Loneliness of the Doppelgnger
04:30 - 04:45 Closing Address - Prof. Brian Nelson, Head, School of Languages, Culture and Linguistics
04:45 - 05:00 Election of Postgraduate Representatives for 2004
This formal item of business will follow the conclusion of proceedings. Centre postgraduates are asked to attend in order to select their representatives.

ABSTRACTS

Session 1: Tuesday 10:30 - 11:30

Peter Coleman

Narcissus Drowning: The Suicide of Certainty

This paper will be an attempt to draw from the mythological tale of Narcissus some teachings of wisdom that might prove useful to our present condition in the world. More specifically, the legend of Narcissus will be described as highly relevant in understanding the contemporary Western attitude towards the 'ecological'. It will be contended that Narcissus' poisonous situation might in many ways be likened to the human community's relationship with more-than-human nature, and that Narcissus' example might act as a warning against our own hubris.

Carolyn Daniel

Monstrous Eating in Charlotte's Web

Culturally specific food rules are impressed upon children through fiction using the popular axiom 'you are what you eat', so that bad or monstrous eating often signals a wicked or monstrous character in the narrative. In E. B. White's Charlotte's Web there are a range of eaters and a range of reactions to what is eaten, both within the context of the narrative and in terms of how the reader is likely to feel. Wilbur the pig, for example, is disgusted and horrified by Charlotte the spider's food choices and her vampire-like habit of drinking the blood of insects, but Wilbur and the reader are taught to be more tolerant when the use-value of her diet is explained. The importance of carefully classifying foods to avoid physical and moral contamination is inferred in this text through a subtextual discourse around the efficacy of eating leftovers. Most interesting of all, however, in terms of the major thrust of this narrative, which concerns the need to get Wilbur's death sentence revoked, is the subject of meat-eating. In psychoanalytic terms language is a marker of proper (human) subjectivity. Because talking animals are effectively subjects, their flesh, like human flesh, is neither morally nor ethically edible. Charlotte's Web therefore legitimises Peter Singer's argument for a vegetarian diet because it endorses the notion that animals have their own interests and the capacity for feeling pleasure and suffering. For the child reader, the real-life duplicity of adult culture's attitude towards animals is therefore revealed in this story.

Session 2: Tuesday 12:00 - 1:00

Chris Danta

"Who Would I Show It To": Kierkegaard and Derrida on Abraham's Reply to Isaac in Genesis 22

In this paper I will use a short poem by W.S. Merwin to develop an alternative reading of Genesis 22 to that offered by Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) and Derrida (in The Gift of Death). The crux interpretum is Abraham's reply to Isaac's question about the lamb for the sacrifice: "The Lord will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son". Derrida follows Kierkegaard in seeing this response as ironic and thus, like Kierkegaard, reduces the impossibility of the sacrificial event to the impossibility of Abraham revealing the purpose of the sacrifice to Isaac. I will use Merwin's poem to argue that this Kierkegaardian-Derridean reduction is mistaken and so remains an incomplete account of the Genesis narrative.

Michael FitzGerald

Part and Whole: Pascal and the Hermeneutics of 'Disproportion'

My concern here is Pascal's presentation of an anthropological problem in hermeneutic terms - writing in the shadow of Descartes, he might be expected to open up an epistemological front against humanism, but the paradox which he adduces to reproach the philosophers is of a distinctively hermeneutic character. Pense 230 formulates the problem of part and whole - the central problem for a discipline which views meaning as identical but fissiparous , as ideally integral but only reproducible through division and partition. I consider the importance of the part-whole aporia in the transition between what might, with reservations, be called a 'pre-critical' and a 'critical' theory of the hermeneutic circle.

Session 3: Tuesday 2:00 - 3:00

Kim Edwards

Get Away From Me, You Bitch! - Demon Mothers, Psycho Sons, and the Scream Trilogy

"Maternal abandonment causes serious deviant behaviour" (Billy Loomis,Scream). Mothers are formidable and prevalent creatures in the realm of cinematic horror. From the Alien quartet which rips open every possible maternal terror and birthing nightmare, through the religious fanaticism of motherhood gone mad in Carrie, and right back to the ultimate monstrous matriarch Mrs Bates, the genre of horror films has an inherent fascination with the maternal as the creator, instigator, and source of fear. The self-referential nature of Wes Craven's three Scream movies makes them a particularly intriguing example of how this tradition is being drawn upon, ostensibly to be remade, but in the end to concur with the legacy passed down from its movie antecedents.

Andrew Padgett

Authenticity and the Author, or, How Not to Study Popular Music

The notion of 'authenticity' has traditionally been the norm by which popular music has been judged and valued, both in academic work and music journalism. Grounded as a vague application of existentialism, authenticity and inauthenticity - the notorious 'sell-out' - are measures of how faithfully a piece of music represents the intentions of the musician, and how effectively the music creates a sense of communion between musician and audience. This paper will critique this notion of authenticity, arguing that its centrality in the study of popular music denies us the opportunity of performing alternative, post-structural readings which, in turn, allow us to move beyond the author fetish so prevalent in the study of contemporary popular music. This paper will outline how and where this debate is being enacted both by popular music audiences and performers.

Session 4: Tuesday 3:30 - 4:30

Jasmin Chen

Arendt and Professional Thinking

One of the most enduring themes in the writing of Hannah Arendt is her dispute with the role of the professional thinker. Indeed, her refusal to identify herself as a 'philosopher' is not a question of lacking interest in the work of philosophy but rather an ongoing concern about the relationship between the life of contemplation, the bios theoretikos, and that of action, the bios politikos, in the shared public world we inhabit as human beings. With particular reference to Heidegger's reading of Aristotle in Plato's Sophist this paper hopes to serve as a preliminary examination of this concern, insofar as Arendt and further commentators have understood the potential incompatibility between the philosophical and the political ever since 'the men of thought and the men of action began to take different paths'.

Alex Cooke

Being Lucid About Nothing: The Phenomenology of Natalie Depraz

This paper will consider the recent phenomenology of Natalie Depraz, with a particular emphasis on her conception of the relation between the body and experience. In her text Lucidit du Corps, Depraz argues that phenomenology cannot be simply understood as an account of the modes of appearing of phenomena where all materiality is put out of play. By considering unpublished manuscripts of Husserl as well as reevaluating his published texts, Depraz arrives at a notion of 'incarnation' wherein one cannot avoid taking account of the materiality of all experience. After briefly outlining the manner in which the lucidity of the body is understood, I will attempt to direct the concept of lucidity towards limitations which are not acknowledged by Depraz. The following questions will be asked: Is there a limit of the body and, consequently, a limit of lucidity? How is it possible to conceive of this limit, the point at which the body ceases? And what effect does this limit have for Depraz's phenomenology?

Session 5: Wednesday 10:00 - 11:00

Louise Gray

Thinking Difference: as Trinitarian, as Sacred

The Deleuzian notion of difference as that which is neither singular nor plural - in its liminality to the concept, its enabling of conceptual and other difference, its eternal ascent in-to descent, its liturgical permeation of otherwise un-crossable frontiers - offers a means of thinking difference as sacred: as with-in, between, beneath, and beyond the temporal realm. In league with Mark C. Taylor's idea of 'a/theology,' difference inexplicably links the temporal and transcendent orders whilst retaining a difference between them. As that which is always virtual, and never actual, except in its potential or possibility, difference comes to mind as interior to itself in a depth given to the concept only as 'intensity.' Difference, then, can be thought of as the in-visible, in-finite factor that humanises divinity and divinises humanity, whilst maintaining an imperceptible difference in and between them. When the human can be conceived as divine, 'the other is difficult to name and to hurt'- there comes to pass an affinity-in-difference between the stranger within and without, an all-in/exclusive difference that cannot be appropriated by representation. Difference brings together that which it holds apart, essentially linking the on/e to the m/any.

Aurelia Satcau

Schism: Between the Postmodern and the Archetypal

This paper - an inquiry into the revelation that 'the Many are potential in the One' - revolves around a topic, 'schism', familiar in Theology and in Religious Studies but still never explored enough, it seems, in the area of Social Psychology & Cultural Studies. Separation, splitting, parting, differing, are all symptoms and facts of the 'psyche', where the notion of 'schism' itself originates. How much 'unity' can resist without the sometimes 'refreshing' instance of the schismatic, and how much can the postmodern obsession with precisely this act of cleaving and severing reinvigorate an old archetypal formation - or, on the contrary, instigate more ludism?

Session 6: Wednesday 2:00 - 3:00

Sam Everingham

Luhmann, Sociology, Philosophy

In his book Ecological Communication Niklas Luhmann claims that in any situation where a given group seeks to occupy positions both inside and outside 'the social system' simultaneously, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of social systems and the best they can hope to achieve is to 'cause trouble'. In this paper I will be examining the basis of this claim as it manifests in Luhmann's work generally, and extend the claim into various theoretical perspectives. I will also examine some of the potential political implications.

Michael FitzGerald

The Individual as Genre in Classical Thought

This paper represents a prolegomena to a history of the concept of 'character' in Western ethical and cultural thought. It charts the emergence in classical antiquity of a humanist culture for which the work of character (the exigency of self-knowledge, the cultivation and elaboration of identity, an attention to 'good' and 'bad' examples and the superintendence of social relations generally) was acutely problematic. Prior to considering the apex of this cultural trajectory in Plutarch's Lives, I examine the absence of conditions conducive to the theorisation of 'character' in Homeric times, and the introduction of categories through which this problem was first able to crystallise.

Session 7: Wednesday 3:30 - 4:30

Robert Savage

The Strange Case of Dr. Wiesengrund and Mr. Rottweiler

This paper is an extract from a work in progress on Adorno's reception of the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hoelderlin. It examines the concept of the polemic(al) in Adorno's work, paying particular attention to his lecture on "The Actuality of Philosophy" from 1932 and his introduction to 'Catchwords' from 1969. It attempts to account for some of the contradictions in Adorno's public persona with reference to this important yet underrated concept.

Dimitris Vardoulakis

"Nothing Around Me and Without Me Nothing as Nothing": The Unbearable Loneliness of the Doppelgnger

Jean Paul, who coined the word Doppelgnger, also published a letter that he 'received' from the archetypical Doppelgnger, the character called Leibgeber in his novel Siebenks. Leibgeber, the prototype of all the doublings of subjectivity and mutliplyings of personality, laments his existential loneliness. How is that possible? If one expected the Doppelgnger to complain about something, it should have been that his subjectivity is needlessly supplemented by one too many subjects. In this letter Leibgeber shows signs of having immersed himself in the philosophy of Fichte. This paper examines how the notions of the absolute ego and the doubling of the self are inter-related. I argue that the Doppelgnger is a 'symptom' of subjective idealism.

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