reason-plus-enjoyment-final-program

Reason Plus Enjoyment ConferenceNever Stand StillArts & Social SciencesSchool of the Arts & Media10-14 JulyRobert Webster BuildingUNSW Australia . Kensington Campusrpeii.wordpress.comThe Reason Plus Enjoyment Conference invites you to join us in reading the vanishing futuresof to phronein (thinking) and to khairein (enjoyment) in the twilight of what Derrida called thegreat Western metaphysical adventure.Keynote speakers:Joan Copjec . Brown UniversityCarol Jacobs . Yale UniversityJuliet Flower MacCannell . UC IrvineJelica Šumič Riha . Slovene Academy of SciencesHenry Sussman . Yale UniversitySupported byUNSW Arts and Social SciencesCentre for Modernism Studies in AustraliaSydney School of Continental Philosophy

ScheduleFriday, 10th July1.30–2 Registration and Coffee+ Tea Webster Level 3Page2–3 Master Class | Carol JacobsAtom Egoyan's Artaud Double Bill3–4 Master Class | Jelica Šumič RihaThe Role of Time in Psychoanalysis and PoliticsWebster 306 6Webster 306 64–4.30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 34.30–5.30 Public Lecture | Rado RihaThe Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s PhilosophyWebster 327 6Saturday, 11th July9–9:30 Registration and Coffee + Tea Webster Level 3Page9:30–11 Opening Plenary | Jelica Šumič RihaEst Deus in nobis, or the Will to EnjoyWebster Lecture B 711–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 311:30–1 Discomforting ReasonsRemy Low | The Pleasures of Beheading, or, what ISIS can teach usabout the politicalKatharine Hawkins | Unnatural Selection: Monstrous identity and theevolution of differenceEdwin Ng | Do you have anything to declare? Epistemological bordercontrol and the religious contraband of Buddhist critical theoryTracey Pahor | People are not stupid even though my paper isridiculousPerforming EnjoymentBen Hjorth | How to act as if one were mourning: working throughMelancholia with HegelEd Scheer | Cooking with a see saw: the recomposition of the dramaanalogyElizabeth Pulie | Seduction of the end of the endSpectres of CinemaJames Donald | Life in the Old Vampire YetMark Steven | Splatter Capital: The Political Economy of Gore FilmsRobert Sinnerbrink | Anatomy of MelancholiaWebster 332 7Webster 306 9Webster 327 101–2:30 Lunch (self-foraging)1

Saturday, 11th July2:30–4 Intervallic TimesJulian Murphet | Rosa Plus Emma: revolutionary rationality andpleasurable revoltKnox Peden | Cruel Radiance: Rancière and Michaels on Agee andEvansLaurence Simmons | Reasoning the Disaster: Catastrophe; Žižek;Dupuy; luck; timeThe Specular ReflexMichael Potts | The Limits of Liberal Rationalism and the Return ofAnti-MaterialismKevin Wilson | The Euthanasia of Pleasure: Guy Debord’s concept ofthe Spectacle and the absolute realisation of the commodity formYen-Chen Chuang | Becoming Spectres in CinemaEndgamesThomas Apperley | The rise of 'nerdcore' porn: Digital gaming as atechnology of the bodyMahli-Ann Butt | The Elizabeth-Anna Illusion: Refuting mimesis withBioShock InfiniteKyle Moore | All Work and No Play Makes Ingress a Surprisingly FunGamePageWebster 332 11Webster 306 12Webster 327 144–4:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 34:30–6 Plenary | Henry SussmanParables of Playful IntelligenceWebster Lecture B 156 Drinks at the DoncasterSunday, 12th July10.30-12 Master class | The Open Ego: Woolf, Joyce and the ‘Mad’ SubjectJuliet Flower MacCannellPageWebster 327 161.30 Beach walk from Coogee to Bondi (weather permitting)4-6 Book launchesLacan Deleuze Badiou | A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Jon RoffePainting is a Critical Form | Helen JohnsonMinerva Gallery 16Monday, 13th JulyPage9–9:30 Registration and Coffee +Tea Webster Level 39:30–11 Plenary | Carol JacobsA Tripp to the London National GalleryWebster Lecture B 1711–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 32

Monday, 13th July11:30–1 NarcotheoryChris Rudge | Incomplete Projects and their Dark Partial Pleasures:Psychopolitics and the Professional Constraints of ScienceAlejandro Cerda Rueda | An incurable subject, or why the apple doesn’tfall far from the tree?Ben Gook | Melancholic-ecstatic: Between Ecstasy and theComedown (1989-90)Logics of PoeticsChris Oakey | Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Poetic ExcessArka Chattopadhyay | The Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company:The Un-Reasonable Real in Samuel Beckett’s How It IsElise Addlem | Poetic thinking and aletheia in the thought ofHeideggerMore Than OneTadej Troha | What is a Collective Subject? FreudianMassenpsychologie RevisitedSigi Jottkandt | Marque et plus: On Prime ZeroRex Butler | On Two Essays by Joan CopjecPageWebster 332 17Webster 306 19Webster 327 201–2 Lunch (self-foraging)2–3.30 Witches, Novels, and the ArchiveJoshua Comyn | Fiction and Concept: The Novel’s Supplementation ofPhilosophy in Late Twentieth Century AmericaThomas Sutherland | Sacrifice on the altar of history: Mediation andthe corrosive teleology of rationalized efficiencyLauren Bliss | The European Witch-hunts and pre-cinema: A Readingof the Unconscious in Aesthetic Film TheoryThe IntractableBryan Cooke | “A sort of Sade, but funnier.” : Lacan’s Plato in the lightof BadiouRobert Boncardo | “Dialectical poetry is the reverse of dialecticalpolitics”: Art and Politics in Alain Badiou’s Theory of the SubjectJon Roffe Deleuze | melancholia: object, world, cinemaWebster 306 21Webster 327 223.30–4 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 34–5.30 Harnessing JouissanceAndrew Dickson and Cindy Zeiher | How Are We Enjoying: HarnessingFeminine JouissanceSharon Mee | Jean-François Lyotard’s dispositif: expenditure incinemaMutiny of EnjoymentAdam Bartlett | Failing to Enjoy: the Thought of Education TodayNicholas Heron | The Homonymous ImageGregor Moder | Phallus and the Fall of Man: Preston Sturges’ TheLady EveWebster 332 23Webster 306 243

Monday, 13th JulyPure and Flawless LawJessica Whyte | Aquinas at the US Military Academy: The Laws ofArmed Conduct and the Genealogy of MoralsKim White | Agamben’s Moods: Shoah, Spectacle, and the Kafkanliberation of shame as the stimmung proper to ethical modernityMarco Grosoli | Fantasy Unchains: Discipline and Enjoyment inQuentin Tarantino’s Latest FilmPageWebster 327 256–6:30 Drinks Reception Tyree RoomJohn NilandScientia Building6:30–7:30 So What? Plenary Lecture | Joan CopjecThe Images Wars and the Modern State: Kiarostami's Zig ZagTyree RoomJohn NilandScientia Building278 Conference Dinner Bistro AvocaTuesday, 14th JulyPage9–9:30 Registration and Coffee + Tea Webster Level 39:30–11 Closing Plenary | Juliet Flower MacCannellRefashioning Jouissance for the Age of the ImaginaryWebster Lecture B 2811–11:30 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 311:30–1 Obscuring the good line: Mallarmé TodayJustin Clemens | A Superior SurfaceChristian R. Gelder | The Boy Who Lived and the Poet Who Should DieRobert Boncardo | Comrade Mallarmé?TransmissionGrace Hellyer | Reason and Enjoyment in Jacques Rancière's criticalpedagogyDiana Shahinyan | Trials in the 21st Century: what Serial's technologycan teach us about law, narrative, and Baltimore as a ‘State ofException’Ari Mattes | ‘No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom’: Pedagogy in the Ageof Revolution without ReasonUnmasterable SubjectsRussell Smith | ‘They’re only letters’: Textuality and Vitality from MaryShelley’s Frankenstein to Spike Jonze’s HerJoanne Faulkner | Inarticulate Wounds of Colonialism: Mute childrenand savages in Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Coetzee’s FoeTamlyn Avery | ‘From Another Distanced Mind': Monstrous Self-Representation in Plath’s The Bell JarWebster 332 28Webster 306 29Webster 327 301–2 Lunch (catered) Webster Level 34

Tuesday, 14th July2–3.30 A Single Abstract AnimalErin Brannigan | Talking Back: What Dance might make of Badiou’sphilosophical projectEhsan Azari Stanizai | Ecstasies of Unreason: Lacan and MysticaljouissanceKaren-Anne Wong | Child’s Pose: Becoming Child and thePhenomenology of Children’s Yoga ClassesDistinct FormsPrue Gibson | Earth VoiceJessica Marian | Desire, Rationality and Style in Derrida’s GlasLucille Holmes | Proposal for an Aesthetics of EthicsCalculus of the EndarkenmentIvan Niccolai | Bureaucracy and its DiscontentsAlan Cholodenko | ‘Computer Says No’, or: The Erasure of the HumanPageWebster 332 32Webster 306 33Webster 327 343.30–4 Coffee and Tea Webster Level 34–5.30 Theory Today Roundtable: What is to be Done?Copjec, MacCannell, Šumič Riha, SussmanWebster 327 355.30 Drinks at the Doncaster5

Friday 10 JulyMaster ClassesWebster 327 | 2–4Carol Jacobs | Atom Egoyan’s ‘Artaud Double Bill’Jelica Šumič Riha | Lacan’s ‘Logical Time’ and Badiou’s Theory of the SubjectPublic Lecture | Rado RihaWebster 327 | 4.30–5:30The 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 thismanifesto and the first as follows: if the first manifesto reaffirmed the possibility and necessity of thecontinuing existence of philosophy, the second is dedicated to its 'revolutionary pertinence'. In the passagefrom 'a separating doctrine of Being' to 'an integrative doctrine of doing' of the first Manifesto, one can isolatetwo theses in the second Manifesto: with regard to the contemporary world, it's a question of the 'renewal ofthe communist hypothesis.' This question is inseparable from the theme of the 'true life', which is nothing otherthan 'life under the sign of the Idea'. Here I will advance the following thesis which will be the main thread ofmy intervention: the task of the Idea that operates philosophy is to reinforce the materialist orientation of thisphilosophy.Rado Riha is a Slovene philosopher. He is a senior research fellow and currently the head of the Institute ofPhilosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coordinator ofthe philosophy module at the post-graduate study programme of the University of Nova Gorica. Riha'sresearch topics include ethics, epistemology, contemporary French philosophy, the psychoanalysis of JacquesLacan, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. From 1996 to 2003 he has been the editor-in-chief of the journalFilozofski vestnik, and since 1993 a member of its editorial board.6

Saturday 11 JulyOpening Plenary | Jelica Šumič RihaWebster Lecture B | 9.30–11Est Deus in nobis or The Will to EnjoyIn “Kant with Sade”, Lacan stages two incompatible couples, incompatible precisely to the extent that theybring together reason and jouissance: Kant and Sade on the one hand and Sade with Epictetus on the other. IfSade is coupled with Kant in order to reveal a hidden driving force behind Kant’s moral law, Epictetus’ joiningSade is revelatory of Sade’s deficiency as a desiring subject. Following Lacan’s indications concerning theradical change of the status of the subject resulting from the establishment of a new relationship betweendesire and will at the end of analysis, this paper examines two modalities of the subject’s confrontation withthe Other’s will to enjoy: Sade’s and the Stoics’. Insisting of a few crucial points of convergence and divergenceof these two modalities of the subject’s coming to terms with the will to jouissance, this paper’s aim is toexplore the conditions of possibility of an ethics without the Other, an ethics of the drive that allows for a nonperversetransgression of the pleasure principle.Jelica Šumič Riha is Professor of Philosophy at the Postgraduate School of Research Centre of the SlovenianAcademy of Sciences and Arts and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre ofthe Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was visiting professor at the University of Essex, UniversityParis 8 and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politikder 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) andEternity and Change. Philosophy in the Worldless Times (Zalozba ZRC, 2012). Currently she is working on aforthcoming volume entitled Volonté et Désir (Harmattan, Paris).SESSION 1 | 11.30–1Panel 1 — Discomforting ReasonsJess Whyte (Chair) | University of Western SydneyWebster 332 | 11.30-1The Pleasures of Beheading, or, what ISIS can teach us about the politicalRemy Low | University of SydneyThe 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 societieslike Australia, the extremity of such images have led to the framing of ISIS as an emergent “Absolute Other” tocivility and normal life; a barbaric “death cult” that appeals to a few isolated individuals with histories of socialisolation, mental health problems and/or criminal tendencies who are liable to be indoctrinated or seduced byIslamic extremism. In this paper, I tease out the possibility that, for those who sympathise with ISIS, theopposite may be the case: that in fact it is the politics of liberal societies in the Global North that are barbaricand that against them, the rhetoric of ISIS is eminently reasonable. If ISIS can be understood as an instance ofwhat Chantal Mouffe calls “the return of the political” that is parasitic on the hegemony of “politics as usual” inliberal societies of the Global North, then what is ignored in the guttural rush to pathological explanations of itssympathisers? Drawing on images disseminated by ISIS’s Al-Hayat media arm and statements from its selfdeclaredcaliph Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, I present a narrative thought experiment on how ISIS’s offer of a type ofpolitical agency and enjoyment otherwise unavailable can be powerfully persuasive.7

Unnatural Selection: Monstrous identity and the evolution of differenceKatherine Hawkins | Macquarie UniversityBy nature, the female Monster flouts convention. She has come to represent a gleefully vulgar, defiant anddeliberately excessive mockery of patriarchal and heteronormative dogmas, embodying all that is repressedand abjected within male-dominated society. But she is more than just a discursive tool, or a symbolicdumping ground for social anxieties. For those marginalised by patriarchal cruelty, the monster may representa welcome alternative and comfort: a decidedly unpious patron saint. For some, the Monster may serve as atotemic 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 theexistence of boundaries, even defy them. However, simply existing between boundaries still acknowledges thatthey are there, however arbitrarily. By identifying with the Monster, are we involuntarily strengthening harmfulsocial dichotomies? (Shildrick, 2001: 80). Critics of feminist and Queer theorists are often quick to warn of thedangers of emphasising difference, when egalitarian emphasis on commonality would be a far less divisivegoal. Baudrillard's 'Catastrophe' would seem to provide an attractive ideological concept–the removal of allindividualistic 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 animportant part of social transformation. Within the context of Queer/Feminist discourse, the Monster mayserve as an important advocate for equality while simultaneously resisting the erasure of experience andcoercion into sameness. The following questions are asked: How can the monstrous be reconciled withegalitarianism, and can Baudrillard's 'Catastrophe' be embraced within this framework of thought?Do you have anything to declare? Epistemological border control and the religiouscontraband of Buddhist critical theoryEdwin Ng | Deakin UniversityIn recent years, the Buddhist-derived practice of mindfulness meditation has been adapted across diversecontexts, including the staff training programs of Google and the US Military. This has provoked concernsabout the need for a critical theory of mindfulness. Taking the normative standpoint of a Buddhist ethos ofcare 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 Buddhistteachings. At base, it involves certain commitments of faith in Buddhist truth claims about the transformativepotential of spiritual self-cultivation via ethical conduct, attention training, and contemplative inquiry. I willoutline very schematically some potential lines of dialogue between Buddhist teachings and current enquirieson 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 byunacknowledged Euro-Christian-centrism, which might prevent reciprocal learning between Buddhist andWestern 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 declareand surrender its perceived 'religious contraband' before being allowed into intellectual debates as an object ofstudy rather than a subject of conversation? But why should Buddhism accede to this demand that it negatesits 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 oursecular age of globalatinisation? Who or what exactly is the source of discomfort? Who or what is beingun/reasonable? Who or what has something to hide? Who or what has something to declare? The Westerncultural heritage or its other?People are not stupid even though my paper is ridiculousTracey Pahor | University of MelbourneIn this paper, I attend to the ideas of Jacques Rancière and a story I was told. The story itself was told to (andhas frequently been told by) me for enjoyment; it is a ridiculous story about a workshop for mental healthprofessionals in which a woman gets dried apricot stuck in her ear. I consider the role of the audience in thisworkshop 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, notjust 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 havethe capacity to understand. I argue that the mindfulness workshop, like the performance of any story, is onlypossible on the basis that there were things people were presumed to already understand. Whether or not youthink it was a good idea for the woman to stick dried apricot in her ear (or that I have told an entertainingstory), 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, onlyequality, not the division between what is and is not sensible, can stand up to reason.Panel 2 — Performing EnjoymentChristian R. Gelder (Chair) | UNSWWebster 306 | 11.30-1How to act as if one were mourning: working through Melancholia with HegelBen Hjorth | Monash UniversityClassicist, essayist and poet Anne Carson is, perhaps unexpectedly, emerging as one of our most intriguingreaders of Hegel. From Antigonick (2012), the transgressive 'translation' of Sophokles in which Hegel isanachronistically, 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'–ifnot also inflationary–readings of Rebecca Comay and Slavoj Žižek. Underlying all of these approaches toHegel are an engagement with both psychoanalytic theory, and the work of Walter Benjamin, around theconcepts of melancholia and mourning and their relation to thought or 'philosophy'. In this paper I read Larsvon Trier's recent film Melancholia alongside these readings of Hegel, in seeking to understand thephilosophical (rather than the clinical) function and value of these concepts. Carson, Comay and Žižek alloutline, in their various ways, a figure of Hegel committed to speculative thought, which becomes imbued witha sense of performance. For this Hegel, read back via psychoanalysis and Benjamin, a certain melancholiadoes 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 itsapparent impossibility. This 'acting as if one were mourning', as if one could mourn, as if mourning werepossible–such as allegorically presented in von Trier's film–is at once an ethical and a logical imperative forHegel, 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 anybeginning 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 ofthe 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 violenttotalisation, but instead a performative 'leap': a speculative, even quasi-fictional investment in the verypossibility of such a leap beyond the melancholic limits of thought.Cooking with a see saw: the recomposition of the drama analogyEd Scheer | UNSW‘The woods are full of eager interpreters’. —Clifford Geertz.‘'In a first meaning, compositionism could stand as an alternative to critique’. —Bruno LatourLatour’s famous claim that ‘Critique’ has run out of steam is based on a move that sociologists call ‘the dramaanalogy’. Along with Goffman, Turner and others, even Barthes in Death of the Author, he gestures towards adramaturgical model for his argument. Critique is ‘This beautiful staging’ and forms a part of the ‘modernistmise-en-scène’ in which ‘you may debunk, reveal, unveil, but only as long as you establish, through this processof creative destruction, a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances.’ (475) Hewants to substitute ‘composition’ for critique, affirming a creative, pleasurable, playful sensibility, a practice ofnurturing 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 thepostdramatic. For example, is it meaningful to speak of a social drama if the stage drama is itself ossified as aform? To put the question differently, is a liquid state of modernity still amenable to such a linear pattern ofevents? And how might we recompose these terms?Seduction of the end of the endElizabeth Pulie | The University of SydneyA 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 evolvingpermutations of art as form. The cascading effect of the development of these forms leads to its finaldisappearance: 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 thedegradation of the significance of form via Pop.In the 1980s, post the disappearance or dematerialisation of the art object, artists such as Haim Steinbachand 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 notionof endgame art is lent cursory importance as a minor movement in the dying days of modern art (or theburgeoning of the postmodern): in reality however, the entire movement of modern art may be characterisedas a move towards its end, each style taking up the anti-art mantle until art objects so closely resemble theordinary 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 homogenisingindefinability, not so much as the end of art, but a potential end of the end of art. What is the function of artonce the ontological adventure of its dematerialisation is complete? Despite the recent disappearance of theart object, art’s embodiment by objects seems today to grow exponentially, via the increasing (anddisconcerting) 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 forthe 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 beautifulseems imminent: art instead of the end’. This paper will raise the question of the potential for contemporaryart 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 CinemaJulian Murphet (Chair) | UNSWWebster 327 | 11.30-1Life in the Old Vampire YetJames Donald | UNSWIn 1989, I published an article entitled ‘The Fantastic, the Sublime and the Popular; Or, What’s at Stake inVampire Films?’ Part of my argument there was that we enjoy vampires, ghosts, zombies, aliens, cyborgs andother such ambiguous figures because they enable us to reflect on the finitude of human existence and thelimits of the human without having to ‘think' about them. A quarter of a century on, those figures still haunt usand thinking about them seems to have spawned the new disciplinary field of Posthumanities, and alsoinforms 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 FilmsMark Steven | UNSWThis talk shows how a popular sub-genre of horror films has developed a uniquely sensitive perspective on thecyclic structure of capitalism. That sub-genre is the splatter film, whose various iterations all visually andnarratively privilege the abject moment when human bodies are destroyed irreparably. Splatter waspopularized in the 1960s by the exploitation films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and then fully commercialized inthe 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 nationalcinemas. 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 throughthe shambles, exploring splatter for both its consistencies and its derivations, whose interplay will be made toserve as a source of both theoretical and practical lessons for navigating the horror movie we all collectivelyinhabit.Anatomy of MelancholiaRobert Sinnerbrink | Macquarie UniversityThis paper analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars on Trier’s Melancholia, focusingin particular on the film’s remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique ofEnlightenment rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-romantic allegory of world-destruction. At the sametime, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds—cinematic but also cultural andnatural—that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticismor melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links itwith two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman’s Shame [Skammen] (1968) and AndreiTarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986). All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, andhistorical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophicloss 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 worlddestructionhas the paradoxical ethical meaning, I suggest, of preparing for a post-humanist beginning.SESSION 2 | 2.30–4Panel 1 — Intervallic TimesCarol Jacobs (Chair) | Yale UniversityWebster 332 | 2.30- 4Rosa Plus Emma: revolutionary rationality and pleasurable revoltJulian Murphet | UNSWIn 2015, we face broadly the return of an old tension internal to Left politics: a prodigious and ratherpleasureless theoretical resurgence of Marxian categories and economic analyses, alongside a febrile activistpolitical culture of occupations, flash mobs and riots. Rather than look to the tired pantheon of usual suspectsin conflict (Marx vs Bakunin, Lenin vs Gesell, etc), this paper excavates a pseudo-couple of the far moreenabling Deleuzian “and…and..” type, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, to see what their juxtapositionmight have to offer contemporary debates and disagreements. In focus will be the distinctive part reserved forpleasure—physical, aesthetic, sexual, and sensual—in both their writings, and the structural relationshipbetween 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 ageneralised libidinal insurgency. Rosa + Emma = death to Left Puritanism!Cruel Radiance: Rancière and Michaels on Agee and EvansKnox Peden | Australian National UniversityJacques Rancière’s reconfiguration of aesthetic modernism as a site of egalitarian verification has recentlycome under fire from the American literature scholar Walter Benn Michaels, who sees in it yet another iterationof a materialist aesthetics that obscures inequality by privileging perspective over structure or form. Thecontrast between the two thinkers is given stark expression in their contending interpretations of the Americanclassic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. The text and photoessayrecounting the lives of three Southern sharecropper families is a masterpiece saturated in failure–Agee’sfailure to produce the piece of reportage that Fortune magazine commissioned; his failure, dramatized in thetext, to stabilize the work’s representational form or genre; the work’s failure to find a coherent reception in itsinitial publication, in the context of the Second World War and the postwar boom. Failure is central to11

Rancière’s and Michaels’s respective interpretations as well. Rancière reads Agee’s failure to respect genreconventions and modernist norms as an aesthetic virtue; its failure as art (Greenberg saw in Agee’s writing atendency toward kitsch) is integral to the emancipatory scene it stages. For Michaels, the failure of thefamilies to appreciate or even perceive the aesthetic qualities of the work is the index of the economicinequality that separates the subjects of the work from the artists who made it and the spectators whoappreciate it. This paper will assess these failures, as well as the possibility that the failure to reconcileRancière’s and Michaels’s approaches would be a valediction of both projects.Reasoning the Disaster: Catastrophe; Žižek; Dupuy; luck; timeLaurence Simmons | University of AucklandHow do we think the disaster? Think towards or against the coming disaster? Natural disaster, industrial andtechnological disaster, moral disaster, and now economic and financial disaster. This paper starts from theissue of our relationship with catastrophes that have not yet happened and it is based on the work of culturaltheorist Slavoj Žižek and French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy. The essence of catastrophe has becomenormal 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 notbecause we can only answer when we learn the outcome of some event. So are we justified in takingpreventative action against global warming? If we do the catastrophe might not occur? But can we be surethat 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 believeit will really happen. Can we make a rational choice before the apocalypse? If we are to confront the threat of acatastrophe 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 futureis casually produced by our actions in the past but the way we act is determined by how we anticipate thefuture, and how we react to this anticipation. As he thinks through the relationship between the crisis of thesacred and our inability to imagine and avoid a catastrophic future, Dupuy develops the idea of an enlightenedcatastrophism as an alternative to the principle of reasoned precaution.Panel 2 — The Specular ReflexRobert Sinnerbrink (Chair) | Macquarie UniversityWebster 306 | 2.30- 4The Limits of Liberal Rationalism and the Return of Anti-MaterialismMichael Potts | University of CanterburyOur civilization understands itself not as a product of history and maker of future history but as afacilitation–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 hascome to be seen by many critics as a seminal novel of struggle against the alienation and anomie of moderncapitalist society. It has also been criticized by Henry Giroux (who condemned it as “a morally bankrupt andpolitically reactionary film”) and others who detect something of a fascist aesthetic under the anti-capitalistovertones. Jennifer Baker (2008) comments that “Fight Club has the appearance of a liberal agendaadvocating a revolutionary fervour against oppressive fascistic forces, but actually masks an ideology similarto early forms of fascism”.What these criticisms have in common is that, focusing on the film adaptation of the novel, they identify theovert or superficial elements of fascism therein, such as the black uniforms, the crew-cut hair, the cult ofpersonality and the glorification of violence. However, the fascistic elements so readily apparent in the filmadaptation 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 andfaceless corporations that the novel rejects but -- ultimately–the enlightenment conception of the individualand society. It rejects the rationalistic judico-legal conception of the individual in society and instead seeks tobreak 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 individualas an entity able and entitled to shape their own destiny according to their will, instead of being defined andconceived of as a member of a particular society, culture, and ethnicity. With reference to Zeev Sternhell’s TheCounter-Enlightenment Tradition (2010), Slavoj Zizek’s “From Politics to Biopolitics” (2004) and Paul Monaco’sEuropean Culture and Consciousness: 1870-1980 (1983) it will seek to explore the representation incontemporary film and literature of the dichotomy between people’s desire to be free agents, able to pursuetheir own ends, and the need for authenticity, for the feeling that we have particular roots and connections thatare real and meaningful rather than simply contingent. The criticisms of modernity implicit in texts by writerssuch as Palahniuk and Houellebecq have been condemned as reactionary, yet they also seem to delineate alacuna or contradiction with Western society that is becoming increasingly pressing. Are we witnessing thebreakdown of the liberal Enlightenment conception of individuality and the return of anti-materialism andirrationality in film and literature, or can the contradictions and shortfallings of modernity and capitalism inWestern society be contained?The Euthanasia of Pleasure: Guy Debord’s concept of the Spectacle and the absolute realisation of thecommodity formKevin Wilson | The University of Western AustraliaGuy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle presents a Marxian critique of capitalism on the precipice of thecybernetic revolution and its encumbent technical rationalisation. Enriched by his engagement with WesternMarxism and the intellectual ferment of post-war French thought, Debord set out first to reveal and thensublate 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 theyare shaped by the context of late capitalism.As Debord conceived of it, the spectacle represents both the “outcome and the trajectory of the existingmode 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 itsspectacular phase, late capitalism has, according to Debord, abandoned the form of Reason whichunderpinned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. In its place is substituted an anti-human, ahistorical capitalistlogic 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 thespectacle’s “glittering diversions” [SduS §59]; a society wherein the greatest excesses of jouissance conceal adeeply repressive mechanism directed against any possibility for human self-realisation. This paper willanalyse Debord’s evaluation of the historical fate of reason, pleasure and being under the conditions of thetotalised commodity relations of the late capitalist spectacle.Becoming Spectres in CinemaYen-Chen Chuang | Tamkang University, TaiwanThis 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 thatthe birth of modern cinema indeed reproduces life whose meaning needs to be redefined. While consideringthe production of films as a spectralization of cutting images, the movie-goers are still implicated in anexperience of living on. What we call “still life” in paintings is analogous to the film bodies. In cinema, we inventa 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, forinstance, best exemplifies the link of filmic screen to the aesthetics of animality. To take Satoshi Kon as anexample, in his Paprika, theater, cinema, and other kinds of media together create phosphorescent images andportray the psychic life as mechanized, non-human, and somehow animalistic bodies. It is noteworthy thatKon’s dream-space originates from a mythical animal, tapir (baku), which literally breathes life into human’sunconsciousness. Kon gives the spectators a glimpse into the virtual world synthesizing shards of images thatultimately leads to a becoming-automaton.13

According to Bergson, livingness marks the moment of indetermination—it is a state of difference. In orderfor evolution to take place, there must be different species. At some level, the becoming of cinema, whichintroduces the evolution of images, only moves toward an aggregation of dif-ferences, a cut that refers to aspace in-between, between memory and perception, present and future, life and afterlife. Eventually, cinemaconsists of an impersonal assemblage of images representing the undying, undecipherable, andunrepresentable.Panel 3 — EndgamesJustin Clemens (Chair) | University of MelbourneWebster 327 | 2.30- 4The rise of 'nerdcore' porn: Digital gaming as a technology of the bodyThomas Apperley | UNSWNerdcore porn is produced and collated for the scopic pleasure of a presumably male audience, but this paperwill argue that this is a result of a contemporary turn towards the spectacularization of the body of the gamerthat resonates strongly with the historic roots of the science and technology of gesture that Linda Williamscalls the ‘frenzy of the visible’. While nineteenth century scholars of motion from Tourette to Muybridge wereconcerned with capturing the truth of the human body in motion, motion- and gesture-based digital gameinterfaces employ the most contemporary technologies that were motivated by these earlier drives in amundane and naturalized manner. However, the utility of the gestural interface increasingly relies on itsprecision in capturing and rendering the motions of the body. The emergence of nerdcore porn destabilizes thenaturalization of gesture and the body in everyday computer interfaces by highlighting how unevenly thesetechnologies produce the gendered body of the gamer.This paper examines the representation of the naked female gamer in nerdcore pornography. It argues thatthe naked female gamer reveals more than simply a reassertion of the male gaze, or of male dominance in thesphere of gaming, now eroded by increasingly ‘casualized’ games. Nor is it entirely a transparent rendering of asadistic impulse in gaming. Rather, nerdcore pornography also makes visible the increasing significance ofdigital gaming as a technology of the body, which opens up a new approach to the material history of gamingthat is both embodied and gendered. This history excavates the uneven and gendered conjunctures of bodieswith the technologies of gaming.The Elizabeth-Anna Illusion: Refuting mimesis with BioShock InfiniteMahli-Ann Butt | UNSWYour escorting companion, Elizabeth, in Irrational Game’s BioShock Infinite (2013), was notably modelled aftera cosplayer, Anna Moleva, for her accurate cosplay of Elizabeth. A version of the classic Chicken-or-The-Eggcausality dilemma occurs when a distinguishable sense of the original Elizabeth is dissolved in characterproduction. I was inspired by the reactions to other cosplays of Elizabeth declaring “Don’t you know you’recosplaying 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 gamingculture in the assessment of being a real gamer. Theories of mimesis, as seen since Plato, are based on amistaken 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 nerdcredentialelitism (as manifested in Gamergate). Predominantly, the focus of this paper is a case study ofElizabeth 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 lyricalabout BioShock Infinite.All Work and No Play Makes Ingress a Surprisingly Fun GameKyle Moore | University of SydneyMobile gaming relocates the practice of digital game play from the private, or semi-private, location of thehome or the arcade to public locations. As the technological capabilities of devices increase, mobile gamesare able to engage with these public spaces in more sophisticated ways. Niantic Labs popular alternate-reality14

game Ingress divides players into two factions, tasking them with hacking locations for dominance of publicspaces. Ingress is a game with no foreseeable end. With the ongoing practice of place hacking, and theongoing practice of play, pleasure is derived from the player’s role within larger communities of practice. Thispaper argues that playing mobile games like Ingress is a situated practice. That is, the performance of play isdependent on a range of sociocultural and material circumstance, while simultaneously making meaning outof such circumstances. Such practices bring the functionality of play into question–namely where is theboundary between work and pleasure? In applying a situated approach to such mobile games, this paperargues that Ingress is best viewed as a form of productive play. Firstly, Ingress is a playful engagement withthe 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 resultsin the tangible outcome of a user-generated mapping of locations. Ingress plays with the material constraintsof the urban environment and mobile gaming technology, resulting in new shared meanings of urbanenvironments. While data is valuable for Niatnic Labs parent company, Google, the creation of sharedinformation and meaning is arguably key to communities of practice which form around the game. Whileplaying Ingress is in itself a form of work, in that the physical action of play results in the valuable commodityof data, this paper argues that the process of generating meaning for communities of practice results in apleasurable outcome for players.Plenary | Henry SussmanWebster Lecture B | 4.30–6Parables of Playful IntelligenceOne pivotal landmark of contemporary culture already in play by 2005 but by no means at its current scale orprofundity was an all-absorbing involvement in and dependency on digital technologies. There was simply noway of anticipating the full degree to which cybernetic devices and ontology would not only overwhelmcommunications and the synthesis, archiving, formatting, and recall of information but also dominate socioeconomicrelations 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’sdiscerned the lineaments and metaphysics of the cybernetic universe, were not so far removed along theacademic corridor from those wild and invariably subversive critical theorists as we might think. For one, theAnthony Wilden, whose 1972 System and Structure established definitive benchmarks for the interactionbetween 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, incomposing a Computer Science textbook for the general public ( Gödel, Escher Bach, 1979), synthesized awork as literarily playful as scientifically methodical. His characterization of the advances, above all by KurtGödel, 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’sinaugural, 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-endedtransformation. Many of the university’s operational fundaments as of 2005 are nothing if not up for grabs adecade later. It is in this sense that a “digital unconscious” entrenching and expanding itself at aninconceivable rate of acceleration presents cultural critics both with a daunting challenge and a creativeopportunity. Neither high-mindedly distancing ourselves from these phenomena and their epiphenomena norunreservedly espousing the technologies will quite do. This paper unpacks several of the memorable parablesthrough which the avatars of the digital age prepared the public both for the technology’s creative leaps and itsembedded 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 ( TheTask of the Critic, 2005; Around the Book, 2011; Playful Intelligence, 2014) has explored the systematic andcybernetic 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 encouragementand support furnished by Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina, founded and co-edits 'Feedback,' a theory-driven15

weblog publication out of Open Humanities Press ( www. openhumanitiespress. org/ feedback). He's constantlyon the lookout for new posts in 11 interrelated topical areas, including yours.16

Sunday 12 JulyMaster classWebster 327, 10.30–12Juliet Flower MacCannell | The Open Ego: Woolf, Joyce and the ‘Mad’ SubjectBeach walk – Coogee to BondiMeet at Coogee Pavilion , 1:30Book Launch at Minerva Gallery4/111 Macleay Street, Potts Point | 4–6Lacan, Deleuze, Badiouby A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and Jon RoffePainting is a Critical Formby Helen Johnson17

Monday 13th JulyPlenary | Carol JacobsWebster Lecture B | 9.30 -11A Tripp to the London National GalleryCelebrated by Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee, and many others, W. G. Sebald has been recognized as one of ourmost 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 bothverify and question their textual counterparts. In a brief, less-well-known, piece* Sebald assumes the voice ofthe art critic and takes up the images of Jan Peter Tripp. He speaks at length of what no viewer of these workscan possibly remain blind to: their remarkable fidelity to reality. And yet within these pages, as we shift backand forth between the artwork and Sebald’s commentary, we are suddenly swept from a strategized positionof careful reason to an exuberant performance of fictional depiction as something of a prank. Perhapsnowhere in Sebald’s writings is there a more nuanced theoretical meditation on the function of his prose, bothon 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 ComparativeLiterature at Yale University. She has written extensively on Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Wordsworth, Rilkeand Paul de Man and others. Carol is the author of Dissimulating Harmony (1978), UncontainableRomanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999) and Skirting the Ethical(2008).SESSION 1 | 11.30–1Panel 1 — NarcotheoryKnox Peden (Chair) | Australian National UniversityWebster 332 | 11.30-1Incomplete Projects and their Dark Partial Pleasures: Psychopolitics and the Professional Constraints ofScienceChris Rudge | University of SydneyA short and lacunose history of writings attests to the pleasure that Freud and his early collaborator, JosefBreuer, took in hypnotising their patients in the 1890s. But this was a shortlived series of “enjoyments” that thepair would swiftly abandon, fearing the consequences of ‘transference-countertransference,’ a phenomenonthat had already made one of Breuer’s patients, Anna O, believe she was pregnant when she was not. Andwhile Freud’s own initial confidence in hypnosis seems to have been finally attenuated by his wife’s cautiousadmonitions of its exploitative potential, Freud’s wife’s voice had been yet only another confirmation of dangerfor a neurologist who labored under a readymade aversion to controversy. If Freud had become excessivelywary, and even paranoid, by 1895, it was because he had already once fallen into ignominy among hiscolleagues, 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 thepsychopharmacological revolution that would cascade into orthodoxy in the mid-twentieth-century. Usingcocaine 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 Berlinpsychiatrist, Albert Erlenmeyer, in an embarrassing event that promptly dissuaded him from pursuing this lineof research. Discontinuing work on cocaine meant that Freud could avoid being eulogised as “the man who letloose the third scourge”—an appellation that had already been imputed to him (at least apocryphally). But18

Freud’s reputation did not entirely escape the tarnishment that comes with the unregulated, and evenpleasurable prescription of medicine.Freud’s essay on cocaine, published as “Über Coca,” abides as a disreputable study, having drawn piercingcriticism from psychiatrists for its imprecision, from psychoanalysts including Lacan for its poorargumentation, 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 orpsychopolitical dictates, my paper seeks to underscore the importance of thymos (reputation) in contouringand defining the limits of psychoanalytic and psychiatric experimentation, and constraining the extent to whichenjoyment 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, MexicoIn 2006, Umbr(a) journal published an issue contesting the notion of the incurable as the limit topsychoanalysis as both a clinical practice and a discourse. However, almost ten years have passed and ourcontemporary situation still places the notion of cure rotating around medical facts, diagnostic criteria, andsocial adaptability of individuals. The purpose of this paper, in relation to this year’s topic “Reason plusenjoyment”, tries to embark on the notion of the incurable as a negative entity in which jouissance is placed atthe epicenter of our clinical practice as psychoanalysts. If it has been stated that psychoanalytical treatmenttends to take too long, and maneuvers around unknown categories of knowledge, then why would someoneconsult a psychoanalyst in the 21 st century? In this case, why would jouissance be the aim of psychoanalyticalcure? What is the work that the psychoanalyst is expected to perform indicating that symptoms allude tosomething? However, one should be weary of such remarks that pinpoint towards a witch-hunt ofpsychoanalysts as disturbers of sleep, just as Freud intended The Interpretation of Dreams to be. The problemshould not be focused on other practices that sympathize with health and well-being, but we should instructour questions to psychoanalysts themselves and grant the right to respond: why doesn’t the apple fall far fromthe tree?In accordance to working the previous concepts, this paper will include a minor detail of a clinical case inMexico City in relation to Freud’s notion of trauma. After the various social upheavals placed in Mexico due tocorruption, drug trafficking, and insecurity issues, one patient relates her experience with a narco-threat thatshook 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 andjouissance, and if so, how does this modify our understanding of psychoanalytic clinical practice based oncurability and incurability? Are new subjects emerging from the social array our contemporary world hasdeveloped 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 MelbourneAround the Fall of the Berlin Wall, electronic music took on a new role in the lives of many people. WhatDeleuze calls the splendour of the impersonal, as experienced in rave’s ecstatic form, soon attracted massaudiences from eastern and western Europe as they danced on the grave of history. By 1997, the annual LoveParade in Berlin saw one-million people dancing in the city’s Tiergarten. Drug use was a strong feature ofmainstream 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 formany, 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 ahuge part of the local tourist industry and the city’s self-image as a place of commodified, ecstatic weekendencounters. This contemporary manifestation of ecstatic experience can be linked to the long history ofecstasy, including its religious history, such as that of mystics and pilgrimages, as well as its link to aestheticsand intoxication.Even so, this short paper lingers on the post-1989 moment to explore, then, dual senses of ecstasy aroundGerman 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 RecentFrench Philosophy (2012) plus a subsequent critique of Gibson’s argument by Benjamin Noys. Like Noys, I find19

Gibson’s ‘melancholic-ecstatic’ coupling suggestive for thinking the present and life after 1989. I explore thismoment within the context of the German Spaßgesellschaft–the hedonistic society. This was the pejorativebroadsheet 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 hadsecured geopolitical and moral legitimacy for the state after the catastrophe of Nazism. What thiscontemporary reportage missed was a sense of hope and pleasure-seeking after 1989, not only in Germany. Itoverlooked the hunger for ecstasy, the search for new shapes of self, other and society. This paper willaccount for (some of) the draw of ecstatic experiences (with and without drugs) in the decades since the Fallof the Wall–but also the disaffection that has become a remarkable feature of affective life in the last decade.Panel 2 — Logics of PoeticsJulliet Flower MacCannell (Chair) | UC IrvineWebster 306 | 11.30-1Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Poetic ExcessChris Oakey | UNSWIn 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: languagethat is used between persons and which is put towards purposive ends. Language, that is, whose linguisticmateriality 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 whatthe 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 forthe 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. Thispaper follows the pioneering work of James Guetti to investigate the manner in which the rigorous logicalinvestigations of Wittgenstein can be turned towards those moments in poetic texts that revel in grammaticalexcess, breakdown, and pure linguistic pleasure. It examines the force and role of such moments in examplesfrom 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 IsArka Chattopadhyay | University of Western SydneyThe paper will explore the Borromean logic of Lacanian knots in the impossible co-existence of solitude andcompany in Samuel Beckett’s 1964 novel How It Is. Instead of reading the (in)famous Borromean knot intoBeckett’s fictional universe as a metaphor, the paper will make use of the knotty Borromean logic to illuminethe operation of Beckett’s text with special emphasis on the strict equivalence in Lacan’s rings and Beckett’scrawlers, the function of the third in bringing one and two together and the passage of the infinite straight lineinto a circle (i.e. the fundamental principle of the Borromean knot) in the dialogue between the form ofBeckett’s book and an image of form within the book. Just as the three rings of string in a Borromean chainare individually alone and yet knotted together by the third ring which knots up the other two through a twistaround a hole; in Beckett’s text, the crawlers in the infinite mud oscillate between solitude and companythrough a rigorously logical play of imagination. I would argue that the Borromean logic which makes thingshang together for the subject only at the level of a hole is consistent with Beckett’s aporetics, thriving on thecontradiction 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 selfsameletter, bores holes into Reason in Beckett’s novel. This hole of the Real collapses Reason and reveals alayer of subjective enjoyment which is irreducible to rationality and yet not without its own knotty logic. I wouldargue that logic as a Lacanian ‘science of the Real’ interrupts and jettisons logo-centric Reason in How It Isand opens up a subjectivity of enjoyment understood in the Lacanian sense of jouissance when writing isenvisaged as a writing by a body part (nails) on another body part (the other’s back). This writing on the fleshby the flesh along with the corporeal inscription of the moving body in How It Is finally produce a complexwriting where the body of the signifier i.e. the letter writes against the sense of the signifier. The impossiblewriting of Real Jouissance permeates the closure of Beckett’s text where the insistence of what cannot bewritten is felt in the gap between the spoken and the written. This dialectical split between typography and20

invocation in Beckett’s text produces the Lacanian modality of the ‘impossible’ as a signature of the Real whichHow It Is transfixes as its final frontier beyond which there is neither hearing nor saying.Poetic thinking and aletheia in the thought of HeideggerElise Addlem | University of MelbourneFocusing on Heidegger’s analyses of Hölderlin, wherein he explicates his conception of poetic thinking asdwelling historically, I will argue that it is possible to conceive of poetry as a place of historical truth, andmoreover, of emancipatory exigency. Thought as the bringing closer of truth, which is the revelation of being, islargely a forgotten conception of truth today. Thus is Heidegger’s stance, though it is often taken to be nothingmore 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 radicallyfrom the contemporary conception of the writer as entertainer. I will look at the extent to which Heidegger’s isan analysis via which we can resuscitate truth in the context of an ahistorical presentism.Panel 3 — More Than OneJoan Copjec (Chair) | Brown UniversityWebster 327 | 11.30-1What is a Collective Subject? Freudian Massenpsychologie RevisitedTadej Troha | Slovenian Academy of Sciences and ArtsIn the introduction to Massenpsychologie und die Ichanalyse, Freud presents a thesis which is a necessarystarting point of every psychoanalytic attempt to approach the problem of mass psychology, that is, the thesisof a specific type of identity between individual and social psychology. The first logical conclusion, drawn byFreud himself, is well known. Since individual psychology is “only rarely and under certain exceptionalconditions … 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 butnevertheless equally logical conclusion? Would it be possible to argue that identity is to be read also in theother direction and to claim that social psychology, too, is from the very first, vom Anfang an, individualpsychology as well? Would it be possible to claim that it is precisely the second equation that is the reasonbehind 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 theemergence of mass phenomena and the transformation that occurs in such instances. In this view, massphenomena must be approached from two perspectives. In the first perspective, we are interested in thetransformation of an individual and the conditions under which some hitherto non-related to-be-members formmass phenomena. But from another perspective, mass phenomena are something else as well–a peculiarmanifestation of society in which the latter gets condensed into a concrete phenomenon that “for the momentreplaces the whole of human society”.The paper argues that, in the formation of a group that begins to represent the entire society, there must bepreserved or, better yet, repeated a dimension of the subject that cannot be reduced to the hypostasizedMassenseele. 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 beinscribed into group–some form of subject must emerge.Marque et plus: On Prime ZeroSigi Jöttkandt | UNSWAre we labouring today under a new form of political inscription that draws itself on a different scale and with adynamism very different from the Symbolic Law of the past? One could describe the sites it traces not somuch as an 'non place' as an antopos–if in this we can hear the anxious double negative of a 'not without aplace'. The word border comes from Old High German bort, the side of a ship, and also in Sanskrit, a 'cuttingoff'. This paper suggests that today's antopos exposes the logic of the border-cut as extinct–an antiquatedfiction that takes down with it the entire logico-epistemological system we have inherited from the Greeks. Ifas philosophers from Derrida, to Deleuze and Guattari, to Badiou have shown, the concept of the border entails21

a logic of exclusion that sustains itself on an empty place–historically troped as the zero–what does thecontemporary experience of being 'without boundaries' imply mathematically? One often talks loosely aboutthe 'perversity' of the Law, but an analysis of three parables of climate change helps us to pinpoint moreprecisely how the structure of how the political lends itself to us today. For there is a masculine and a femininelogic to every inscription of the Symbolic Law. To try to 'diagnose' our contemporary experience of theSymbolic Law, we should look not to perversion but to the Prime Zero of a specifically 'feminine' psychosis.On Two Essays by Joan CopjecRex Butler | University of QueenslandIn her 'Cutting Up', now included in the collection Read My Desire, Joan Copjec puts forward a critique ofdeconstruction through a reading of a 1980 essay by Samuel Weber entitled 'Closure and Exclusion'. Her pointagainst deconstruction is that, due to its commitment to undoing every totality, it is unable to account for thefact of closure and totality. As Copjec writes, what deconstruction is incapable of grasping is 'a more complexnotion of closure and totality that was not simply illusory and that, far from suppressing difference, was thevery condition of its possibility'.In many ways, Copjec's critique echoes that of Slavoj Zizek in his 'Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at itsDestination?', and similarly we might say that the paradoxical effect of Copjec's critique of Weber is to showthat Weber (and deconstruction more generally) is already saying what she is saying. But, beyond pointing outthis similarity -- a mere academic point-scoring exercise or effect of the arrival of the letter -- we might look athow the kind of 'coincidence' raised here is played out in another of Copjec's great essays, which takes up thework of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, 'The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act'.SESSION 2 | 2- 3.30Panel 1 — Witches, Novels, and the ArchivePrue Gibson (Chair) | UNSWWebster 306 | 2-3.30Fiction and Concept: The Novel’s Supplementation of Philosophy in Late Twentieth-Century AmericaJoshua Comyn | University of MelbourneLeaving off from a statement by Alain Badiou that the novel has stood in for philosophy when the latter hasfound itself weak—the 19th century Realist Novel for example supplementing the weakness of philosophybetween Hegel and Nietzsche—I would like to think the status of the novelistic Fiction in relation to that of thephilosophical 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 McCarthyand Thomas Pynchon, and the manner in which their works perform a trial—a pre-eminently philosophicaldrama—of the becoming subject of the reader of these works. Given that the novel is the preeminent art of themodern subject qua individual, I will seek to elaborate the manner in which the Fiction of these works performsthe pleasure of thinking and the thinking of pleasure insofar as these concern the question of the (merelypossible) becoming subject of the reader.Sacrifice on the altar of history: Mediation and the corrosive teleology of rationalized efficiencyThomas Sutherland | University of Melbourne‘If we consider the mass of individual happenings,’ writes Hegel, ‘history appears as an altar on whichindividuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed’. For Hegel, thisephemeral character of history is the concrete image of evil, the negation that drives the affirmative characterof reason onward, submerging all particular ends within the universal end of history itself. In other words, theprogress of the spirit of world history necessitates the tragic ruination of the past, and through this gradualand repeated sacrifice the universal principles of this process of mediation emerges. This image of history asa process of continual immolation in the name of a larger rational purpose, effectively representing themovement of history in the terms of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, preservation and destruction, is22

perfectly suited to a philosopher such as Hegel torn between the utopian hopes of Enlightenmentprogressivism 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 normalizationof so-called creative destruction in our present age, and in particular, the perceived necessity of sacrifice (oftraditions, norms, institutions, and so on) in the name of efficiency as rational end. Looking specifically at theentropic nature of the digital archive, which operates not so much to preserve data as to ensure its continuedcirculation and regeneration (contra the negentropic design that motivated prior forms of archival), I will arguethat we must pay more careful attention to the technical ephemerality of contemporary media, and thepresupposition of an inherently rational and teleological end that motivates their presumed disposability. Giventhe extent to which history (as an object) is conditioned by the media with which it is recorded, do we risksacrificing history itself to the ‘pragmatic’ exigencies of an ossified economic rationalism that strives topreserve 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 TheoryLauren Bliss | University of MelbourneThis paper will develop the early modern witch-hunts as a pre-cinematic phenomenon. Pre-cinema typicallyrefers to the invention of devices such as the magic lantern, camera obscura and trick mirror; however in thispaper 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 theappearance of the foetus through vision alone. Posing the hunts as a pre-cinematic phenomenon bounded byboth unreason and desire, this paper will aim to open up reformulated questions for Susan Buck-Morss’ widelyaccepted thesis of cinema’s aesthetic disconnection between the ‘natural’ body and perception.Panel 2 — The IntractableJelica Šumič Riha (Chair) | Slovenian Academy of Sciences and ArtsWebster 327 | 2-3.30“A sort of Sade, but funnier.”: Lacan’s Plato in the light of BadiouBryan Cooke | University of MelbourneAlain Badiou famously remarked that “the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the renaissance ofphilosophy.” That psychonalysis is, in Badiou’s sense, an anti-philosophy, is something that I take (followingJustin Clemens' recent work) to be uncontroversial. But what exactly is so essential about anti-philosophy forphilosophy? What is the proper relationship of the former to the latter and vice versa? This paper will take upthese questions in relation to Lacan’s 1958 seminar on “transference” and, in particular, that seminar’sengagement with a text that seems to explicitly occupy the threshold between philosophy and its antiphilosophicalcounterpart: Plato’s Symposium.In reading Lacan reading Plato, I will attempt to show how Badiou’s reference to the connection betweenphilosophy and anti-philosophy finds itself already staged in Plato’s dialogue as a problem arising out of thecomplicated circuit between reason and enjoyment. In discussing how Lacan, Plato and Badiou conceive ofthis circuit, I will try show how a reading of the Symposium which revolves around the Platonic tensionbetween eros (love) and aidos (pious shame) ultimately opens up the question of a political-philosophicalforce-field in which philosophy and law, shame and love, political affect and intellectual jouissance cometogether in a kind of perpetual stasis. However, while such a reading of Plato is not unique to Lacan (forexample it can be found among the disciples of Leo Strauss) it is the question of how this force-field isreconfigured in the modern period which, I argue, comes increasingly to occupy Lacan in the later seminars, apreoccupation which (I shall attempt to show) provides perhaps unexpected insights into the fragile nature ofsubjectivation in the age of digital capitalism.“Dialectical poetry is the reverse of dialectical politics”: Art and Politics inAlain Badiou’s Theory of the SubjectRobert Boncardo | University of SydneyWith its infuriatingly complex prose, its intricate philosophical constructions, its outbursts of real rhetoricalviolence and its unapologetic commitment to French Maoism, Alain Badiou’s 1982 book Theory of the Subject23

emains 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 andethically, and perhaps even philosophically unhinged.In this talk, I will attempt to reconstruct the philosophical and political project that Badiou pursues in Theoryof the Subject. I will do so by focusing on the first two sections, which are devoted to Hegel and Mallarmérespectively, 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 May68, Theory of the Subject constitutes a unique intervention into a key debate. And despite Badiou having prisedapart the autonomous spheres of art and politics in his post-Being and Event work, a close reading of Theoryof the Subject suggests that something of the relation forged between them in his early work remains andcontinues to give his work its singular force.Deleuze melancholia: object, world, cinemaJon Roffe | UNSWDespite the fact that serious and important engagements with psychological and psychoanalytic categoriesrun through Deleuze’s work from beginning to end, there is at least one striking omission: melancholia. At firstblush, this is not surprising, given his general hostility towards both neuropaths and the kind of egocentricapproaches to psychopathology also mercilessly attacked by Lacan. However, in light of recent work thatchallenges Freud’s intertwining of mourning and melancholia, which locates the latter instead under theheading 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 theobject-cause of desire in Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus (which are, orthodoxy aside, remarkablyclose), the paper will consider the modern ‘loss of the world’ that orients the Cinema books as ethical andpolitical documents. In sum, I will argue that there is a powerful Lacanian-inflected concept of melancholia tobe developed on the basis of Deleuze’s work.SESSION 3 | 4 -5.30Panel 1 — Harnessing JouissanceArka Chattopadhyay (Chair) | University of Western SydneyWebster 332 | 4-5.30How Are We Enjoying: Harnessing Feminine JouissanceAndrew Dickson | Massey UniversityCindy Zeiher | University of CanterburyIt could be argued that how we enjoy is uncontrollable. The importance of enjoyment via the Other is centralnot only to enjoyment itself, but also to one being able to enjoy that which is out of grasp and not fullyrecognisable. The obligation to enjoy even that which one does not want to enjoy is stronger than ever. Thismanifests most obviously when one feels disgust at accepting and being seen as accepting enjoyment whichis being imposed. Such an obligatory compulsion to enjoy demarcates the excess of violence which, it couldbe argued, is institutional, managerial and bureaucratic. This enjoyment, far from being a space for socialtransformation, sustains the status quo.How we enjoy is socially transmitted yet for the subject the obligation to enjoy becomes an embodied eventthat may not necessarily be desired. Jouissance here is in a dialectic relationship with desire, and it is from thisconjuncture that a claim to control might emerge. In harnessing feminine jouissance (whereby the subject isnot 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 fromits context.We offer the example of the modern managerial super-ego as exhibiting a logic which navigates firstly, howwe enjoy and secondly, how a dialectic between desire and feminine jouissance might simultaneously revealand harness the horror of pleasure.24

Jean-François Lyotard’s dispositif: expenditure in cinemaSharon Mee | UNSWIn 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 thePhantasy’ (1971) and ‘Acinema’ (1973) to analyse the force of ecstasy or jouissance that is both in the bodyand in the image. This paper asks: what are the expenditures that are channelled and exploited by thedispositif, 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 ofcinematographic movement which sees the valuable ‘return and profit’ of movement in the production ofcinema. The second kind of movement that Lyotard describes has two poles—‘immobility and excessivemovement’—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 enjoymentand sexual pleasure (la jouissance)’ (Lyotard, ‘Acinema’: 171). And yet, although the intensities of ecstasy orjouissance see ‘uncompensated losses’ in consumption, the dispositif of cinema seeks to bind and exploitintensities nonetheless. In this sense, the dispositif can be seen as the structures, arrangements ordispositions that bind and exploit the intensities of ecstasy or jouissance.Ecstasy or jouissance is predicated on (affective) proximity and ‘uncompensated losses’ for the subject inthe expenditure of energy. In regards to cinema, ecstasy or jouissance has an affective force. Distance andmastery is lost in relation to jouissance. It is not that the spectator has mastery over space and time from thispoint to that, rather, the spectator loses herself in the difference between a charge and discharge, and in doingso, subject and object mean nothing other than the operation of and for expenditure: it is the misspending ofenergy. Such expenditure is, in a sense, beyond enjoyment and beyond (the structures that bind and exploitthe) subject, which is what this paper will examine.Panel 2 — Mutiny of EnjoymentJon Roffe (Chair) | UNSWWebster 306 | 4-5.30Failing to Enjoy: the Thought of Education TodayAdam Bartlett | Monash UniversityPlato's Apology stages a scene reminiscent of Lacan’s impromptu at Vincennes whereat Lacan famously tellsthe protesting students that the regime is putting you on display, saying 'look at them enjoying'. The effect, hesays, will be to deliver yourselves over to the master, once again. In Plato’s case, three figures Meletus, Anytusand Lycon, representing respectively, the poets-teachers, businessmen-politicians and orators of the law andthus the state as such accuse Socrates of failing to enjoy in the prescribed way. In other words, Socrates isaccused of harbouring, of practicing, an impossible desire for thought. To think, then, is to corrupt, to passthrough enjoyment as its radical impossibility. Plato's entire problematic in the dialogues, exemplified in theApology, is to think the question of educational corruption against these ubiquitous and determinativeperformances of pedagogical enjoyment. This paper will consider these several points and connections anddraw some consequences for the thought of education today.The Homonymous ImageNicholas Heron | University of QueenslandLong before being taken up within the tradition of the Christian West, Aristotle figured significantly in thewritings of the Christian East, where language obviously presented no obstacle to his reception. But here itwas his logic, rather than his metaphysics, that was decisive. At the inception of this logic stands thedistinction between homonymy and synonymy, between the discourse pertaining to things which have thename in common but not the definition corresponding to that name and the discourse pertaining to thingswhich have both the name and the definition corresponding to that name in common; a distinction which, asMarie-José Mondzain (and others) have shown, would prove decisive in the sophisticated proto-scholasticismof the victorious iconophiles of the second Byzantine iconoclasm crisis and in ways that remain pertinent for a25

consideration of the hegemony of the contemporary “iconomy.” By integrating the historical example of themobilisation of this distinction into a larger interpretative context, this paper will consider the significant roleperformed 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 EveGregor Moder | University of Ljubljana, SloveniaIn Pursuits of Happiness, Stanley Cavell begins the analysis of what he calls the Hollywood comedy ofremarriage by inspecting Preston Sturges’ classic The Lady Eve (1941). In the first part of this paper we willhighlight two moments of the film and argue that Cavell's genre of “remarriage” should be interpreted as agenuine concept of repetition where repetition functions on the level of the original itself. Firstly, we willanalyze the reason why the male protagonist, Charles, can't believe that the beautiful lady Eve is the samewoman as the con-artist Jean whom he met some time ago and fell in love with: they look too much alike to bethe same. It is as if she is deceiving (him) by revealing herself; as if being were only a function of itsappearance; as if the original were just an effect of the repetition. Secondly, we will comment on theframework of the film and its constant reference point, the myth of Adam and Eve and the fall of man. We willargue that Sturges brilliantly transforms the myth by pointing out that “fall of man” is not a singular, primordialevent that marks human existence as tragically “fallen”, but rather shows us the man, Charles, falling all thetime, serially and comically. The second part of the paper will explicitly address the question of the sexualdifference and its economy in the film; we will attempt to read the film with the aid of the Lacanian concept ofphallus, especially as it is used by Alenka Zupančič in her Sexuality and Ontology (Ljubljana 2011).Panel 3 — Pure and Flawless LawDan McLaughlin (Chair) | UNSWWebster 327 | 4–5.30Aquinas at the US Military Academy: The Laws of Armed Conduct and the Genealogy of MoralsJessica Whyte | University of Western SydneyIn the course of the twentieth century, the revival of just war theory saw contemporary variations on ThomasAquinas, embodied in what moral philosophers have termed the ‘principle of double effect’, inform muchphilosophical reflection on the killing of civilians in war. More recently, US military lawyers have referred toAquinas in interpreting the laws of armed combat, and in attempting to reconcile tensions between theprinciple of ‘humanity’, and the principle of ‘military necessity’. If we accept Quentin Skinner’s argument thatthe classic texts of political thought do not provide answers to ‘timeless questions’, then it remains for us toask what work the reference to Aquinas does at our own historical moment. How are we to understand therecourse to Scholastic theology in contemporary struggles to define the moral and legal limits of acceptablekilling? For a contemporary Just War theorist like Michael Walzer, the contemporary “triumph of just wartheory” is a product of the Vietnam War, which revealed the inadequacy of non-moralising languages inarticulating (and denouncing) the brutality of US military conduct. Seen from the perspective of recenthistorical research on human rights and the rise of moral politics in the 1970s, however, the moralization ofpolitical language in the wake of the Vietnam War appears instead as a means to cleanse the United States ofthe stain of its wartime conduct, and thus to ‘reclaim American virtue’, as Barbara Keys puts it. In this paper, Iaim to interrogate the relation between international law and morality, and between the history of internationallaw and the ‘genealogy of morals’. In doing so, I suggest that neither a strict contextualism nor a teleologicalaccount of the progressive refinement of moral sensibilities over time is adequate in understanding thecontemporary prestige of Aquinas in debates about the killing of civilians. Instead, I suggest that WalterBenjamin’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.26

Agamen’s Moods: Shoah, Spectacle, and the Kafkan liberation of shameas the stimmung proper to ethical modernityKim White | UNSWIn the English commentary on Heidegger, Stimmung is frequently translated as mood. One of the overlookedaspects of Agamben's relation to Heidegger is his radicalization of this concept. While in Heidegger thephenomenology of moods categorizes ecstatic openings onto ontological possibility that make decisions anddestinies possible for the individual in relation to a worldhood of others and nations, in Agamben moodbecomes the ontological foundation for an ecumenical relation to language and the multitude of all others quaspeaking beings incapable of appropriating any local or ultimate destiny. This entails a being-with-all-othersfraught with the need to evade eschatological machinery that, in Hegel and in Heidegger, ensnares humanthought in a double bind that both insists that the catastrophes of human history find legitimation in asuprasensuous origin and finds itself lacking any proper logos by which to translate the edicts by which suchcalamities are putatively vindicated. The Stimmung proper to this double bind is, Agamben says, shame. Thispaper aims to reconstruct Agamben's genealogy of shame in modernity in relation to three central coordinates:the petty bourgeoisie who in the age of mediatized spectacle have displaced the proletariat as theresiduum of ecumenical human potentiality and are captured in the eschatological machinery by theirinterminable oscillation between the moods shame and arrogance; the encounter between the Muselmännerand the liberators of Auschwitz, in which the blush of shame among the latter implies the possibility of theappropriation of the inappropriable; and Kafka, who seeks to liberate the shame of humanity from its agon witharrogance in order to render inoperative the eschatological machinery that perpetuates the banality of evilunder the sign of redemption.Fantasy Unchains: Discipline and Enjoyment in Quentin Tarantino’s Latest FilmMarco Grosoli | University of KentFollowing Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek has famously and frequently stated that cinema tells the viewer “howto 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 DjangoUnchained (2012). Therein, one of the characters (Schulz, a German immigrant) teaches the hero (Django, ablack slave in 1858 North America–and arguably an epitome of contemporary, destitute, postmodern globalproletariat), precisely, how to desire freedom, and how to attain it. What is more, his recipe coincides withstandard Hollywood narrative. First of all, Schulz helps Django clarify his main goal: to rejoin his wifeBroomhilde (the final embrace between the hero and his lover being of course the traditional Hollywood happyending); then, he introduces the slave to the most basic tenets of Hollywood storytelling, by condensing thewhole German Ring Cycle in a succinct boy-Siegfried meets girl-Brunhilde kind of three-acts over-simplenarration (and here one is easily led to think of how much classical Hollywood owed to German intellectualsand artists who migrated to the States between WW1 and WW2); ultimately, he teaches his protégé how to fitin that basic structure (“Don't break your character!”)–that is, how to be the hero of a Hollywood story. Andindeed, Django plays a role, during most of the film. Encouraged by Schulz, he impersonates a black slaver inorder 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. Themost important lesson he teaches Django is how to handle one's own enjoyment (as an essential part of theaforementioned “role-playing”): how to react to the pleasure (and pain) generated by violence, how not to loseone'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: whatkind 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 finalscene of the film–the man he has to kill in the final duel) embodies discipline as well–but in an entirelydifferent way. It's Stephen–not a white man, but another black man (Django's double, as it were). He is acunning slave owing his considerable power and influence to the recognition he gets from his master–arecognition due to the innumerable series of micro-practices whereby he disciplines the enjoyment pervadingdaily life in his master's household (he entertains the other slaves with complicit dirty jokes, he maintains afamiliar 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 toGuy Debord's art of detournement, in that he uses a shallow, fictitious appearance to defeat a world offictitious appearances.27

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, byconstantly playing with classical writing/filmmaking and the “figural” excess thereof.So what? Plenary Lecture | Joan CopjecTyree Room, John Niland Scientia Building | 6- 7.30The Images Wars and the Modern State: Kiarostami's Zig ZagOne of the recurrent, signature images in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's premier director, is that of a pathwhich zigzags across the landscape. This paper argues that this path -- a figure of what Henry Corbin (thewell-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 asthe recent work of Agamben on 'the Kingdom and the Glory,' the paper offers a significantly different view ofpolitical 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 EastStudies. 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), aswell 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), andShades of Noir (1993). Her forthcoming book is titled Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran (MIT Press).28

Tuesday, 14th JulyClosing Plenary | Juliet Flower MacCannellWebster Lecture B | 9.30- 11Refashioning Jouissance for the Age of the ImaginaryJuliet Flower MacCannell is Outstanding Emeritus Professor at UC Irvine and an Honorary Fellow of theInstitute for Advanced Study, University of London. Also currently co-chairing the California PsychoanalyticCircle, and co-editor of ( a): the journal of culture and the unconscious. Juliet is author of numerous books onpsychoanalysis and philosophy in a social and political frame, including: Figuring Lacan: Criticism & theCultural 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 beentranslated into Spanish, German, Slovenian and French. She is also an artist.SESSION 1 — 11.30- 1Panel 1 — Obscuring the good line: Mallarmé TodaySigi Jöttkandt (Chair) | UNSWWebster 332 | 11.30-1A Superior SurfaceJustin Clemens | University of MelbourneUn Coup de dés is one of the masterworks of modern literature, and a kind of summa of Mallarmé's lifework. Itcould not have been better served by writers and thinkers: on the one hand, it immediately transformed poeticsfor poets as different as Paul Valery and Christopher Brennan; on the other, one of the strongest lineages ofEuropean 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 couldbe forgiven for experiencing the torment of a methodological and intellectual impasse. How could one add tothis sequence of readings except as a supernumerary number that could always be another? Yet how couldone also not feel that the sequence itself demands another numbering or enumeration of the operations of thepoem? Even more tormentingly, does not this double address itself mimic the structure of the limit as deliveredby Mallarme himself: the crowd of history erupting spontaneously and simultaneously to which one cannotadd except by subtracting oneself, as per the disappearance of the author, the purification of the verse, thebecoming-abyssal of content? This paper will take the route of a speculative reconstruction of a covertsequence of thought that must have taken place for Un Coup de dés to become what it is, along the lines ofthe familiar paradox that can only find its own conditions of possibility following the act that retrospectivelycreates those very conditions.The Boy Who Lived and the Poet Who Should DieChristian R. Gelder | UNSWIn 1999, renegade philosopher, linguist, and political theorist Jean-Claude Milner published a literally insaneaccount of the 19th century poet Stéphane Mallarmé under the title Mallarmé au tombeau. For Milner, contraryto a century's worth of scholarship, the political doctrine of Mallarmé’s poetry can be summed up in a singlestatement: nothing takes place. Born out of a reading of a lesser-known sonnet Le vierge, le vivace et le belaujourd’hui, Milner reads the figure of the swan in Mallarmé’s oeuvre to suggest that the poet denounced the19th century’s revolutionary potential and its accompanying poetics to revel in nothing but nihilisticnothingness. Milner’s “meeting with Mallarmé” thus carries a strong polemical injunction, asking its reader toleave the poet behind to die in his tombeau once and for all.29

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 workMilner has pronounced upon since 1999 is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In distinct contrast to thecontemptuous political nihilism of Mallarmé’s poetry, Milner reads the Harry Potter movies as an example ofpost-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 benegotiated 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’slarger project. In so doing, I shall offer a critique of the former book on Mallarmé, while also outlining what is atstake in leaving a dead poet behind to focus instead on the boy who lived.Comrade Mallarmé?Robert Boncardo | University of SydneyThroughout his posthumous reception, and in particular in the post-War period, the late-19th century poetStéphane Mallarmé has been a privileged object of reflection for French intellectuals. Crucially, however, hiswritings have not only been drawn on to lend support to specific positions in philosophy or poetics, but also inpolitics. From Sartre’s reflections on the possibility of a politically-committed poetry; to the theory of therevolutionary virtues of poetic language proposed by the Telquellians; to the election of Mallarmé as a figure ofpolitical endurance by Alain Badiou; and finally to the recent speculations on the politics of literature profferedby Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé has been at the centre of political thought in 20th century French intellectuallife. This talk will sketch the main interpretative positions that have been taken up on the political significanceof Mallarmé and his work, and will explain why one question in particular has persistently troubled the abovementionedFrench thinkers: namely, is Mallarmé camarade Mallarmé, or not?Panel 2 — TransmissionBen Gook (Chair) | University of MelbourneWebster 306 | 11.30-1Reason and Enjoyment in Jacques Rancière's critical pedagogyGrace Hellyer | Sydney School of Continental PhilosophyIn The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière offers a reframing of the pedagogical encounter that deprivilegesacademic institutions and the role of the instructor by foregrounding the will of the student. Thispaper will attempt to complicate and develop his account of the emancipated student as 'a will served by anintelligence' by exploring the more specific account of the will that emerges in his accounts of aestheticexperience. I will explore Rancière's reading of Schiller's play impulse and argue that this aspect of Rancière'sbroader account of the aesthetic regime is crucial to the way in which writing as a medium of both rationalityand a particularly defined mode of enjoyment takes center stage in his conception of an emancipatorypedagogical 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 SydneyIn the American imaginary Baltimore has come to signify a space in which the law routinely fails to bothrepresent 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 schoolstudent Adnan Masud Syed, found guilty of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, and convicted to a lifesentence. Similar to TV shows such as The Wire, also set in Baltimore, Serial purports to, through itsunwavering 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 necessarilyunimpregnable narratives fit for trial.But are the legal narratives that aestheticise Baltimore as a space in which the law habitually fails actuallycomplicit with the forces that uphold an unremitting and uninterrupted picture of American sovereignty based30

on rule of law? From my analysis of Serial I will argue that narrative attempts to unmask or lay bare the law’smost troubling flaws in fact uphold the rule of law, by preventing the kind of radical scrutiny that would see thelaw’s wholesale suspension in Baltimore. Drawing on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and GiorgioAgamben, this paper will make a case for the city of Baltimore as a hidden state of exception within animagined picture of American federalism and sovereignty, and examine the new possibilities and directions ofthe study of law and literature that emerge from this analysis.'No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom': Pedagogy in the Age of Revolution without ReasonAri Mattes | University of Notre DameWhat gives the teacher–human, computer, text–its authority? Is it its superior knowledge, intelligence andprocessing capacity, its capacity for analysis and synthesis both more acute and faster than that of thehumble student-being? Is it simply a matter of force, the cane replaced in the contemporary classroom byforms of control such as isolation and neglect? Is it a matter of psychology, a commitment on the part of bothmaster and student to sustain the pleasure of displeasure for as long as possible? Is it, as Jacques Rancièresuggests 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 mastercoupled 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 thecreation of pliant, docile and “creative” workers–at UNDA, for example, “work-integrated learning” is the currentbuzz-phrase, and terms like “innovation” are frequently bandied about in the same sentences as “education” inthe 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 SubjectsChris Oakey (Chair) | UNSWWebster 327 | 11.30-1‘They’re only letters’: Textuality and Vitality from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Spike Jonze’s HerRussell Smith | Australian National UniversityRoland Barthes’ famous characterisation of the literary text as a ‘tissue of quotations’ is nowhere moreexemplified than in the case of Frankenstein, where, as Chris Baldick notes, Mary Shelley ‘made a living bookout 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 spellof understanding DNA as a code-script, often conflated vitality and textuality’. This paper explores the legacyof 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’slove-relationship with ‘Samantha’, his computer’s ‘lifelike’ artificially-intelligent operating system (OS). FriedrichKittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, traces the role of typewriter in enabling a rethinking of language ascybernetic code. Of particular interest is Kittler’s analysis of how the typewriter reconfigures relations betweenthe 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 circuitbetween 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 ofother people’s love-letters by repeatedly saying ‘they’re just letters’. The end of the film, when Theodore seeksthe comfort of his best friend Amy after they have both been jilted by their respective OS-lovers, thus performsan 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 andepistolary senses). We can read the creature’s third-hand autobiographical discourse at the centre of the novelas a forerunner of the Turing Test, the famous thought-experiment in which, on the basis of a typed exchangeof 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 andreproduction of living texts has decisively shifted from exclusively human control.31

Inarticulate Wounds of Colonialism: Mute children and savages in Malouf’s Remembering Babylon andCoetzee’s FoeJoanne Faulkner | UNSWThe paper examines the significance for Australian settler subjectivity of two uncanny figures of postcolonialliterature: David Malouf’s ‘Gemmy” in Remembering Babylon and J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Friday,’ of Foe. Each of thesecharacters exerts a powerful influence on the white colonials with whom they share a fictive universe; andeach is also rendered without speech (in-fans, or infant), either through the loss of language, in the case ofGemmy, or, for Friday, through the violent and mysterious loss of his tongue. They are also both displace, orhave strayed from their original community in a way that renders them homeless and dependent, and whichpoignantly mirror their colonial antagonists’ own defensive sense of homelessness. I argue that in theirinarticulateness to the colonials, these figures express, or reflect, the ambivalence and illegitimacy throughwhich the colonial claim to land is instituted. By connecting Gemmy and Friday to a genealogy of lost andmute children/savages (enfants sauvages) within colonial imagination, we can begin to excavate thisunacknowledged ambivalence regarding white sovereignty.‘From Another Distanced Mind': Monstrous Self-Representation in Plath’s The Bell JarTamlyn Avery | UNSWThis 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 pleasureand rationality through explicit recitation of unspeakable facets of womanhood. By inverting the traditionalhierarchy of binaries such as beauty and monstrosity, masculine and feminine, or pleasure and pain, Plathshockingly inserts the monstrous feminine into the traditional 1950s scene of the American everyday. EstherGreenwood 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 representsthe portrait of the quotidian American belle, a beautiful and civilized socialite. However, the protagonist feelsdeeply 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, andmotherhood. There is systemic obstruction; the reader’s expectations of ‘Esther’, as our generic prototype, arebroken 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 predestinedharmonious maturation expected of the genre, aborting her own womanhood in becoming some otherunclassifiable, fluid reckoning of subjectivity. It is only through embracing the abject self that the female artistfigure is brought to the brink of her creative potential. This paper shall ask: what are the literary ethics ofapproaching the American Bildungsroman after the event of such a subversive generic contribution, and howmight we continue to read the future of the genre once all of its traditions and paradigms have been brokendown?SESSION 2 — 2-3.30Panel 1 — A Single Abstract AnimalAdam Bartlett (Chair) | Monash UniversityWebster 332Talking Back: What Dance might make of Badiou’s philosophical projectErin Brannigan | UNSWAlain Badiou states that ‘philosophy depends on art and not the reverse,’ so it follows that the encounterbetween philosophy and art occurs in the field of aesthetics where art becomes inscribed in philosophicalstrategies. (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 theartistic activity of dance, but to turn the ‘subjective potency’ of the art form toward the task of defining a32

particular type of thinking. (2014) This distinction has been missed by some of the rather prickly responses tohis essay coming from Dance Studies. (Cjevic 2014: 148, Clark 2011) In a recent paper I considered anotheressay on thought–Jeremy Prynne’s account of what he calls, ‘poetic thought.’ Prynne, a progressive andexperimental poet, describes a type of thought that is active, processual, directed, and applied; ‘the activeprocess of thinking, mental energy shaped to some purpose or tendency: I think of it as poetic work.’ (595) Hisis 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 attemptto respond to the work of art (in this case painting) in the face of its assault upon thought. (1993) Both writersspeak of the labour of translating an act of thought into language. Their descriptions of this process in termsof 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 sharescorporeal 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 marryinghis model of thought to the contemplation of specific creative objects or modes. He is following Nietzsche andMallarmé in an exercise–perhaps inspired by specific dances, perhaps not–that would find in dancing astrategy, model or ideal for his own disciplinary labour. Dance becomes an instrument amongst hisphilosophical project just as dance became an ideal strategy amongst Mallarmé’s poetic practice. If this is acase of dance being inscribed into the philosophical labour of Badiou, and if dance could talk back, what wouldit have to say in response? What would the dance of the early 21 st century make of his description of the artform? 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 thinkingdescribed and the creative practice of dance? And finally, what is this thinking that approaches the character ofdance in comparison to other modes such as Prynne’s poetic thought or Lyotard’s thought under the affectivethrall of the work of art?Ecstasies of Unreason: Lacan and Mystical jouissanceEhsan Azari Stanizai | University of Western SydneyThe primary intent of this paper is to investigate the construal definition of mystical experience as flight fromthe body and ascension into a spiritual union with divinity. This notion will be analysed in amystic/philosophical context. As a point of departure, I will discuss mysticism as a path to knowledge of thedivine in Rumi, St. Augustine and Meister Eckhart and Hegel’s notion of Absolute Knowledge through whichthe truth of God is exposed in its pure essence. For Hegel, a philosopher was a “mystai that has been presentat 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 functionof mysticism as a sum of concept, precept and affect. Deleuze’s ontology has been positioned against thebackground 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. Byfocusing on Rumi’s love poems and reviewing his Whirling Dervishes, I argue that mystical ascension is, infact, dissension in the body and living wholly in the body. The mystical apoplectic ecstasy is, thus a sensuousexperience within the boundaries of the corporeal body. A mystic will need a body to enjoy and run throughmystical experience by leaving reason and dwelling in jouissance.Child's Pose: Becoming Child and the Phenomenology of Children's Yoga ClassesKaren-Anne Wong | University of SydneyTo date there has been little theoretical consideration of how children's yoga affects students' ways of thinkingand being. Using interviews with child students of yoga and my own participant observation as a children’syoga teacher, this paper focuses on how a theoretical understanding of narrative may illuminate ourperceptions of how children learn to think and feel during yoga practice. Narrative is considered a tool forstudents’ to view their own bodies as vehicles for storytelling, producing new conceptions of self. I readchildren’s yoga practices through Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus. Using Deleuzeand Guattari’s theories of the body, I suggest that in a yoga class, children are not imagining themselves tobecome other, such as a dog or tree. Instead, children are actually becoming a new entity, a mediated bodythat lies somewhere between self and other (such as a dog or tree). By listening to children and engaging withtheory this research brings greater understanding of children’s experiences. Ways of being on the yoga matmay provide a window into the ways that individuals experience childhood.33

Panel 2 — Distinct FormsRussell Smith (Chair) | Australian National UniversityWebster 307 | 2-3.30Earth VoicePrue Gibson | UNSWEvie Wyld’s 2014 book All the Birds Singing investigates the dual landscapes of Australia and the UK as placesof suspended reason in space and time. The chronology of her narration is modified and despite the calm selfassuranceof 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 anidyllic backdrop to thought, it is a means of extenuating human time and augmenting human thought vianature. This paper applies Ian Hamilton Grant's concepts of materiality over transcendentalism, whereby thereis no separation between the biotic and abiotic. The landscape is more than a surrounding environment, it isvital. 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 GlasJessica Marian | University of MelbourneIt is well known that Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974) departs from the more staid conventions of philosophicalwriting, that it blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature. The relationship staged between thetext’s two columns is regularly understood as one of Hegel against Genet and Genet against Hegel. Thisopposition 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 isrepeatedly undermined by an inseparable relation of the two columns against–as in, in near proximity to orcontact with–one another. This argument will be focussed through an extensive engagement with keypassages concerning the relation of desire and rationality in Hegel, Genet and Derrida and the recurringallusions to the names of fathers and mothers found throughout Glas. In this light the paper hopes to alsooffer some consideration of the role and impact of Glas’ stylistic aberrances and bi-columnar textual layout.Proposal for an Aesthetics of EthicsLucille Holmes | Elam School of Fine ArtsBy comparison with other subject areas, the creative arts are relatively new research disciplines where theethical implications of research in the creative arts have only recently begun to be addressed, and these initialstudies demonstrate a negative characterisation of ethics as a significant institutional limitation to artisticresearch in universities. Taking these criticisms into account, this paper will explore the possibility for artisticresearch ethics to critically address, rather than reject, the operations of control, regulation and censorship inresearch ethics, and in that process to position those limitations in relation to the question of the desire of theresearcher. That is, how could ethics as the obligation to act in the right way have a place in art research notsolely as a controlling force but more importantly as a force in the service of the singularity of desire. JacquesLacan has proposed an ethics which promotes the singularity of each person in terms of the universalparticularity of human desire. How could Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis provide a theoretical framework forartistic research and its aims to establish its own set of methodological approaches? The question of anethics of singularity for artistic practices was initially advanced by Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells (2012), whoargued against the ethical imperative for art to contribute to the social Good and proposed a moreaesthetically attuned ethics, based in part on a Lacanian ethics, where the dimension of desire beyond theGood is positioned as the ethical foundation of artistic endeavour. This paper will develop Bishop’s proposalfor an ethic of art that takes into account the fidelity to a singular desire, as that which supports the opennessof desire inherent to art, while also retaining an ethical position towards artistic research participants.34

Panel 3 — Calculus of the EndarkenmentHenry Sussman (Chair) | Yale UniversityWebster 327 | 2-3.30Bureaucracy and its DiscontentsIvan Niccolai | University of SydneyThis 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 ofbureaucracy across all private and public sectors. The paper seeks to examine problems of scale and powerconcentrations that prompted the explosion of the use of processes and frameworks broadly grouped underthe term bureaucracy, and to that end will describe common traits of bureaucracy in Australian governmentinstitutions and large corporations. The perverse pleasure in the following of impersonal processes and ruleswill be examined and the apotheosis of that impersonal bureaucratic enjoyment shown to lie the dream of aform of algorithmic governance impregnable to political manipulation, exemplified by techno-libertarianprojects such as bitcoin and public key cryptography. The similarities of ends but antagonisms of meansbetween the radical left and these American libertarian projects will also be examined.‘Computer Says No’, or: The Erasure of the HumanAlan Cholodenko | University of SydneyIn 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, indeedsingular 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 keydisciplinary, institutional, scientific and technological aspects and implications of that singular relevance ofanimation, including foregrounding the impact of the ‘defining’ technology reanimating everything (fortechnologies 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, markingmajor currents at the ‘heart’ of which lies the unacknowledged, almost universal ‘blind spot’ of theoreticalinquiry 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 whatreality has morphed into, reanimated as, that is, Baudrillardian hyperreality, virtual reality, the pure and emptyform of reality, a ‘reality’ marked by the extreme, ecstatic processes of the viral, the fractal, the clonal, thequantum, 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 orderreality, including for all second order theory, marking the morphing of the subject into hypersubject, the objectinto hyperobject and theory into hypertheory, key of which repercussions will, if time allows, be charted in thiswalk 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, thehyperhuman.Theory Today Roundtable | What is to be Done?Copjec, MacCannell, Šumič Riha, SussmanWebster 327 | 4-5.3035

BiographiesAddlem, Elise is a philosophy honours student at Melbourne University, researching the ontologicalsignificance 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 thoughtof female philosophers.Apperley, Thomas Ph.D. is an ethnographer that specializes in researching digital media technologies. Hisprevious 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. Hisopen 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 DigitalCreativity, eLearning and Digital Media, and Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication. With AssociateProfessor Justin Clemens and Professor John Frow he is the Co-Chief Investigator on the AustralianResearch Council Grant Avatars and Identity (DP140101503).Avery, Tamlyn is a third year PhD student at UNSW, whose research interests include twentieth centuryAmerican literature and Bildungsroman studies.Bartlett, A.J. teaches philosophy in Melbourne, has published widely in contemporary philosophy andeducation and is the author of Badiou & Plato: An Education by Truths (EUP 2011) and co-author (with JustinClemens and Jon Roffe) of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2014). He is also the editor of several essaycollections and co-translator of Alain Badiou's Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury 2014). He coeditsthe philosophy series Insolubilia for Rowman and Littlefield.Bliss, Lauren is a PhD Candidate within the School of Culture and Communication at The University ofMelbourne. 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 andL'Université d'Aix-Marseille 1. His thesis dealt with the political reception of the late-19th century poetStéphane Mallarmé by 20th century French intellectuals, including Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou and Rancière. Hehas given courses on Sartre, Rancière and French literary theory at the Melbourne School of Philosophy. He iscurrently 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 andworks in the fields of dance and film as an academic and curator. Her current research explores the conditionof dance within the broader field of the performing arts through its relationship with other art forms ininterdisciplinary practices. She is author of Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (OUP, 2011), coeditorwith V. Baxter of Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (2014) and editor of AP Movementand Performance Symposium Papers (2009).Butler, Rex is an art historian, writer and Professor of Art History at Monash University. He received his PhDfrom 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’sShort 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 recentlydiscovered the free catering of academia (the cheese and wine sections are her favourite).36

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 andSociety at University of Western Sydney on Samuel Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis under thesupervision of Prof. Anthony Uhlmann and Dr. Alex Ling. He has presented in conferences like 2010 and 2011NEMLA Conventions, 2012 International Samuel Beckett Working Group and the 2014 Oxford SamuelBeckett: Debts and Legacies Symposium. He has published himself in books, anthologies and journals likeMiranda and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui and edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter ofPhilosophy and Literature with James Martell, published by Roman Books, London in 2013. He has a chaptertitled ‘“I switch off”: Towards a Beckettian Minority of Theatrical Event’, forthcoming in Palgrave MacMillan’s2015 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 Lecturerin Film and Animation Studies in what is now known as the Department of Art History and Film Studies at thatuniversity. 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 editorof 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: MoreEssays on Animation (2007).Chuang, Yen-Chen is an assistant professor at Tamkang University. She is currently working on film theoryand continental philosophy, especially in Deleuze and Derrida.Clemens, Justin is the author of many books and papers on psychoanalysis, contemporary Europeanphilosophy, 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 iscurrently working on a number of projects, including an ARC Discovery Grant with Tom Apperley and JohnFrow 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 themanner in which the prose fiction works of William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthyaddress the question of subjectivity in the social, political and economic contexts in which those works wereproduced.Cooke, Bryan is the Secretary of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and a Leading Tutor inPhilosophy 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 EastStudies. 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), aswell 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), andShades 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 ofbiochemistry and business. His research expertise is in critical health studies, focusing mainly on the widerweight-loss industry and nutritionism, but also in applying a psychoanalytic lens to other 'health' industrytopics including: the impact of managerial ideology on work; gender relations; and embodied alienation in thesport 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.37

Faulkner, Joanne is an ARC DECRA fellow in Philosophy, in the School of Humanities and Languages atUNSW. She is also Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy; Member of Council for theAustralasian Association of Philosophy and Co-Editor of the Series in Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asiawith Rowman & Littlefield. Jo's books include The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry AboutChildren (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Dead Letters to Nietzsche: Or the Necromantic Art of ReadingPhilosophy (Ohio University Press, 2010), and co-author (with Matthew Sharpe) of UnderstandingPsychoanalysis (Acumen, 2008).Gelder, Christian is a Master of Arts by research student in English at UNSW. He is interested in Mallarmé andmathematics.Gibson, Prudence is an arts and fiction writer. She has published fiction in Antipodes, Eureka Street, EtchingsJournal and Blood. She is author of the art book The Rapture of Death and has had over 200 artessays/articles published in Heat, The Australian, Vogue, Australian Art Collector and Art Monthly etc. Her nextbook 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, Universityof Melbourne. He has lectured in the Schools of Social & Political Sciences and Culture & Communication atthe University of Melbourne. His first book Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 isforthcoming 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 amonograph 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 MonicaDall'Asta) a collection on Guy Debord's cinema, and one (with Jean-Baptiste Massuet) on the cinematic usesof 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 isin her first year of candidacy with a background in Sociology. Her study is interdisciplinary – being largelyinformed by Feminist and Queer studies as well as other intersectional aspects of social justice. Katharine'scurrent 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 bodymodification in 2014. Katharine is currently a gender studies tutor at Macquarie, and feels awkward referringto herself in the third person.Hellyer, Grace completed her PhD at The University of New South Wales on Jacques Rancière’s philosophy ofradical equality and aesthetic modernity and the nineteenth century American novel. She has taughtphilosophy and critical theory at NIDA and literature at the University of New South Wales and is continuingher 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 theUniversity of Queensland. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Liturgical Power: BetweenEconomic and Political Theology and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a PoliticalParadigm.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 relationshipsbetween philosophy, performance and politics, with a current focus on Hegel, Walter Benjamin,psychoanalysis, and contemporary poetic and performance practices. He has published articles inPerformance Research and Senses of Cinema, with a forthcoming article in Crisis & Critique. Most recently hehas 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 afestival / conference of performance and philosophy in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He holds a Bachelor of Dramatic38

Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA / University of Melbourne), and an Honours Degree ofBachelor of Arts from Monash University.Holmes, Lucille PhD is a senior lecturer in Elam School of Fine Arts, and an ethics advisor in the NationalInstitute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on theapplication and development of psychoanalytic theory in the visual arts and education.Jacobs, Carol is Professor of German Language & Literature and Birgit Baldwin Professor of ComparativeLiterature at Yale University. She has written extensively on Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Wordsworth, Rilkeand Paul de Man and others. Carol is the author of Dissimulating Harmony (1978), UncontainableRomanticism (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 ofActing Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic, First Love: A Phenomenology of the One andnumerous articles on literature and psychoanalysis. A co-founding editor of S: Journal of the Circle forLacanian 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 ofSydney. His research interests lie in the identities produced through the pedagogical practices of culturalinstitutions, subcultures and social movements. He is also interested in fictional and narrative approaches tosocial science research.MacCannell, Juliet Flower is the Outstanding Emeritus Professor at UC Irvine and an Honorary Fellow of theInstitute for Advanced Study, University of London. Also currently co-chairing the California PsychoanalyticCircle, and co-editor of (a): the journal of culture and the unconscious. Juliet is author of numerous books onpsychoanalysis and philosophy in a social and political frame, including: Figuring Lacan: Criticism & theCultural 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 beentranslated 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 ofMelbourne. Her work focuses on the concept of style in philosophical and literary texts, in particular the workof Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. She has research interests in literature and philosophy, continentalphilosophy, 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 hisPhD from the University of Sydney in 2010 for a thesis tracing the development between classic Americanliterature and Hollywood action cinema. He has had short fiction and academic articles published in Australianand 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 cinematicpulse in horror and horror erotic film using theorists Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and GeorgesBataille. She has presented at national and international academic conferences. Her areas of interest areaesthetics, psychoanalytic philosophy and poststructuralism.Moder, Gregor teaches philosophy of art and works as a researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Hepublished many scholarly articles on sexual and political implications of comedy, edited comedy-sections forjournals Problemi, Dialogi and S, and contributed to Lubitsch Can’t Wait collection (SK 2014, distributed byColumbia UP).39

Moore, Kyle is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney from the Department of Media andCommunications. His current research explores the ways play is situated within urban environments, focusingon 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 Racein Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (Cambridge UniversityPress, 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 thereciprocity between Buddhist understandings and cultural theory, and to interrogate the Euro-Christian andsecularist 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 theother 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 theNew Centre for Research and Practice. He works as an information security architect and holds a Master of ITManagement from the University of Wollongong.Oakey, Christopher is a Postgraduate Researcher and Postgraduate Teaching Fellow at the University of NewSouth Wales. His current research addresses the intersection between Modernist and Post-ModernistAmerican poetry as it intersects with its contemporary philosophies. He is currently completing a PhDaddressing the poetry of George Oppen and Ron Silliman, as well as the philosophies of Martin Heidegger andLudwig Wittgenstein.Pahor, Tracey is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD project draws onplace-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, atthe Australian National University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalismfrom Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and the co-editor, with Peter Hallward, of a two-volume workdevoted 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 inthe Literature of the Twentieth Century, 1937-2013” and looked at the way reactions towards modernity and itsperceived materialism often allowed for a cross-fertilisation of ideas and ideals between reactionary andprogressive 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 researchinterests are literature, culture and ecology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As well as variousconference presentations and papers, he is contributing chapters to various collections including “ViolenceAgainst Black and Brown Bodies”, edited by Dr Sandra Weissinger of Southern Illinois University, and “DarkNature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Culture and Literature”, edited by Dr Richard Schneider of WartburgCollege, 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 isrepresented 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 from2002 to 2005 she wrote, edited and published the magazine Lives of the Artists. She is currently undertakingher PhD at Sydney College of the Arts (The University of Sydney), researching the end of art in relation tocontemporary art discourse and practice. Pulie is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney and NeonParc in Melbourne.40

Rueda, Alejandro Cerda is a practising psychoanalyst in Mexico City. He is a professor atUniversidad Iberoamericana (Mexico), and the senior editor for Paradiso editores. He has a PhDfrom the European Graduate School (Switzerland) and has previously edited Schreber: Los archivosde 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 ofPhilosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coordinator ofthe philosophy module at the post-graduate study programme of the University of Nova Gorica. Riha'sresearch topics include ethics, epistemology, contemporary French philosophy, the psychoanalysis of JacquesLacan, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. From 1996 to 2003 he has been the editor-in-chief of the journalFilozofski 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 MelbourneSchool of Continental Philosophy and editor of the journal Parrhesia. His books include Abstract MarketTheory (2015), Lacan Deleuze Badiou (with Clemens and Bartlett, 2014), Badiou's Deleuze (2014), GilbertSimondon: Being and Technology (2012), Muttering for the Sake of Stars (2012), Deleuze's PhilosophicalLineage (2012) and numerous other publications.Rudge, Chris is a researcher at the University of Sydney’s Department of English and a member of theBiopolitics of Science Research Network. In December 2014, Chris submitted his PhD thesis, titled“Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley, HermanMelville, and Philip K. Dick.” Heavily influenced by those working within the philosophy of psychiatry and themedical humanities, Chris’s writing also addresses psychopharmacology and what he calls, after PeterSedgwick, ‘psychopolitics.’ Recent publications include a chapter in the edited volume The World According toPhilip K. Dick, where Chris’s essay sits alongside articles by Laurence A. Rickels, Richard Doyle, and MarcusBoon, and an essay on Henri Bergson and Bruno Latour in Philament. Chris is currently editor and designer ofPhilament.Scheer, Ed is Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He haspublished articles on performance art and aesthetics in TDR, PAJ, Parkett and Performance Research and haswritten numerous catalogue essays for the AGNSW, Documenta (12), the Biennale of Sydney (2006) and theAuckland Triennial (2010) as well as pieces on arts and culture in The Sydney Morning Herald and TheMonthly. Author of Scenario, a study of new work from the iCinema Project (UNSW Press and ZKM, 2011), hislatest book is entitled Multimedia Performance (Palgrave 2012) with Rosie Klich. Scheer’s study of Mike Parr'sperformance art, The Infinity Machine (Schwartz City Press, 2010) is the first comprehensive account of thisaspect of the artist’s practice.Shahinyan, Diana received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2014. Her thesis looked at the legalfictions of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner against the backdrop of American jurisprudential changesin 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 SocialSciences at The University of Auckland. He is the co-editor of Derrida Downunder (2001), Baudrillard West ofthe Dateline (2003) and From Z to A: Zizek at the Antipodes (2005) and published a book on Freud’s papers onart 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 secondvoyage to the South Pacific.Sinnerbrink, Robert is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy atMacquarie 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 journalssuch 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 (Routledge2015).41

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 hisnext project, Frankenstein: A Life in Theory, is a reading of the history of literary theory its responses to MaryShelley’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 lecturesat NIDA (UNSW). His most recent book is Lacan & the Destiny of Literature: Desire, jouissance and theSinthome 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 theUniversity 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 communismand 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 horrorfilms (Repeater, 2016).Šumič Riha, Jelica is Professor of Philosophy at the Postgraduate School of Research Centre of the SlovenianAcademy of Sciences and Arts and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre ofthe Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was visiting professor at the University of Essex, UniversityParis 8 and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Politikder 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) andEternity and Change. Philosophy in the Worldless Times (Zalozba ZRC, 2012). Currently she is working on aforthcoming 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 writingsince then (The Task of the Critic, 2005; Around the Book, 2011; Playful Intelligence, 2014) has explored thesystematic 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 indispensableencouragement and support furnished by Sigi Jottkandt and David Ottina, founded and co-edits 'Feedback,' atheory-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, hisresearch 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 interestsinclude Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, literature (Kafka, Beckett, Kristof), and philosophical aspects ofcurrent political and economic issues. He is the author of Neither Miracle Nor Miracle (2010, in Slovenian) andThe 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. Hisdoctoral research concerns the political ontology of figurations of the sacred in the literatures of the AmericanRenaissance and the late twentieth century. In particular his thesis examines how canonical writers in eachperiod responded to crises of political legitimacy in their respective eras by using figures of the sacred toilluminate or obfuscate the degree to which such crises stem from a failure to reckon with the founding statesof exception of the American polity - the colonial expropriation of Indigenous Americans and Afro-Americanslavery - 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 ofhuman rights and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly Agamben and Foucault. She is the author42

of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY Series in ContemporaryContinental Philosophy, 2013).Wilson, Kevin is currently completing his Masters at the University of Western Australia, entitled 'WorkersMust Become Dialecticians: Guy Debord, Western Marxism and the Society of the Spectacle.' He previouslycompleted an Honours dissertation on the literary work of Andre Malraux, and has taught a number of coursesin '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 ofSydney. Her research is an ethnographic study of children's yoga, investigating how paradigms of childhoodare represented in the yoga classroom. Karen has a Bachelor of Arts (English)/Bachelor of Art Theory (Hons1) from the University of New South Wales. Karen has been teaching adults' and children's yoga since 2011.43