Talks
Forthcoming talks
Breach! The Law’s Jouissance in Miéville’s The City & The City
Where: Trans(l)egalité - joint conference of the Law and Literature Association of Australia and the Law and Society of Australia and New Zealand Dates: 2nd December 2009 - 5th December 2009
This paper critically examines how China Miéville’s weird detective narrative The City & The City (2009) charts the excesses of law’s embodiment in Detective Tyador Borlú of the Besźel policzai. Putting the philosophico-psychoanalytic insights of Slavoj Žižek on the trail of Borlú’s transgressions and (counter-)transference, Miéville’s unique demonstration of the Lacanian mapping of jouissance with/against the non-negotiable core of justice will be shown to secure Borlú’s negation of his own embodiment of the Law of Breach. This Law of Breach, the Law of the Other, bifurcates the schizoid city of Besźel-Ul Qoma through the processes of unseeing, unhearing, and, ultimately, unsensing. It will be shown that Borlú’s escape into the mysticism of unsensing is inevitably marked by the betrayal of his ‘being’ (jouis) because the anality of the Law of Breach is predicated upon a ‘positive principle of being’ that posits the existence of Borlú as a subject (j’ouïs-sens) rather than opening the way to an ontological encounter with Borlú’s existence (jouis-sens) in all its antagonistic excessiveness; that is, in the negation (jouis-sans) of its symbolic demarcation by the Law of Breach insofar as it is Law: meaningful and representative (Symbolic) and necessary and iconic (Imaginary). Herein Miéville’s narrative discloses Borlú’s subjectivisation as ‘a subject’ through the support of a speculative identity that stands at the interstices of transmutation between the authority of the Law of Breach (wherein the agents of Breach become a perverse Order, a tool of the Law that enact its jouissance) and the subjectivity of Borlú as Besźel policzai. This final point challenges and problematises the ‘positive principle of being’ inherent in the legal positivism of various post-modern, feminist, and liberal discourses, and invites the reader of Miéville’s The City & The City to reconstruct their own position with regards to the embodiment of authority.
LikePast talks
The Real and Mallarmé: Žižek or Badiou?
Where: Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference Dates: 29th November 2009 - 1st December 2009 When: November 2009
Earlier version published in the International Journal of Žižek Studies (3/4)
This paper examines the differences between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s articulations of ‘impossibility’ in their readings of the French experimental symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé. We will also discuss how Badiou and Žižek diverge in their respective understandings of impossibility as a hallmark of the Lacanian Real in Mallarmé’s oeuvre.
The ontological repercussions for maintaining a naïve phenomenological trust in the experience of the life-world are elaborated on by both Badiou and Žižek using the demonstrative example of Mallarmé’s experimental poetic modernism. Underlying Žižek’s engagement with Mallarmé is the formulation of the commands of authority in the post-modern universe as imperatives to enjoy. As an imperative, this argument about the formal structure of duty in the post-modern universe constitutes the particular mode of enjoying (mode de jouir) that valuates the variety of objects and activities able to be taken up by the subject. For Badiou, on the other hand, the poetry of Mallarmé demonstrates the pattern of a generic idea. The poetry of Mallarmé has “no mimetic, semantic, or figural relation either to an object or an author” says Badiou.
As we shall see, Badiou and Žižek consonantly turn to the modernist poet Mallarmé to understand the conditions under which the subject can attempt to access this imperative/idea. Herein two relations become apparent: ‘subtraction’ and ‘purification’; ‘subtraction’ as the removal of the imaginary contents, the ideological filler, from the subject’s self-relation in an attempt to get to the future antérieur and ‘purification’ as the attempt to purify the pure idea by locating the opaque core of the aesthetic object as the point of failure in the relation with the object. Finally, this paper aims to show that Mallarmé furnishes Žižek with an aesthetic reading of impossibility that is formatively different than that of Badiou.
Minimalism, Bloodied and Raw: Palahniuk’s Literary Violence
Where: Cultures of Violence and Conflict: The Second Conference of the International Society for Cultural History Dates: 20th July 2009 - 23rd July 2009
This paper analyses how Chuck Palahniuk’s minimalist violence toward literary style feeds on conflict to bring the reader to a ‘gut reaction’. It will be proposed that the Palahniukian source of this psychosomatic expression is the literary style of ‘romantic minimalism’. Foremost, Palahniuk’s style is romantic; his stories profane the utility of everyday life from within. And Palahniuk uses minimalist prose to shape this romantic impetus. This minimalism strips the regime of language raw; making it an unadorned core of literary expression that is too intense for merely cerebral celebration. Palahniuk’s ‘romantic minimalism’ condenses the reader’s experience into an evocative experience of, at times conflicted, embodied imagination. This condensed ‘gut response’ is reflexively explored in Palahniuk’s book Diary where the motif of uncontrollable cerebral excesses (i.e. Stendhal syndrome) is a vital part of the ingested narrative that resonates within the reader’s imagination. Mutatis mutandis, Palahniuk’s exposition identifies several axioms that bridge the psychosomatic reception of his literary enterprise with the aesthetic field of his prose. Firstly, the contours of his minimalism are substantially ‘in-aesthetic’, excessively powerful. Subsequently, this excess is purified and condensed by Palahniuk’s minimalism that transforms the words on the page into violent things that exceed the dead symbolic structures of written language, catching the reader unaware. From this it follows that this ‘powerful excess’ is not localised in the aesthetic ‘present time’ of the narrative but rather relies on the speculation of imagination, the in-aesthetic excess. Yet the reflexive ficto-critical exposition in Diary only partially reveals the resonance of Palahniuk’s ‘romantic minimalism’ with our ‘psychosomatic imagination’. While these axioms appear to suggest something extra-literary about Palahniuk’s minimalist prose we should remember that this is merely the fruit of his subjection to the tyranny of symbolic regiment (language). Thus, in his fidelity to minimalism is Palahniuk also therefore his own tyrant?
The Parallax Enjoyment: Perniola and Sexual Enjoyment
Where: Fourth Biennial Australian Centre for Italian Studies Conference Dates: 10th July 2007 - 13th July 2007 When: 11th July 2007, 11am - 1pm
In the mid-1990s Hugh Silverman proclaimed that Italian philosophy, like its continental contemporaries, was defined by its own scarto. Half a decade later, filosofo Italiano Mario Perniola attempted to elaborate an aesthetic philosophy of desire in this abyss: Il Sex Appeal dell’Inorganico (The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic). This rich philosophy of desire, filled with ideas about the inconsistencies and over-flowings of enjoyment, takes the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan as one of its anchors. From Lacan’s work Perniola extracts the rule that ‘there is no sexual relationship’. Yet this axiom is a problem for Perniola because he posits the (human) subject always-already within the structure of their enjoyment, within their masculine/feminine ‘sexuation’. Here the precious scarto is lost in a way particular to Perniola’s context within Italian philosophy alongside the hermeneutic followers of Vattimo and the semantic disciples of Eco. To recover the scarto that defines the constellation within which Perniola is located we will first turn to the notion of ‘the parallax view’, developed in the recent work of infamous Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek, to demonstrate Perniola’s position within the scarto. Subsequently the film Blade Runner will be used to demonstrate how this ‘view from nowhere’ is the proper position of the subject in Perniola’s philosophy of desire.
Knowing the Suspension: Spinoza and the Master-Signifier
Where: Wandering With Spinoza Dates: 13th September 2006 - 15th September 2006 When: 14th September 2006, 11am - 1pm
Slavoj Zizek has so far had limited interest in the work of Baruch Spinoza. But the attention he does pay to Spinoza is crucial to his critique of the ideology of late-capitalism. This debt returns Spinoza to Zizek through the interplay of Heidegger’s absent engagement with Spinoza and Lacan’s review of Spinoza’s purported pantheism in Seminar XI. In his more recent discussions of theology, Zizek binds himself to the Spinozist legacy by addressing the disconnection of deontology from the constitutive gap separating it from ontology. In Spinoza Zizek finds the precise formulation of the command to “Enjoy!”
Where: The Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference Dates: 3rd July 2006 - 7th July 2006
In the work of Slavoj Zizek we can piece together a theory of the subject that takes aim at the universality of perversion. For the purposes of this paper perversion is here cast as the reification and concomitant transgression of the symbolic limits of the human condition by the all-pervading challenge of technology. Perversion appears at the level of the social relation because physical limitations are compensated for by the substitution of the all too human repose with technical/calculative rationality. Such substitution in turn inculcates a socio-symbolic mode of relation. Thus we are between the fantasies of technological empowerment and the fetishisation of this empowerment. This reification of the compensatory project of technology appears to inevitably transgress the limit/horizon of the human condition. A crisis for the human condition herein emerges as the transgression of technology ‘writ large’ in the Social overruns the ineffable territory of one’s own humanity. In response to this crisis Zizek asserts a missing Third that intervenes between the perverse transgressive fantasies and illusive reification: love. Rather than being swept along with a pathological will-to-power this love is without compromise, and this distinguishes it from reification or transgression wherein the subject must always compromise their position to try and get what they want. The loving subject of Zizek’s discourse is constituted by the Cartesian cogito, embodiment, the psychical structures of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the vortex of sexual drive. This paper will examine these four aspects of love-without-compromise in the context of Zizek’s ongoing critique of the perverse social relation.
O' Sublime, Where art Thou? Subject as Site in Cosmopolitanism
Where: Sites of Cosmopolitanism, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University Dates: 6th July 2005 - 8th July 2005
Cosmopolitanism is a subjective attitude that changes the way we experience sublimity because it alters our relation to the field of the Other necessary for self-knowledge and a critical understanding of the world as representation. Difference, the enigmatic surplus of the Other, is brought into the subject’s dealings with their raison d’être instigating a desublimation of the human condition that enacts the supplementation of humanity as a ‘lure’. The framework for revealing a site as ‘cosmopolitan’ thus appears as a fantasy in the strict psychoanalytic sense: a transcendental schematism maintaining a lure in perceived reality that offers the (im)possibility of being traversed. Changing from the Kantian to post-Kantian position the critical literature of cosmopolitanism reveals a shift in the relation toward sublimation and the sublime parallel to recent developments in Western cultural aesthetics; the move from emphasising the elevation of the object to the dignity of the Thing in modernism to the importance of clearing the Place for the sublime to emerge in post-modernism. The latter formulation of the pathos of the human condition abandons the symbolic authority of the Other, leaving open the question of whether there is an answer—touché—to the cosmopolitan’s inherent transgression of difference by instating it as a lure.
Where: Griffith University School of Humanities When: September 2004
Later revised and published in 'Borderlands e-journal', 6.1, 2007
Biotechnology has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside a variety of formulations of ‘the ethical’ and in this way biotechnology has become an ideological phenomenon swept up in structuring freedom and processes of designating living beings in a full and objective manner. In the twenty-first century the mapping of the genome has provided individuals with a means of full self-objectivisation which necessitates a rethinking of the ethical content of biotechnology as human life is laid bare. This paper examines the ideology critique of Slavoj Zizek at the turn of the twenty-first century to show how a post-rational ethics can be generated when the human subject is reduced to an ‘objective’ phenomenon.
A Caution for Pursuing the Stolen Thing
Where: Memory & History Postgraduate Conference, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University Dates: 15th August 2004 - 15th August 2004 When: 15th August 2004, 3pm - 5pm
Today the issue of ‘stolen wages’ is emerging to take its place beside ‘stolen lands’ and ‘the stolen generation’ in the Australian cultural identity. Yet this emerging demand for rectification carries within it a paradigmatic shift from the dichotomised black/white split of two laws—the white subjugating the black—to an universalisation of one law for all. This development is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it does not differ from the other two infamous scenarios of identity theft because it still refuses to deal with the present, i.e. it is a reconstitution of nostalgic proportions putting focus on compensation rather than overcoming within the social plight of indigenous cultural history. And secondly, it fails in producing the radical politics necessary for the active integration of multiple cultures. What is at stake in challenges against the theft of identity is not whether a particular battle is won or lost, but that the mode of the challenge will not lead into pathology. Whether the ‘stolen wages’ case is successful or not it is still under the thumb of commodification and commodity fetishism—consumer culture—because the mode of the challenge (a universal law) logically results in a singular exception. Compensation comes no closer because to gain as much is to separate one’s identity from the multicultural mass to which the universalised law aims, setting an area of Australian identity against itself and therein undermining the universality of the law the case of ‘stolen wages’ appeals to.
Surveillance, Body, Democracy: the digital age (of the genome)
Where: Traumas of Law: Law & Literature Association of Australia Conference 2004 Dates: 9th July 2004 - 11th July 2004 When: 11th July 2004, 12pm - 1pm
The ‘surveillance culture’ of the twenty-first century is one which functions ‘for the Other’. Who exactly is watching us, we do not know, but these small cameras in the corners of ceilings, and on the heights of poles, testify as a signifier of the power of the State. Identity is now checked and traded. Biotechnology heralds a new paranoia for the hysterical mode of surveillance culture: the end of democracy. Intervention into the human genome therapeutically, judicially or aesthetically opens the possibility for a new Master class of ‘genetic manipulators’ to emerge. We are confronted with the prospect of corporations misusing the free market to manipulate people, of the rich breeding an exclusive race. Policing this ethical degradation demands more than legislation, it demands duty. These things and more are what many theorists and philosophers have been warning of, offering critique, solace and alternatives. The dilemmas of surveillance and biotechnology in a democratic state of the digital age are questions of ‘what the Other wants’, a plague of fantasies.
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