School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemPoetics, Self-Understanding, and Health(Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021-05-11)In the thick of the global plague, Richard, Justin and Valery agreed to hold a conversation on the topic of poetics, self-understanding, and health. An analysis and discussion of this trinity requires love of poetry and philosophy. Both supreme human practices take common root in mythology and religion, and also share a notorious categorical divide, that of reason against affect. Is this Platonic divide indeed categorical, given both practices rely on language and creativity to compose their meaning? Interestingly, the practice of poetics does not have the reputation for boosting one's health, in the mainstream understanding of that concept. If anything, poetic practice gained notoriety for corrupting one's mind and, possibly, life. Like philosophy? We touched on these and other classical aporia, on the political struggles in American and Australian poetry. Here is a written record of this encounter, countries and miles apart, three persons simply getting to know one another.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableA Journal of the Plague Year(MEANJIN COMPANY LTD, 2020-06-01)
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ItemNot Nearly Wrong Enough: Epistemontology as an Analogical Re-fusion of Real Abstraction(University of Minnesota Press, 2021-06-01)For the past two decades A. Kiarina Kordela has been working on a singular and difficult synthesis of Benedict Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. Her attempt is to construct a new form of historical materialism, transforming it into a rigorous monism for which the exemplarily modern--let's say, the seventeenth century--distinction between epistemology and ontology would no longer be able to be considered real. As Kordela puts it on the first page of her new, challenging book: "In spite of the incommensurable difference between ideas and things, their relations share the same structures, and both, ideas and things, express the same substance or being" (2018,1). Kordela gives two names to that substance which is expressed in the "parallelism" or "homology" of words and things: "structurality" (3) and the "unconscious" (2). The unconscious, then, is not simply a name for non-conscious mental processes or just an a-topic or ex-static locus established by the non-natural fact of language. It is the key support for any account of a "self-actualizing" universe at once secular, rationally accessible, yet without reduction to the concept. It is ultimately Kordela's commitment to a special kind of speculative psychoanalysis that links Marx to Spinoza and allows her to rebind philosophy with politics with psychology and that will reinstate in full ambition the powers of philosophy for our apocalyptic present age.
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ItemNot Not. A Note on the Figures of Power in Giorgio Agamben(Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2020-12-13)When one starts to read the work of Giorgio Agamben, one cannot not be struck by his erudition, his eye for previously overlooked or under-interpreted details in the philosophical, political, artistic and legal archives, not to mention his commitment to rethinking those received traditions according to new means. Yet what is also very striking is Agamben’s unceasing attention to the apparition and construction of what I will term figures of power. At the beginning of Means Without End, Agamben asks himself “Is today a life of power available?”. If Agamben’s word here is ‘life’, it is just as critical to understand that such a term is not to be taken in its biological acceptation; on the contrary, what he means by ‘life’ must be something other than a scientific category. I will make a number of suggestions as to why the word ‘figure’ has some pertinence in this context, and why it leads, on the one hand, to a new analysis of operations of negation, and, on the other, to a paradoxical kind of non- or extra-ontological act of impotentiality.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWhere then shall hope and fear —(University of Melbourne, 2020-08-03)The article examines a radical tradition of poetry in which the phenomena of hope and fear are thematized. Moving backwards in time, the argument focuses on work by Ali Alizadeh, John Ashbery, Samuel Johnson, Juvenal, Benedict Spinoza, Plato, and others.
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ItemMorbus Anglicus; or, Pandemic, Panic, Pandaemonium(Crisis and Critique, 2020-11-30)Mid-17th century England births two fateful new signifiers: pandemic and pandaemonium. Although both words are founded on a Greek root pan, meaning all, neither designate a firm or flourishing polity. The words also retain close etymological, homophonic, and semantic relations to another crucial word of the time: panic. Yet these terms do not simply indicate the destruction or abolition of politics or the political, but rather reconstitute the problem of politics according to a radical paradox. This essay examines the emergence and reconstitution of these signifiers in a philological matrix inflected by plague, civil war, religious violence, scientific inquiry, and monarchical restoration, in order to proffer several theses about their significance and operations in and for politics that subsists beyond the specificities of that site.
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ItemIn the State of Nature Nothing Will Be Lost(Australian National University, 2020-05-01)This article argues that the cryptocurrency Bitcoin functions according to a contemporary form of political theology: an instrumental technology that forecloses the operations of art, on the one hand, and represses mathematics, on the other. It is further shown that the blockchain on which Bitcoin is founded is a technicized form of Von Neumann ordinals, which simultaneously 'finitizes' and 'unifies' the latter.