mscp summer school 2009

The MSCP is pleased to announce its programme for the 2009 Summer School

Week 1: January 26-30
Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Dr. Ashley Woodward)

History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Prof. Ian Weeks)

Week 2: February 2-6
Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)

Week 3: February 9-13
Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (Prof. James Williams)
Heidegger's Being and Time (James Garrett)

Week 4: February 16-20
On Slavoj Zizek's Political Theory (Dr. Matthew Sharpe)
Dialectics of Enlightenment (Brian Cook)

barbershop

On the west side of Sydney Road, just north of Blyth Street, there’s an old barber’s shop. In it, a chair faces a mirror. Behind the chair, a couple of old vinyl covered seats. No magazines, no newspapers. Oddly, in the window, one or two cans of shaving cream and a pack of disposable razors. Whether there’s a counter, or cash-register it’s difficult to tell. The lights are never on and the place quite possibly deserted.

There are shops like this throughout Melbourne’s inner suburbs, though next to the newer ones they are almost impossible to see. First things become impossible to the eye, then they disappear. In the up-to-the-minute hairdresser across the road, we are blind to the old shop. But whilst it still stands, it speaks. And not of the past, but of the future; of the fact that what is visible now need not be visible for all time; that the always-already-the-same is a spell to be broken; that one day things might, and seemingly against all odds, be otherwise.

Frozen in time, the old shop explodes it.

spring

Thought must push its object to the point where that object destroys its own illusion.

no subtitles

Several months ago I had occasion to watch a film in German with no subtitles. Despite having only an average proficiency in that language, I was able to follow the plot and most of the dialogue. I wasn't bored, nor was I fatigued from having to translate. However, I didn't much enjoy the film. I thought the performances superficial and the whole look of the film bland and uninteresting.

Just recently I happened to catch the film again, this time with subtitles. While I was pleased to see I had understood the plot, I could not help but be struck by something peculiar: far from looking bland, it was this time visually superb and full of colour. The performances, too, came alive. As a whole, the film had acquired a depth previously lacking. The missing element here, of course, was language and, more importantly, my (fuller) understanding thereof. Or rather, what was lacking the first time was the more-than-understanding (colour itself) that one 'has' or 'is' in one's own language. I had understood the first time. But I had more than understood the second.

Clawing at the door of this little argument, however, is the fact that in speaking of language this way I risk hypostasising and dehistoricising it, treating it as a 'thing'--in this particular instance almost like a pair of glasses one puts on in order to see correctly. But language is not a thing. At least not in any simple sense. It is dynamic not static, dialectical not ontological. My concern here is that the notion and the experience of language as more-than-understanding, as colour, as depth, as the third dimension is growing fainter. My fear is that language has already passed from history altogether and that what we have in its stead is not language at all, but its memory, a shadow on the cave of meaning.

paideia

Fuck research grant applications! Fuck journal rankings! Fuck boring articles, boring reviews, and boring monographs! Fuck the accuracy of irrelevancies!

Only a critical pedagogy can save us now...

the accuracy of irrelevancies

In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno writes:

The stubborn urge to check the accuracy of irrelevancies rather than to reflect on relevancy at the risk of error is one of the most widespread symptoms of a regressive consciousness.

For all the awkwardness of the translation, part of what Adorno is criticising here, I think, is the less than progressive practices of contemporary academic philosophy; the way it all too easily loses sight of the point of it its own existence; the way it often fails to adopt a broad enough perspective on its own activity; the way it very quickly gets tangled in minor squabbles: "the accuracy of irrelevancies".

For Adorno, what we need is to "reflect on relevancy" itself. In other words: to think about why we're thinking in the first place. This is a simple-sounding thought, to be sure. One that is easily passed over. But let's not be so hasty, shall we?