MSCP Summer School 2012 - Distance Enrolment

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to offer six courses from the 2012 Summer School for distance enrolment.  Distance enrolled students will be able to access audio recordings and class readings online.  Each course consists of 5 x 2-hour seminars.  Please note that the MSCP has reduced fees for those enrolling in multiple courses.

When: January 30 - March 1, 2012

Where: Law Building, Pelham St
University of Melbourne ( map )

You can see the course fees here.  Once you submit your details using our online enrolment form you will be asked to choose to pay online using paypal (you don't need a paypal account - you can use a credit card).  Details regarding access to the online material will be emailed to you once the Summer School has begun.  Please allow a few days for audio material to be available after each lecture has been given.  We appreciate your patience.

Distance Enrolment only

courses available for distance enrolment

Course Details

The ‘Singular Universal’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Existential Biographies’
Lecturer: Robert Boncardo
Monday, Jan 30 - Friday, Feb 3.  3pm - 5pm.

Jean-Paul Sartre is not only one of the most formidable philosophers of the 20^th Century, he is also among its most important novelists, playwrights and political polemicists. He is less well-known, however, as a biographer, despite the fact that he spills more ink on his ‘existential biographies’ of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert than on any other part of his work.

As he writes in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, “I have tried to do the following: To indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality.” His ‘existential biographies’ are thus testament to his commitment, across four decades of intense intellectual life, to the creation of a philosophical anthropology that would accord a central place to the subject – or, as he prefers to call it, the singular universal. They are also a decisive battleground for his encounter, as originally an Existentialist, with two of the dominant doctrines of 20th Century French intellectual life – Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Accordingly, his ‘existential biographies’ attempt to account for the weight of the individual’s objective determinations, whilst also bearing witness to their decisive margin of freedom. However, as his thought moves from Existentialism to Marxism, this margin of freedom gradually dwindles.

This course proposes to give an introduction to Sartre’s ‘existential biographies’. We will have as our focus Sartre’s methodology. While we will use as exemplars his four ‘existential biographies’ (on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert), our main aim will be to abstract from their particular content a relatively coherent and compelling philosophical anthropology. Thus, we will follow him from his first phenomenological writings to his more Marxist works and finally to his monumental and monstrous three-volume, three-thousand-page study of Flaubert. The course will thus also be a broad introduction to Sartre’s thought in its entirety.

Throughout the course, we will seek to strike a balance between, on the one hand, an appreciation for the force and coherence of Sartre’s project in his ‘existential biographies’ – namely, to preserve and explain human freedom – and, on the other hand, a critical vigilance concerning its flaws. Does his commitment to showing how Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet or Flaubert achieve a margin of freedom from the constraints of their epoch turn into a constraint of Sartre’s own?

Course Schedule

• Lecture One, 'The Early Works, part 1: The Transcendence of the Ego, The Imagination,The Imaginary, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Nausea': This first lecture will address Sartre’s first conception of the subject and his aesthetics, his two concerns that are most important to his ‘existential biographies’. We will aim to appreciate his key concepts of the pre-reflexive and reflexive consciousness; his conception of the ego; his theory of the imaginary and its concepts such as the irrealizing function of consciousness, ‘sens’ (meaning) and signification, and his ontology of the artwork. We will look at his first criticisms of Psychoanalysis and some early, cryptic references to Marxism.
• Lecture Two, ‘The Early Works, part 2: Being and Nothingness, Baudelaire’: In this second lecture, we will dive into Being and Nothingness and deepen our understanding of the Sartrean subject. Our aim will be to understand the strange beast Sartre calls ‘existential psychoanalysis’. We will also explore his first notorious and brilliantly polemical ‘existential biography’ of Baudelaire.
• Lecture Three, 'The Transitional Works: Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Questions of Method’: On the third day, we will turn to Sartre’s early encounter with Marxism and his attempts to integrate it into his Existentialism in Questions of Method. We will also look at his little-read biography of Mallarmé and his thrillingly bizarre biography of Jean Genet, which both also takes steps towards this integration.
• Lecture Four, 'The Late Works, part 1: Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vols. 1 and 2, The Family Idiot, Vols. 1, 2 and 3': In the first of our last two lectures, we will look at Sartre’s mature integration of Existentialism and Marxism in the Critique alongside his monumental study of Flaubert. The latter draws on the theoretical apparatus of the Critique, but also represents Sartre’s most mature engagement with Psychoanalysis. In another point of interest, it is also the sequel to his early work The Imaginary, where the insights of the early work are blown up to socio-historical proportions.
• Lecture Five, 'The Late Works, part 2: Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vols. 1 and 2, The Family Idiot, Vols. 1, 2 and 3': This final day will continue with the our work from day four. We will also attempt to come to a conclusion about Sartre’s achievements in his ‘existential biographies’, particularly in relation to his better-known body of work.

Readings:
Despite the fact the course will follow Sartre from the beginning to the end of his career, it will certainly not be expected of students to do the same in their reading. Of course, I would not discourage anyone from diving into any book by Sartre. Nevertheless, it would be helpful to have at least read his Questions of Method. It seems to me to be the work that best encapsulates the content of the course. The following (very limited) list is of secondary sources that are of significant value:

• Existential Marxism in postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser by Mark Poster
• Sartre and Flaubert by Hazel Barnes
  
• Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: Towards an Existentialist Theory of History by Thomas Flynn
  
• Reading Sartre by Joseph Catalano

Changing Images of Knowledge in Modernity
Lecturers: Dr Kristian Camilleri (Unimelb HPS) and Dr Matthew Sharpe (MSCP, Deakin)
Monday, Feb 6 - Friday, Feb 10.  11am - 1pm.

Course Schedule: (all lectures will be co-taken by KC and MS)

Monday: dominant images of science and modernity
Tuesday: Theology, Magic, and Mathematics: Rethinking the scientific revolution
Wednesday: Styles of scientific reasoning
Thursday: Relativity, incommensurability, instrumentality ... evaluating the postmodern critiques of science
Friday: Science, philosophy, modernity

Readings:

• A. Koyre, Metaphysics and Measurement
• C. Norris, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions
• I. Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002.
  
• A. Koestler, The Sleep-walkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
• D. Lindberg * R. Westman (eds.) Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution

History of Mathematics: Stories Retold, Stories Forgotten
Lecturer: David Sweeney
Monday, Feb 13 - Friday, Feb 17.  3pm - 5pm.

This course will look at the history of mathematics. At stories that have been retold so many times that they have lost all but the barest of meanings and at some stories that have not been told often.

Each day we will look at a different event or time in the History of Mathematics. Different stories will be looked at and compared. I will attempt to tell new stories about these events, or at least stories that do not figure too prominently in most history of mathematics text books. We will to do some of the mathematics, we will count and draw. We will look at the different ways in which mathematics is performed in the different times and in the different stories.

Course Schedule:
Monday: Number in Classical Greece
Here we will get a feeling for the Greek concept of Number. This is a very different conception to our own. For the Greeks a number was always a definite number of definite things. Thus five sheep, 120 boats. We will work with pebbles to gain a consciousness of number as performative and embodied. We will see how the relations between numbers (20 sheep and 4 sheep are 24 sheep, one quarter of 100 stones is 25 stones) prefigure the mathematical operations of addition and multiplication, subtraction and division. We will look at the Greek concept of the kinds of numbers, the even and the odd. This classical attempt to classify all numbers and so move away from number as embodied.
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Plato, Aristotle, Nicomachus, and Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

Tuesday: Geometry and the Angles of a Circle
Euclid’s The Elements of Geometry is probably the most successful text book of all time. Much of the modern idea of not only what mathematics should be, but also what logic and science should be, stems from an attempt to emulate the deductive reasoning of this work. However the success of this work has meant that very little remains of the works of Geometry as it was practiced before The Elements. What has been lost? On this day we will look at one idea in Geometry that Euclid cut out. The angle between a circle and a straight line. At least one proof using this concept remains in the work of Aristotle. I will give some of my ideas on the use of this concept and we will draw some basic proofs. Comparing the proof in Aristotle to Euclid’s proof of the same theorem which does not use such angles will give an idea of how mathematics can change and what can be lost and gained.
Readings: Short texts will come from Euclid and Aristotle.

Wednesday: Numbers for the Moderns
With the Renaissance the Greek idea of number was changed and interpreted and the modern ‘symbolic’ number was born. I will tell both the ‘normal’ story that is told regarding this development and I will give an outline of Klein’s telling of these events. We will try to get at the different feeling that results from thinking in terms of the embodied numbers looked at in the first day and the symbolic numbers that now surround us.
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

Thursday: Calculus and Infinitesimals
Calculus is the study of, among other things, how to find the area of a curved object. For instance, how many square units are there in half a circle? The classical approach to such problems gave a different procedure for each shape. During the Renaissance a method was sought that would answer all such problems of area and volume with one single procedure.  The key was the idea of Infinitesimals. Infinitesimals are infinitely small geometrical objects or infinitely small numbers. For about two hundred years infinitesimals were the foundation of this new procedure which was called the Infinitesimals Calculus, or The Calculus. We will look at some of Kepler and Newton’s simpler proofs and have a go at drawing and using infinitesimals. Then we will look at Lagrange’s Calculus without infinitesimals and my own work with calculus with and without infinitesimals.
Readings: Short texts will come from Kepler, Newton, and Lagrange.

Friday: The Modern World
What stories are we to write about Modern Mathematics? Why is the world split into those who feel an affinity for mathematics and those who do not? What is modern mathematics? How big is it? Why does modern mathematics look so different to its predecessors? What difficulties face modern mathematics? What is the modern mathematician afraid of?
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

One of my questions of the History of Mathematics
Mathematics has always, it seems, been both a way to do something and a certain ‘something else’. There has always been a story with the doing, whether that story comes from Plato as ‘mathematics is the way to the thought of the gods’ or whether that story is ‘man, I don’t want to do maths, everyone says its sooo hard’. It is a story that marks out mathematics as something special either greater than or worse than many other human activities.

Why do the different stories and retellings of mathematics and its history so often point to mathematics as in some way special?

Mallarmé and the Philosophers
Lecturer: Dr Mark Hewson
Mondays, 6-8pm, Jan 30 - Feb 27

This course will provide an introduction to the French poet, Stephane Mallarmé.  The course will work through Mallarmé’s career, focussing on his theory of poetry, on key hermetic poems and sketching an approach to his final poem, “A throw of the dice”. A key theme will concern Mallarmé as a specifically modern poet – as a poet responding to the question of the meaning of poetry in the modern (urban, industrial, scientific, democratic) age.

The course will combine the study of Mallarmé with examination of some of the philosophical texts that have made use of his work in order to develop their own questions.  Philosophers who have given a significant place to Mallarmé in their work include Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Rancière.  Extracts from these writers will accompany the study of key texts by Mallarmé.

Course Schedule:
This is a schedule of the writings of Mallarmé to be studied in the course.  The writings of various critics and philosophers on his work will be considered at intervals in this sequence, mainly in the latter weeks. The titles here are from the English versions in Weinfeld’s translation: they may be slightly different in Blackmore’s or in other translations: I include the French for some that are likely to vary. All of these texts will be made available as PDFs.

1. Early Poems:

• The Windows
• The Azure
• ‘Weary of Bitter Sleep’ (‘Las de l’amer repos’)
• Sea Breeze
• The Flowers

2. Hérodiade and the Metaphysical Crisis:

• ‘Scene’ from Hérodiade.
• A Phenomenon of the Future
• Mallarmé’s Letters of 1866-1867 (on his ‘metaphysical crisis’)
• ‘Her pure nails on high displaying their onyx’ (‘Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’): also known as the Sonnet in X.

3. Poems

• ‘When the shadow menaced with its fatal law’ (‘Quand l’ombre menaça de sa fatale loi’)
• ‘The virginal, vibrant and beautiful dawn’ (‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’)
• Funereal Toast to Theophile Gautier (‘Toast funèbre)
• The Tomb of Edgar Poe
• For the sake of voyaging – heedlessly (‘Au seul souci de voyager’)

4. Prose-texts on Poetry, Art and Culture

• Art for All
• Restricted Action
• The Mystery in Letters
• The Crisis in Verse

5. The last poem:

• A Throw of the Dice

All readings will be in English.  
The best translation of the poetry and prose-poems is Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems.  Translated with commentary by Henry Weinfeld.  University of California Press, 1996.  The translator includes good commentaries, and this makes it an especially useful work.  Also good, less expensive and easier to obtain, is Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, Translated by E.H. Blackmore. Oxford World Classics, 2008.  A good, readable introduction to Mallarmé’s life and work is the biography by Gordon Millan, Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice, Secker, 1994.

A Reader will be distributed in the first class, containing the main poems to be studied, as well as extracts from various philosophical readings of Mallarmé.

The Inhuman Condition : Nihilism / Information / Art
Lecturer: Dr Ashley Woodward
Wednesdays, 6-8pm, Feb 1 - Feb 29

This course explores the related themes of nihilism, information, and art in the thought of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard explored the contemporary conditions of culture and in particular the impact of information technology on the political, cultural, and existential dimensions of human life. He was also an aesthetician and art writer, and aesthetics plays a central role in his analysis of life in an information culture. In addition to his extensive writings, Lyotard co-currated one of the first major exhibitions of new media art (Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). Lyotard’s uniqueness and importance with respect to the cultural analysis of information is that he can be seen as treading a “middle road” between a critical reaction to the dehumanising effects of new technologies on the one hand, and a naïve, unreflective celebration of such technologies on the other. The subject will explore Lyotard’s investigations of these issues through various of his rich texts, interpreting them and contextualising them within the wider discourses of information theory and new media art, as well as examining them through various other contemporary theorists who have engaged with Lyotard, such as Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Rancière. The aim of the course is to uncover what Lyotard has to offer to philosophy, social theory, aesthetics and the arts today.

Course Schedule:
Seminar 1 : the Idea of the Inhuman
Introduction to Lyotard. After the postmodern condition: the inhuman condition. The problem of nihilism. Nihilism in the information age.

Seminar 2 : Information theory
Introduction to information theory (Shannon, Weiner, etc.). Lyotard’s philosophy of language in The Differend. Language and information. Lyotard’s critique of information.

Seminar 3 : New media arts
Introduction to Kantian aesthetics. Lyotard’s critique of new media arts. The exhibition Les Immatériaux.

Seminar 4 : Solar catastrophe
The fable of the exploding sun as a ‘post-metanarrative.’ Transhumanism. Leibniz’s monad. Artificial intelligence. Time. On technics: Lyotard and Steigler.

Seminar 5 : Art contra nihilism
The value of entropy. Lyotard’s recourse to psychoanalysis. Art as unpresentable: Lyotard and Rancière. The ‘art-phrase.’ Lyotard on specific arts: painting, music, cinema, etc. Conclusions.

Readings:
Primary
J.-F. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable” in Postmodern Fables, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
______, “Time Today” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
______, “Les Immatériaux,” Art & Text 17 ( 1985): 47-57.
______, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” Cultural Critique 5 (1986-1987): 209-219.
______, “Oikos” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
______, “Freud, Energy, and Chance: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” Tekhnema 5 (1999).
_____, “Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer” in The Assassination of Experience by Painting: Monory, ed. S. Wilson (London: Black Dog, 1988).

Secondary
A. Woodward, “Nihilism and the Sublime in Lyotard,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities vol. 16, no. 2 (2011): 51-71.
______, “New Technologies and Lyotard’s Aesthetics,” Litteraria Pragensia  vol. 16, no. 32 (2006): 14-35.
______, “Immaterial Matter” in Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life, ed. Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Graham Jones, Ashley Woodward (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Foucault’s Critique of Neoliberalism
Lecturer: James Muldoon
Thursdays, 6-8pm, Feb 2 - March 1

This course aims to give an introduction to Foucault's lectures given at the Collège de France from 1977-9:  Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. These lectures contain some of Foucault's most interesting unpublished work and develop his now well-known concepts of biopolitics, governmentality and the dispositif [apparatus]. They continue his earlier Nietzschean inspired studies of disciplinary power in new directions, analysing the rise of “societies of security” and tracing the emergence of governmentality back to the pastoral power of the early Christian church. Foucault also undertakes an analysis of liberalism as a mode of governance and examines the complex relationship between classical liberalism and the emergence of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism deserves particular attention because over the past thirty years neoliberalism has become the dominant political and economic ideology of Anglo-American societies and a reference point for new critiques of capitalism. This course will locate Foucault in relation to previous critiques of political economy by Marx and also explore his relation to his contemporaries and followers such as Deleuze, Negri, Lazzarato and Wendy Brown.

Course Schedule
Seminar 1: Introduction: Reading Foucault and an Introduction to Neoliberalism
Seminar 2: From Disciplinary Societies to Societies of Security
Seminar 3: Governmentality and Pastoral Power
Seminar 4: Liberalism as a Technique of Governmentality
Seminar 5: From Liberalism to Neoliberalism

Readings: excerpts from Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics.

Course difficulty level: introductory