- School of Culture & Communication
The University of Melbourne
VIC 3010
Australia
Justin Clemens
University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty Member
Of all the grades of doggerel, the limerick is one of the lowest. Brief, risible, finicky, the limerick is a form whose greatest successes never rise above the mildly embarrassing. Populist and participatory if not precisely popular, the... more
Of all the grades of doggerel, the limerick is one of the lowest. Brief, risible, finicky, the limerick is a form whose greatest successes never rise above the mildly embarrassing. Populist and participatory if not precisely popular, the limerick first becomes a hit in Victorian England with Edward Lear’s books of nonsense. It spreads at once across the English-speaking world like a highly-contagious linguistic rash. Yet despite never having enjoyed unqualified approbation from critics or public, the form has its enthusiasts and eminent aficionados: there is no lack of literary luminaries who have lavished love on the limerick. The present book continues this queer minor tradition, presenting 77 limericks about writers and philosophers from St Thomas Aquinas to Simone Weil. Including a critical essay that delineates the limerick’s salient features, along with a dictionary that collects brief physiognomies of the subjects of the limericks, this book dares to descend into the maelstrom of mediocrity and return, arms overflowing with mixed metaphors and microplastics.
Available from a range of distributors, including: https://www.manic.com.au/limericks-philosophical-and-literary.html
Available from a range of distributors, including: https://www.manic.com.au/limericks-philosophical-and-literary.html
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A note on the role of mysticism in the work of Simone Weil
Research Interests: Mysticism and Simone Weil
What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell... more
What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bin Laden tell us about new methods of popular propaganda? These are only some of the thought-provoking questions raised in Avoiding the Subject, which highlights the feedback-loops between philosophy, technology, and politics in today's mediascape.
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"The theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary European thought. While the combined corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each other’s... more
"The theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary European thought. While the combined corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each other’s work, such references are often simply critical, obscure – or both. Lacan Deleuze Badiou guides us through these crucial, under-remarked interrelations, identifying the conceptual passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or agreement.
Working through the rubrics of the contemporary, time, the event and truth, Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe present a new, lucid account of where these three thinkers stand in relation to one another and why their nexus remains unsurpassed as a point of reference for contemporary thought itself."
Working through the rubrics of the contemporary, time, the event and truth, Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe present a new, lucid account of where these three thinkers stand in relation to one another and why their nexus remains unsurpassed as a point of reference for contemporary thought itself."
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Minimal Domination collects a selection of Justin Clemens’ art writings from the past decade. The title is drawn from contemporary mathematics: a minimally dominating set is the smallest set of points that neighbour all other points of a... more
Minimal Domination collects a selection of Justin Clemens’ art writings from the past decade. The title is drawn from contemporary mathematics: a minimally dominating set is the smallest set of points that neighbour all other points of a graph. A minimally dominating set is therefore a multiple and a structure which has privileged access to that which it is not. This is the secret of contemporary art: it creates discrete selections from which we can survey the whole.
Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science... more
Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an ‘antiphilosophy’, that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture.
Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.
Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.
Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary... more
Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary theory. The central contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic - despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought.
The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou.
In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism.
Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism.
Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements.
This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.
The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou.
In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism.
Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism.
Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements.
This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.
Modelled on classical epics such as Virgil's Aeneid and Pope's Dunciad, The Mundiad is a mock epic poem celebrating the conception and birth of little Mundia, her heroic escape from her parents, medical staff and hospital, and journey... more
Modelled on classical epics such as Virgil's Aeneid and Pope's Dunciad, The Mundiad is a mock epic poem celebrating the conception and birth of little Mundia, her heroic escape from her parents, medical staff and hospital, and journey into the real world. A world of deranged superstars, climate-change deniers, rogue states, multimedia extravaganzas, political bullshit, creepy talkback demagogues, financial crises, child soldiers, happy idiots, genetic engineering, death camps, pornographers and more.
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Villain is a poetry collection by Justin Clemens. Invoking the spirit of celebrated French poet, vagabond and thief Francois Villon – some of whose ballads are translated here – these poems range from the violent and obscene to the... more
Villain is a poetry collection by Justin Clemens. Invoking the spirit of celebrated French poet, vagabond and thief Francois Villon – some of whose ballads are translated here – these poems range from the violent and obscene to the lyrical and sublime, sometimes within a single verse. Villain unleashes a war of forms, perfect sonnets clash with mock haiku, heroic couplets and free verse — all directed towards capturing the contemporary world. But Villain also ranges over time and place, people and events, encompassing science-fiction creatures as well as medieval criminals.
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In a symptomatic opening shot, the Acknowledgements to this book conclude: ‘I would like to thank ... for being absolutely wonderful fellow Deleuzists, if I may put it that way’. The apparent generosity of such an attribution is, however,... more
In a symptomatic opening shot, the Acknowledgements to this book conclude: ‘I would like to thank ... for being absolutely wonderful fellow Deleuzists, if I may put it that way’. The apparent generosity of such an attribution is, however, quickly mitigated when Ian Buchanan undertakes to explain the differences between being excellently ‘Deleuzist’ and merely ‘Deleuzian’: ‘Deleuzism, then, is what one gets when one has managed to cease being Deleuzian without at the same time having become something else (Jamesonian, Derridean, or whatever)’ (7). He continues: ‘If this book is anti-Deleuzian, then it is so in what I take to be the spirit of Deleuze’s project, namely the rejection of all forms of slavishness in favour of (liberating) creativity’ (8). This raspberry to all who might have considered themselves ‘Deleuzians’ is thus also a bid on Buchanan’s own part for distinction in a eld still ooding with books on Deleuze. Not only does Buchanan thereby turn the aforementioned Acknowledgements page into a declaration of priority (‘if I might put it like that’), but he lays down the terms in which he demands to be read. Buchanan, you understand, is a Deleuzist. It should be noted here that the use of Deleuze’s name usually proves a problem for Deleuze’s critics, anyway. It is dif cult not to feel somewhat sorry for Felix Guattari, Deleuze’s collaborator on a number of major books, whose name is routinely dropped in discussions of the work (along with the conjunction). For his part, Buchanan sometimes says Guattari, and sometimes does not. Then again, Buchanan sometimes does not seem to have the con dence of his own neologisms either, and often reverts to the very words he elsewhere rejects: ‘What I am looking for here is a Deleuzian way of doing cultural studies ...’ (177; emphasis added). Michael Ryan once remarked of American literary deconstruction that it was ‘an old-model new criticism from which the muf er has been removed, creating more noise without noticeably improving the speed’. One might similarly say of Australian literary Deleuzism that it is an old-model Leavism, etc. Indeed, one could simply replace the word ‘Desire’ in this book with the word ‘Life’ and have a text that clearly would like to insert itself into the Great Tradition of English Criticism. Indeed, the claims this book makes are exemplarily literary, insofar as they hover undecidably between opinion and knowledge. They are not simply opinion— Buchanan is too scholarly for that—but neither can they be considered falsi able scienti c statements or philosophical propositions. Furthermore, the chapters remain somewhat unfocused, and meander from remark to remark without the
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As the French thinker Jean-Claude Milner points out in a recent important study: the ‘revolutionary creed’ that governed global political action in modernity no longer holds as a horizon for action. What emerges in its wake is the... more
As the French thinker Jean-Claude Milner points out in a recent important study: the ‘revolutionary creed’ that governed global political action in modernity no longer holds as a horizon for action. What emerges in its wake is the fundamental experience that there are no longer any political differences able to curb rapacious technocapitalist expansion; the only difference that makes a difference is that of the immanent outside, the environment, the conditions of life itself. This poem arises at this juncture, where technological progress has become indistinguishable from the extermination of conditions of planetary life as we know it.
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Since the very concept of 'medium' means that there are media, plural, i.e., differentiated media, and since the digital converges all media into a single state, i.e., digital data, then by definition the concept of media... more
Since the very concept of 'medium' means that there are media, plural, i.e., differentiated media, and since the digital converges all media into a single state, i.e., digital data, then by definition the concept of media disappears....
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This is a radical reconstruction of how psychoanalysis operates and a renewed sense of its indispensable power. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century. From psychiatry to politics, it left no... more
This is a radical reconstruction of how psychoanalysis operates and a renewed sense of its indispensable power. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century. From psychiatry to politics, it left no field untouched. Yet it is itself an untouchable discipline: not really science, not really criticism. Alain Badiou described psychoanalysis as an 'antiphilosophy': a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Now, Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under this rubric. He shows how this impacts on the key concepts that continue to be misrepresented by disciplines hostile to psychoanalysis; above all, regarding the relationships of humans to drugs, animality and sexuality. It analyses psychoanalysis in a new way, under the rubric of 'antiphilosophy'. It identifies and clarifies a set of previously undeveloped psychoanalytic concepts: torture, slavery and swarming. It applies these concepts to a range of key topics raised in the work of theorists including Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben.
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The world in which we live is an obscene and demonic cocktail of matter in which the living and the dead commingle promiscuously. As such, irs no surprise that the popular culture of our time seethes with images of zombies, angels,... more
The world in which we live is an obscene and demonic cocktail of matter in which the living and the dead commingle promiscuously. As such, irs no surprise that the popular culture of our time seethes with images of zombies, angels, aliens, spectres, vampires, undead of all kinds, or that there's a global frenzy to recover, memorialise and publicise even the most negligible events.
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The controversies unleashed by psychoanalysis never seem to stop repeating themselves. If what psychoanalysis has to say is true, then, by its own lights, it has to be controversial. Controversies are thus a privileged place to see this... more
The controversies unleashed by psychoanalysis never seem to stop repeating themselves. If what psychoanalysis has to say is true, then, by its own lights, it has to be controversial. Controversies are thus a privileged place to see this truth and this resistance in violent and lurid action. Take infant experience and bastardry. Every kid is a bit of a bastard, and the establishment of this infantile bastardry conditions subsequent repetitions of the organism: that breast is persecuting me, these are not my real parents, I did not borrow your kettle. Just how much of a bastard is this baby? The answers psychoanalysis comes up with depend on how it formulates the vicissitudes of differential repetitions, formations of the unconscious. Yet there remains something puzzling about repetition: if eros is constantly getting itself into nasty situations as a matter of course, are there still other factors (perhaps even more sinister) at work? Because of his refusal to dismiss his own puzzlem...
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There is an ancient, if rarely thematized bond between philosophy and slavery. As Alain Badiou has recently remarked, ‘this [rarety] is especially because from the outset everything is in some sense divided.’ For the figure of the slave... more
There is an ancient, if rarely thematized bond between philosophy and slavery. As Alain Badiou has recently remarked, ‘this [rarety] is especially because from the outset everything is in some sense divided.’ For the figure of the slave divides philosophy at its inception, cutting across the divisions of the polis, freedom, and justice. My thesis is that this paradox of the slave is at once foundational and aporetic for philosophy: when the slave appears within the text of philosophy, it thereafter has certain disorganising, if revelatory effects. Moreover, the paradox of the slave is linked integrally to another ancient phenomenon: judicial torture as the model of the extraction of knowledge from a resistant or un-knowing body. This essay examines this situation, in which slavery, torture, and philosophy are variously linked, through a series of vignettes drawn from Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel.
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A review essay of a recent book regarding the cross-over between psychoanalysis and analytic philosophy, which draws on a range of recent works in the subfield
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Apperley, T. & Clemens, J. (2009). All your base are belong to us! Videogames and play in the information age. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 16.
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England falsifies France; or, English falsifies French. The English Revolution of the mid seventeenth century accomplished, well over a century before the American and French Revolutions, the legal execution of a monarch and the... more
England falsifies France; or, English falsifies French. The English Revolution of the mid seventeenth century accomplished, well over a century before the American and French Revolutions, the legal execution of a monarch and the installation of a new form of republic. John Milton, radical puritan, polemicist and poet, was instrumental in that (qualified) English success. Proselytiser for divorce, new kinds of education, the extrication of religion from the state, and epic poet, Milton produced work which at once exemplifies many of the theses proffered by Jacques Rancière regarding politics, education and aesthetics – as he exceeds and falsifies them. This chapter will discuss a late pamphlet of John Milton titled Of True Religion, in order to suggest how Milton confronts and rebukes Rancière’s theories of disagreement, ignorant masters and the distributions of the sensible, not only by contravening many of the latter’s demonstrations and arguments, but in anticipating them. The key...
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In this chapter, we attempt to describe and theorize some salient elements in the transformation of the structure of public address at once incarnated and affected by the ongoing enthusiasm for big screens in urban spaces. Our key... more
In this chapter, we attempt to describe and theorize some salient elements in the transformation of the structure of public address at once incarnated and affected by the ongoing enthusiasm for big screens in urban spaces. Our key conclusion is that contemporary big screen art at once tends to work to expose, exploit and exceed these forces, form the point of conception through the process of creation to the finality of circulation. At the same time, the regulatory processes that organize the uses of big screens are tantamount to the inculcation of certain controls on creativity, seeking to capture and canalize aesthetic affects for governmental and corporate ends by, above all, a kind of fiscal moralization of technology.
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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... more
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.
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... in Deus Ex: Human Revolution Alexandra Orlando and Matthew Schwager The Biopolitics of Gaming: Avatar-Player Self-Reflexivity in Assassin's Creed II Tom Apperley and Justin Clemens BioShock Infinite: The Search for Redemption and... more
... in Deus Ex: Human Revolution Alexandra Orlando and Matthew Schwager The Biopolitics of Gaming: Avatar-Player Self-Reflexivity in Assassin's Creed II Tom Apperley and Justin Clemens BioShock Infinite: The Search for Redemption and ...
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A note on the role of mysticism in the work of Simone Weil
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Recently Anglophone Continental philosophy has been marked by an emergent trend which goes under a variety of names, but which is perhaps best known as “speculative realism” (SR) (alongside such fellowtravellers as “object oriented... more
Recently Anglophone Continental philosophy has been marked by an emergent trend which goes under a variety of names, but which is perhaps best known as “speculative realism” (SR) (alongside such fellowtravellers as “object oriented ontology”). Its proponents now include—and exclude—such personages as Ian Bogost, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Timothy Morton, among others.1 The rapid success of SR and object oriented ontology has been remarkable but also controversial: the trend has been accompanied and prosecuted by often-scathing polemics from all sides. Notably, much of the discussion has taken place online—which perhaps makes SR the first philosophical movement of the post-convergent digital media environment.2
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This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media, and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious... more
This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media, and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent and was subsequently imported into video game terminology during a period of widespread appropriation of Eastern culture by Californian tech industries. We argue that the use of the term was not a case of happenstance but a signaling of the potential for computing to offer a mystical or enchanted perspective within an otherwise secular world. This suggests that the concept is useful in game cultures precisely because it plays with the “otherness” of the term's original meaning. We argue that this indicates a fundamental hybridity to gaming cultures that highlight the need to add postcolonial perspectives to how issues of diversity and power in gaming cultures are understood.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Communication, Game studies, Social Sciences, and 15 moreDiversity, Postcolonial Studies, Hybridity, Technology And Culture, Appropriation, Avatar, Avatars, Scholarship, Communication and media Studies, Games and Culture, Cultural appropriation, Game Studies, Game Culture, Postcolonialism, and Games Culture
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This chapter focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual spaces. The avatar has become the key technology through which this interplay is organized and experienced by organizing our relationship between spaces,... more
This chapter focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual spaces. The avatar has become the key technology through which this interplay is organized and experienced by organizing our relationship between spaces, which are simultaneously “real” and “virtual.” It facilitates this relationship through multiple functions; it is a mode of identification, a vector of the user's agency, and an in-world representative of the user. The role of the avatar is analyzed using the concepts of focalization, localization, integration, and programming. Together, these concepts form an operational framework for understanding the complex form of the avatar, which can take on a multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the “real world.”
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Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Studies Review (formerly The UTS Review)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to... more
Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Studies Review (formerly The UTS Review)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is the present efflorescence and dominance of drug-based psychotherapies. Indeed, the astonishing public success of a physician such as Oliver Sacks - whose entire career would have been impossible without his illegal pharmaceutical experimentation upon uniformed patients in the guise of authentic Hippocratic care - can stand as a particularly chilling index of just such a crisis: the case study, a genre which Freud is often said to have invented, and to which he certainly gave the decisive impetus, has become in Sacks’ hands an unreflective celebration of the radiant sovereign power that legal access to, and distribution rights over, synthesized psychoactive substances can bequeath to the duly-authorised representatives of the pharmaco-medical institution. Sacks aside, John Forrester characterizes this shift thus ;the introduction of the psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, a new generation of tranquilizers shortly after (Librium, Valium), the anti-depressants of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mood-altering drugs of the 1980s, has entailed a significant shift in the practice of psychiatry. Yes, the new psychiatry went hand in hand with a shift of theoretical focus from psychological and psychoanalytical theories to neurological and psychopharmacological concerns’. His analysis has been echoed by other major psychoanalytic theorist-practitioners, such as Bruce Fink, Elie Ragland and Elisabeth Roudinesco, all of whom naturally deplore this situation, even if their condemnations take different forms, and identify different causes
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Review essay of Talia Morag, Emotion, imagination and the limits of reason (Routledge, 2016). The relationship between psychoanalysis and other forms of thought, including philosophy, has always been fraught at best. This review examines... more
Review essay of Talia Morag, Emotion, imagination and the limits of reason (Routledge, 2016). The relationship between psychoanalysis and other forms of thought, including philosophy, has always been fraught at best. This review examines the claims of an important new book that draws on contemporary analytic philosophy in its reconstruction of a psychoanalytic theory of emotions.
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Review of A.J. Carruthers, Axis, Book I: Areal and J. Watson, 3 Painters: Marquet, Bonnard, Beckmann in
Southerly, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2015).
Southerly, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2015).
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Review of Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets
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Review of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
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Unedited draft of chapter on 'The Exception' for Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha (eds.), Future Theory (Bloomsbury 2021).
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The prognosis for psychoanalysis today is dire. We live in a time in which the dream of technological solutions to mental disorders dominates the governmental-corporate-medical provision of services. The new generation management... more
The prognosis for psychoanalysis today is dire. We live in a time in which the dream of technological solutions to mental disorders dominates the governmental-corporate-medical provision of services. The new generation management strategies for mental illness have overrun psychoanalytic methods of diagnosis, treatment and theory. This paper reexamines the situation from the angle of a genealogy of drug-use, from Shakespeare to Prozac.
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England falsifies France; or, English falsifies French. The English Revolution of the mid seventeenth century accomplished, well over a century before the American and French Revolutions, the legal execution of a monarch and the... more
England falsifies France; or, English falsifies French. The English Revolution of the mid seventeenth century accomplished, well over a century before the American and French Revolutions, the legal execution of a monarch and the installation of a new form of republic. John Milton, radical puritan, polemicist and poet, was instrumental in that (qualified) English success. Proselytiser for divorce, new kinds of education, the extrication of religion from the state, and epic poet, Milton produced work which at once exemplifies many of the theses proffered by Jacques Rancière regarding politics, education and aesthetics — as he exceeds and falsifies them. This chapter discusses a late pamphlet of John Milton titled Of True Religion, in order to suggest how Milton confronts and rebukes Rancière's theories of disagreement, ignorant masters and the distributions of the sensible, not only by contravening many of the latter's demonstrations and arguments , but in anticipating them. The key points of the exposition will hinge on Milton's doctrines of indiscernibility, infinity and decision. In doing so, this chapter shows how Rancière's three regimes seem unable to account for a fourth modality, transversal to his own.
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Uncorrected proof for book chapter for Melanges Anne Freadman (please note in particular some of the formalizations have gone awry before corrections), dealing with the question of 'Can Mathematics Think Genre?' on the basis of some of... more
Uncorrected proof for book chapter for Melanges Anne Freadman (please note in particular some of the formalizations have gone awry before corrections), dealing with the question of 'Can Mathematics Think Genre?' on the basis of some of Alain Badiou's theses.
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A discussion of the contribution of Arena Magazine to the thinking of Australian politics over the last 25 years or so. The chapter was commissioned for and published in J. Hinkson et al. (eds.), Cold War to Hot Planet (Melbourne: Arena,... more
A discussion of the contribution of Arena Magazine to the thinking of Australian politics over the last 25 years or so. The chapter was commissioned for and published in J. Hinkson et al. (eds.), Cold War to Hot Planet (Melbourne: Arena, 2016).
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In July 2016, the world was suddenly abuzz with news of Pokémon GO. It seemed almost impossible to find anything in social media news feeds that wasn't directly related to the Android/iPhone app. Real life was the same; everywhere, there... more
In July 2016, the world was suddenly abuzz with news of Pokémon GO. It seemed almost impossible to find anything in social media news feeds that wasn't directly related to the Android/iPhone app. Real life was the same; everywhere, there were people wandering through schools, parks, and public spaces, caught up in the capture of virtual menageries. From Tokyo to Tacoma, there was a palpable transformation in the behavior in vast numbers of otherwise totally unrelated peoples, who, armed with mobile phones, swept through such spaces, scoping and swiping as they went. Everywhere, stories of assaults, thefts, and accidents assailed us from social media, as the Pokémon swarm stormed through the world, following the virtual summonses issuing from millions of tiny screens. Whatever one's opinion of the game, its players, and its consequences, there seems no question that Pokémon GO constitutes an event in the transformation of both publics and public spaces by video games. Pokémon GO is the latest project by Niantic Labs, a company that emerged from the aftermath of the 2015 reorganization of Google. Niantic has a track record of making games and apps for mobile devices, which are based on real-world maps. The precursor game by Niantic, Ingress (2013), had involved crowdsourcing a gigantic database of playable locations that eventually became the database on which Pokémon GO operates today. If Pokémon GO is merely the most recent and most successful augmented reality game that has been developed so far, it expressly builds on hardware and software networks that have been in development for some time. What is particularly notable for our discussion here is the central role that the avatar has in the smooth operation of Pokémon GO and how a particular deployment of the avatar concept facilitates this mass shift in behavior. While Pokémon GO is indeed just one augmented reality game among others in a genre that has a long history (Moore, 2015a,b), Pokémon GO focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual
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In this chapter we discuss key gameplay elements of one of the most important and influential videogame series of recent years, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. We propose that an essential part of the success of this game is due to its... more
In this chapter we discuss key gameplay elements of one of the most important and influential videogame series of recent years, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. We propose that an essential part of the success of this game is due to its making a significant and innovative intervention in the meta-reflexive thematization of the avatar-form: the imaginative staging of the experience of the user and consequently the user’s necessary relationship to the game software and hardware is the underlying theme of the narrative itself. Within this staging, the concerns of narrative and the ludic parameters of the game world are extraordinarily strongly aligned. This alignment further offers a strong interpretation of the “real world” in which the game is played: that is, what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics”.
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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... more
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 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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A collection of articles on the topic of 'Politics and Melancholia' by a variety of thinkers, including Sami Khatib, Rebecca Comay, Marc de Kesel, Peter Goodrich, Sigi Jottkandt, Jon Roffe, and Alexi Kukuljevic... Crisis & Critique Home... more
A collection of articles on the topic of 'Politics and Melancholia' by a variety of thinkers, including Sami Khatib, Rebecca Comay, Marc de Kesel, Peter Goodrich, Sigi Jottkandt, Jon Roffe, and Alexi Kukuljevic...
Crisis & Critique Home crisiscritique.org
Crisis & Critique Home crisiscritique.org
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WRITING & CONCEPTS is a free public lecture series designed to explore the potential of writing as both a process and an outcome. The lectures will alternate between practitioners for whom the written form is their primary professional... more
WRITING & CONCEPTS is a free public lecture series designed to explore the potential of writing as both a process and an outcome.
The lectures will alternate between practitioners for whom the written form is their primary professional output and practitioners whose work manifests as exhibitions or events within the domain of contemporary art.
The lectures will alternate between practitioners for whom the written form is their primary professional output and practitioners whose work manifests as exhibitions or events within the domain of contemporary art.
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This paper is a contribution to an online forum curated by Monique Rooney and titled 'Cryptocurrency and the Intelligence of the Humanities.' The argument is that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin constitute a contemporary theology of... more
This paper is a contribution to an online forum curated by Monique Rooney and titled 'Cryptocurrency and the Intelligence of the Humanities.' The argument is that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin constitute a contemporary theology of technics, which operates by simultaneously foreclosing the creative disjunctions of art and repressing the infinitary functions of mathematics.
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This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture, and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious... more
This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture, and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent and was subsequently imported into video game terminology during a period of widespread appropriation of Eastern culture by Californian tech industries. We argue that the use of the term was not a case of happenstance, but a signalling of the potential for computing to offer a mystical or enchanted perspective within an otherwise secular world. This suggests that the concept is useful in game cultures precisely because it plays with the ‘otherness’ of the terms original meaning. We argue that this indicates a fundamental hybridity to gaming cultures that highlights the need to add postcolonial perspectives to how issues of diversity and power in gaming cultures are understood.
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This paper is the text of a contribution to an encomium for Russell Grigg at the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy Conference 2016 at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Other speakers included Oliver Feltham and Talia... more
This paper is the text of a contribution to an encomium for Russell Grigg at the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy Conference 2016 at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Other speakers included Oliver Feltham and Talia Morag.