Ontario Hegel Organization – Call for Abstracts

Theme: Negativity

Deadline:  October 31, 2010
Conference date:  April 1 - 3, 2011
Conference location: University of Ottawa
Organisers: Douglas Moggach and Jeffrey Reid

Much of the dynamic activity in recent Hegel studies, particularly in the Anglo-American world,  has focused on what might be called the “positivities” of his system, on Hegel’s writings on conscience, language, nature, law, religion, psychology, education, art, ethics, the state...  Much of this scholarly work involves new interpretations of Hegelian content, which are meant not only to help us better understand the philosopher’s work but also to advance more general contemporary reflections on these subjects.  In moral-political philosophy, Hegel’s thoughts on mutual recognition, forgiveness and community are seen as informative of our own ideas about living-together. Hegel’s writing on consciousness can be seen as responding to certain problems associated with contemporary empirical science;  his writing on property and the juridical person provides new perspectives in philosophy of law etc.  However, as rewarding as such approaches to Hegelian content are, they tend to ignore that unsettling and yet essential element of Hegelian thought which might be broadly qualified as negativity.

Douglas Moggach and Jeffrey Reid will organise a conference on Hegelian negativity, under the umbrella of that loose-knit group of Hegel scholars known as the Ontario Hegel Organization, at the University of Ottawa, April 1-3, 2011. Those interested in presenting papers (25 minutes) are invited to send abstracts dealing with any aspect of the question:   logical considerations on the restlessness thought, the movement of the concept, natural questions of finitude, spiritual topics of scepticism, desire, freedom, or expressions of struggle and strife...   the darker elements of Hegelian thought that are perhaps more often associated with European approaches to Hegel (existentialism, Frankfurt School, metaphysics, psychoanalysis...) but which should be seen as relevant to any discussion of the “positivities” mentioned above.  Can we conceive of mutual recognition without the struggle to attain it?  Is revealed religion possible without the pain and loss at the heart of spirit?  Is art and culture possible without the annihilation of nature?  Is conscience possible without a sense of evil? Does education not involve the cruel overcoming of the natural body?  Please limit abstracts to 250 words and send them to jreid[at]uottawa.ca before October 31.

Douglas Moggach and Jeffrey Reid

Henry Miller: Escape from America (French Interview)

Some people live interesting lives, but write uninteresting works. Some people live uninteresting lives, but write interesting works. Henry Miller was a man that lived and wrote in a way only a few can emulate: His life and literary creations were equally interesting. What is great about this interview of Henry Miller is the ease in which he describes his unorthodox life. His unconventional ways were clearly an inspiration to his creative endeavors.

Revolutionary thinkers may take some issue with him. His politics seemed apolitical. He was disturbed by the direction he saw America going and then chose not to let it matter. Politically he was escapist. That's not good for helping create change in one's country or the world. Yet, when change is not happening it's not a bad way to live. This weekend I will escape back into his novel Sexus. I might not finish it until next week. After I'm done there are still a few books by Marx and Paine in my book collection needing to be read. They are not far from my tattered copy of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

The Notes Taken at One Year

Today marks the one year anniversary of The Notes Taken. We began with this short post setting out our ambitions (to review books), and since then we've written 231 posts, 60 of them being book reviews.

To me, these are decent numbers; but more importantly, I find that maintaining a blog has changed the way that I work with non-blog related reading and writing. There are other factors involved here, including the kind of clarification that is required when one starts thinking about the problems that were left unresolved with one's previous efforts, mine being the book Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art, but blogging has transformed the way I engage with texts, and the way I write (not to mention that it has expanded the circle of those with whom I converse with about philosophy, through either blogs, email correspondence, or a few guest features). It has also increased the amount that I write. And that, I think, is a positive development because writing requires a lot of practice. Some of that work has appeared here, with varying degrees of success, and much more of it remains stuck in my notebooks.

For our more recent readers, I would just like to highlight a few of the successes, primarily those of the other contributors to The Notes Taken. If you would like to get a sense of where we stand, I'd recommend, first, the online reading group/self-clarification that Matthew McLennan and I undertook around David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Then I would add Matt's review of Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End of Times, which captures the exasperation that I know he and I feel at every new book of Zizek's that begins with some promise and ends with the same jokes he used in The Ticklish Subject or Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? I'd also recommend Matt's long running series on Yukio Mishima.

And with these I would include Sean Moreland's thoughts on the legends of J.D. Salinger, occasioned by the author's death on January 27th (on the same day as Howard Zinn).

That rounds out our Ottawa-based contributors. But the blog would not be complete without Jason Smith, currently based in Korea, who has been engaging questions of imperialism, including this post on U.S.-South Korean relations, which drew the ire of a conservative blogger, and even a small bit of traffic therefrom. Nor would the list be complete without the weekend posts by Joshua, currently living in the Central Valley of California where several of us grew up. It took a while to convince him, but eventually I prodded Joshua into making his nearly all-consuming Youtube habit a blogging habit. For me it's like going to visit his place every weekend, when he's just got to show you that clip of William F. Buckley Jr. interviewing Huey P. Newton, or Georges Bataille discussing literature and evil.

I could keep adding links, but I think I've already added too many. I'll close by saying that I've had a good year writing for The Notes Taken, and I think next year will be even better.

Yukio Mishima, "Confessions of a Mask"

Last winter I forayed into the works of arguably the greatest Japanese author of the 20th century, Yukio Mishima. I was not unscathed; you might say I'm still "working through it". In any case, I can't put this fascist bastard's books down.

I've already blogged about how Mishima's fiction, singularly crafted and aesthetically interesting on its own, makes much more sense - or in any case, gains considerably in depth - when one is familiar with his biography, psyche, political ventures, etc. In fact, there's good reason to suspect that Mishima cannot be divorced from his literary work, or vice versa; rather, since he lived his life as a work of art, to read his novels is only to scratch the surface. Whereas other authors I've recently blogged about, such as Cormac McCarthy, for the most part cultivate themselves as impersonal and remote with respect to their works, Mishima seems at all times to be engaged in creating the work of art that is Mishima; hence, each novel must be read in the context of the larger creation (less charitably, the larger spectacle).

For this reason, "Confessions of a Mask" is a particularly interesting Mishima novel. It's the closest he gives us to a straight-up, confessional autobiography, and although his surviving family would apparently still be (somehow) reticent with respect to this interpretation, it chronicles in a very literal way his own changing and largely painful relationship to his queerness. It's widely known that Mishima had affairs with men and trans-women throughout his adult life; "Confessions of a Mask" provides his own take on this, executed with incomparably violent and flowery prose.

It would be tempting, perhaps, to read the novel as in some way exemplary of postwar Japanese queerness. I suspect however that Mishima is too rare a bird for this to be true. His homosexual desire is to some extent polymorphous (armpits!), and is deeply tangled with a desire for images of violence, destruction and death; case in point, his description of erotic fantasies wherein his schoolmates are tortured to death, and his vivid description of masturbating to an image of St Sebastian bristling with arrows. Perhaps something about this sheds light on coming of age at the height of Japanese militarism and imperialism; Mishima did seem to regret faking his way out of military service, having missed his chance to die a "beautiful death" like so many other young Japanese men. I hesitate to make such sweeping generalizations, however. At best, I might agree that Mishima, as always seems the case, is something like the canary in the mineshaft: if something bizarre is going on in Japan, however buried, his prose and his gestures seem sure to reflect it in spectacular fashion.

Larger questions surrounding a "Queer Canon" can be posed in light of this novel. It strikes me that Mishima, like William S. Burroughs, presents something of an enigma, if not an outright problem, for constructions of queerness as somehow inherently liberal (if not radical). Let's not forget his cartoonish ultra-nationalism, his problematic celebrations of "manliness", and what is - arguably? - his gross misogyny. If Mishima belongs in a canon of any kind, I would suggest that it's as a liminal figure. The questions that can be spun from his confession are legion, and in my mind they suggest that the simplistic notion of a "queer author" is deeply troubled.

The Politics of University Budgets

Amy DePaul interviews Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Public University, over at Alternet. Although I haven't read Newfield's book, I think his general thesis is correct: he argues that the ideological battles over university curriculum and the cutting and privatizing of university budgets are part of a concerted effort to undermine a more diverse and critical approach to education. While it is true that some universities have become mired in financial difficulties, the logic of their solutions follows that of a loosely neoliberal or 'business' perspective. We've already argued that student debt is political, because increased debt can reduce a graduate's inclination toward low-paying work in activism or social justice work (at the same time that it implies a consumer's model of education); following Newfield we should add that budget cuts are political insofar as they target fields that study the negative aspects of contemporary life, and that advocate a critical and diversified public life. One excerpt:

You say in the book that elites on the right began to focus on universities increasingly. What actions did they take?

They attacked every reform in the humanities that racially integrated the curriculum, including attempts to broaden ‘great books’ courses at Stanford in the late 80s. The humanities as a source of knowledge in society was gradually discredited. In the early 90s, attacks began on affirmative action in California and elsewhere.

The other flank of the culture wars is the budget wars and my argument is they are basically the same thing. The goal was to discredit fields that had studied negative aspects of American life. The second goal was to use budget pressures to de-fund disciplines that seemed too critical of the established order. History, literature studies, anthropology, sociology -- anything that isn’t econometric and efficiency oriented, anything too skeptical, all of that stuff should only be tolerated if it can pay its own way.

Freedom and Personhood: Two Reviews

Though you were expecting another tirade, I offer links to two recent book reviews. 

Peter Gratton reviews Jonathan Franzen's Freedom over at Philosophy in a Time of Error. Here's a catchy excerpt:

Let me take an inelegant analogy, but since I’m teaching Husserl, I find it apt: this is certainly a phenomenology of characters, the best I’ve read (or rather, I suppose, I’ve read in a recent work) for some time. He detaches us from the natural attitude of realism (this is the word he has championed in interviews) for an eidetic reduction into literature. There, on the page, we can twist and turn each person from various angles, from various personae or masks, just as we turn each page, seeing them from behind and front, and thus developing a “sympathy” he notes one of the characters has innately for even the worst among us; literary realisms tend to leave character behind in the passing of scenes and details. Definitively not so with this work.

And Scu reviews Roberto Esposito's Terza persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell'impersonale (Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal) at Critical Animal:

The book is, in many ways, very Agamben-esque. In both the good and bad senses of that term. Everything is empty metaphysical machines separating and rearranging bodies into killable and protected in zones of indetermination. And of course the teleology of all of this is the Nazis. The solution is, of course, to render the machine inoperative by exiting from the metaphysics associated with the machine. A lot of sillyness is pushed against supporters of human rights and bio-ethicists (I'm sorry, I find it hard to believe that what this world needs is less attention paid to practical ethics, or that was really drove the logics of the Third Reich was bio-ethics and human rights). It is very learned and nuanced, with fascinating arguments and insights.

Tony Benn: Let's Talk About Socialism

Documentary film maker Michael Moore does a great interview with the former British parliamentarian Tony Benn. This clip comes from an extended portion from Moore's documentary "Sicko." The United States needs such politicians, the United States needs socialism. Our capitalist health care system is killing us. US Socialists should learn to articulate their arguments with the clarity of this ol' firebrand.

Sorel on Pessimism

I have started reading Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence, without really knowing what to expect other than the vague and/or allusive remarks made about his work by Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács. Having only read through the different introductions to two of the early editions of the work, the latter being his 'Letter to Daniel Halévy,' I've already discovered why I'm not a pessimist.* 

Sorel rejects the common distinction between optimism and pessimism as a pair of opposites, in the way that we stare at a water glass and ask if it's half full or half empty. "Pessimism," he writes, "is quite a different thing from the caricatures that are usually presented of it; it is a metaphysics of morals rather than a theory of the world; it is a conception of a march towards deliverance that is narrowly conditioned." He lists three aspects of this 'metaphysics of morals,'  which nevertheless hints at a genealogy of morals (especially when he writes that the optimism of Greek philosophy reflects the urban and commercial life of their society, while "Greek pessimism sprang from the poor warlike tribes living in the mountains who possessed an enormous aristocratic pride but whose material conditions were very modest").

• First, pessimism refuses to deny the wretchedness of mankind, and the constant threat of pain and suffering.
• Second, "the pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded...and which can only disappear through a catastrophe which involves the whole." As much as he condemns all Marxism after Marx, Sorel takes up the fatalist current that fixated on the iron laws of development.
• Which is why the third element, which he calls the "most fundamental," is the "path towards deliverance." Despite the necessity of catastrophe, the pessimist still proposes a way to end the tyrannies of "wretchedness or of fate." For Sorel, the contemporary form of deliverance with be the proletarian violence of the general strike.

Sorel is best known for proposing a concept of the myth of the general strike, and his reasons can already be seen in the phrasing of these aspects of pessimism, the hints about morals, fate, and deliverance. This strikes me as an aestheticization of violence. I should have more to say about this later.

Note

*Other than the fact that the distinction between optimism and pessimism strikes me as too abstract, and  distracting when we are describing the complex world of politics.

Fall Semester is Around the Corner

Or, more accurately, the start of the fall semester here at the University of Ottawa is less than 24 hours away. To follow up on my previous post on my employment situation: between then and now I took on another section of "Reasoning and Critical Thinking," bringing my course load for the semester to two. The optimistic way to look at this situation is to say that I've never taught more than a 1/1 course load, and so a 2/1 (and there's still a chance that I will pick up a course in the winter...such is the life of the sessional professor) still leaves plenty of time to work on my new project. Before getting to that project, however, I've got to write up two abstracts for upcoming conferences (still at the CFP stage, not post-acceptance), and finish What Is To Be Done?, the final text in my summer reading selection of essential texts in the history of Marxism (from 1860-1923).

Aside from teaching, I've set a fairly ambitious working schedule for fall semester: I'll be working on my conference presentation on Agamben for the RPA, the chapter on Lukács for the aforementioned 'new project,' and participating in a reading group dedicated to The Phenomenology of Spirit and its influence-- that is, readings of Hegel by Hyppolite, Kojève, Lukács, and Althusser-- not to mention keeping up with the blog.

Olbermann: There Is No 'Ground Zero Mosque'

There has been constant rantings on right-wing AM radio programs about the the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque'. The proposed Islamic community center is to be located several blocks from the site of the former Twin Towers in New York. There are even right-wing and liberal politicians arguing that a mosque being built close to the site of the terrorist 9/11 attacks is an insult to the victims. Keith Olbermann addressed this current situation in the most thorough manner. His analysis is dead on and dead right.