Aurelia Armstrong

Spinoza’s Method of Joy

According to Hans Jonas the profundity of Spinoza’s philosophy lies in its insight into the vital interplay between the capacity to act and be acted upon, to affect and be affected. What follows from this insight is an affirmation of the complementarity of receptivity and spontaneity, a complementarity which implies that “only by being sensitive can life be active, only by being exposed can it be autonomous.” Jonas’ suggestion that, for Spinoza, our openness to what can affect us is not simply the mark of our passivity in the face of external forces but is itself a power which increases our power of acting, implicitly raises the question of what contribution passive emotions might make to the power of action. This question is directly addressed by Gilles Deleuze in his studies of Spinoza, where he argues that joyful passions provide the affective impetus for the formation of common notions. This paper examines Deleuze’s arguments with a view to clarifying which kinds of passive joyful affections, if any, might play a role in expanding our powers of acting and thinking.

The University of Queensland

Alain Badiou

The Mathematics of Being

The “more geometrico” is not an external form, but a fundamental part of the content.

European Graduate School in Saas-Fee

Mieke Bal

Facing as Travelling Concept (keynote address on Day 1)

In the wake of de-colonization, and in the face of the current wave of subsequent mass migration in Western Europe, publications systematically ignore one group of peo-ple involved and affected by the departure of young people from their countries, commu-nities and families: their mothers. It struck me that these older women had to be facing a great distress. Not only had they seen their children leave, but they even had to support that decision – “it’s for his good” – while it affected their lives with a deep loss. This prompted me to develop a video project in which the hereto forth invisible mothers were given the opportunity to speak about their departed children.

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The installation is entirely devoted to the issue of facing: literally, indirectly, and figuratively – facing the consequences of migration. In Nothing is Missing, a series of one-shot videos are projected on eye-level. In each, a woman speaks to someone close to her about the loss she suffered when her beloved son or daughter left, for an indetermi-nate period if not forever, without knowing if, when and how often she would ever see them again. She literally faces the camera, behind which is a person with whom the con-ventionally close relationship is (also) affected by the departure: a son- or daughter-in-law, which she never got to know before they were just sprung on her; a grand-child she didn’t see grow up; the migrated child him- or herself. The intimacy, yet sometimes a slight uneasiness, is a first layer of literal facing. But, since the questions asked by that other person are sometimes deleted without cutting the image, it is as if the women also face each other, listen to each other. Individuality is given the most intense expression possible, yet a group is also given shape through this mode of installing. This is an indi-rect level of facing.

A third level of facing occurs between each of the women and the visitor. The women face the viewer, wherever he or she turns. The images are all close-ups on eye level. This aesthetic of the close-up is informed by Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. The close-up, according to Deleuze, is a form of overcoming linear time. This seemed appro-priate in the case of women who struggle to keep a relationship alive that history has damaged so intensely. Facing, now, receives its figurative meaning of facing a painful reality.

The aesthetic of close-up, of one-shot filing, no-editing and hence, of non-interventionism, and of intimacy in filming as well as projecting makes this politics of facing a viable alternative to what Luc Boltanski has termed “the politics of pity.”

I propose to develop the concept of this project, both philosophically and semioti-cally, with the help of Deleuze, Bontanski and Adorno, in order to articulate in what way this is political art. This discussion is anchored in what I have learned from my Australian colleagues to be a “Spinozist” approach to culture. This approach overcomes the binary between individual and social entities, as well as the severance of past from present, hence, future, and the boundaries among disciplinary fields.

A Rembrandt for Our Time (plenary panel paper on Day 3)

I have left Rembrandt in 1991. Then, I had written about his work as “popular culture” and “contemporary” – an approach that earned me some solid trashings from the art his-tory crowd. Today, 15 years later, I am frankly put off by the appropriation of the art for commerce, while some of the issues the works raise seem to be even more urgent for con-temporary life. I will simply revisit a few of my earlier readings and self-critically update these. The drawing, etching and paintings of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife are among these. I will expand the remarks on inter-central to the Facing lecture and probe the conse-quences of those academic postures for the way we look at art.

University of Amsterdam

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Riccardo Baldissone

Spinoza beyond Spinoza Towards Unimagined Multiplicities

The quest for the appropriation of Spinoza is rampant. Would the man who pursued the perfect joy of love directed towards that which is eternal and infinite and therefore geo-metrically precise, want to allow himself just to wander with us? I suggest that we could lure Spinoza to join us if we accept his challenge, which was nothing short of recasting a whole worldview. We could recognise his work as an ongoing effort to provide an all-encompassing translation table, resumed in his (then) infamous equation of god with na-ture. Now the second term is more likely to claim being the original text, in a frightening reenacting of the non-negotiable authority of its former author. Therefore, if we would like to walk along Spinoza’s radical path of twisting and shifting the meanings behind the names of ideas and things, we could appeal to a plurality of assembled multitudes of hu-mans and objects, gods and natures.

Curtin University of Technology, Perth WA

Andrew Benjamin

Rembrandt’s Absolute Mark

This paper will deploy the work of Walter Benjamin, specifically his early paper, “On Paintings Signs and Marks,” in order to develop the relationship between naming and criticism that is at work in Benjamin’s text and which is suggested following Benjamin in Rembrandt’s painting “The Feast of Belshazza.”

University Technology, Sydney

Laurie Benson

Rembrandt and Spinoza The Virtual Show

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In a year where every gallery in the world which has Rembrandt in their collection seem to be staging an exhibition, why not have a virtual show on the meeting of these two great minds.

National Gallery of Victoria

Paolo A. Bolanos

How to Think with Nietzsche and Spinoza? (Wandering with Gilles Deleuze)

My paper will deal with Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of the Spinoza-Nietzsche relation. There are very few 21st century philosophers who have lived up to the sense of “philoso-phical wandering,” and, among these few, only Deleuze has had great success in doing so. Inspired by Nietzsche’s image as a nomadic thinker, Deleuze presents us with a different image of Spinoza: a man who is closer to life. Deleuze manages to marry Nietzsche and Spinoza and the essential difference between “morality” and “ethics” becomes central to this marriage. It will be shown that the joyful affirmation of life is achieved through being ethical and not moral.

Macquarie University

Jenny Bunker

Spinoza as Empiricist

Picking up Genevieve Lloyd’s hint that the structure of the Ethics constitutes false adver-tising, I will investigate whether – despite his reputation as the archetypal ‘top-down’ ra-tionalist – one could profitably read Spinoza’s philosophy as ultimately driven by percep-tual observations rather than the analysis of a priori concepts. I will claim, with particular reference to the surprising congruence of the respective views of Spinoza and Schopen-hauer on the embedded nature of the human self, that such an interpretation casts new light on Spinoza’s celebrated influence on the post-Kantian German Idealists.

University of Southampton

Louise Burchill

Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence and Spinoza

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Questioning Continuity

Deleuze’s major ontological category of a virtual continuum, variously designated throughout his corpus as an “intensive spatium,” “ideal or metaphysical surface,” “plane of consistency,” “body-without-organs,” or “plane of immanence,” would seem to find its “prototype” in Spinoza’s concept of substance, with Deleuze hailing Spinoza as the “Christ of philosophers” for having “shown, erected and thought the best, which is to say, the most pure, plane of immanence.” A number of problems, however, adhere to Deleuze’s determination of the plan of immanence as a pure continuum, notably in re-spect of its relation to chaos, which is constantly characterized by Deleuze as the lack of any relation or connection between its elements. My paper will focus on the problematic nature of the relation between the virtual continuum and chaos, while attempting to ascer-tain its implications as regards Deleuze’s reference to Spinoza.

L’Université d’Evry Val d’Essonne

Tim Cahill

Spinoza Wandering with Zukofsky

This paper will detail the integral use Spinoza’s Ethics made by North American poet Louis Zukofsky in his Objectivist poetics. Zukofsky utilises Spinoza’s definitions of Natura naturans and Natura naturata; these permeate his poetical and critical output, be-ing quoted and referenced extensively. They provide equivalence to his aesthetic and ideological influences, J.S. Bach’s fugal form, and a Marxist formulation of ‘economic basis’ and ‘superstructure’. The three influences create a framework of denotative poeti-cal practise, the primary tenet of which is that the materials comprising the poem are de-termined necessarily by a single significance, and not arbitrarily. Every aspect of form and content retrieves meaning from connotative potentiality, serving, instead, clear deno-tative functions. Spinoza’s definitions provide a clear precedent and adjunct to this theo-retical determinism: the poem is an object, and is articulated in objects. As Zukofsky pro-poses, “Natura Naturans – / Nature as creator, / Natura Naturata – / Nature as created. / He who creates / Is a mode of these inertial systems” (Zukofsky, “A”-6). In every sense, Zukofsky wanders with Spinoza.

University of Wollongong

Matthew Chrulew

If ethics is an ethology, what then is ethology?

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Animals in Deleuze’s Spinozism

For Deleuze, Spinoza’s ethics is not morality but pure ontology, an ethology defined as “a practical science of the manners of being.” It is clear that Deleuze wishes “ethology” to cover both animals and humans, of all of whom we should inquire not of their essence, but what it is they are capable of doing. But nonetheless, and despite the attention re-cently given to concepts such as “becoming-animal”, animals occupy a somewhat am-bivalent place in Deleuze’s (solitary and collaborative) work. For all the merit of the pla-teau on ethology in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it remains in the genre of scientific knowledge, concerned with animals still pictured, on the whole, as dis-playing behaviours in largely untouched natural settings. And in the preceding discussion of the micropolitical dimension of all becomings – as becomings-minoritarian within the majority assemblages of white-man-adult-male – the animal silently slips out of the frame. However, this latent anthropocentrism is ultimately inconsistent with the core Deleuzian framework. This paper will attempt to show that, following Spinoza and Deleuze, not only can ethics be considered as an ethology, but ethology – if we maintain its objects to still include nonhuman capabilities and forms of life – must be seen as an ethics: a claim which has radical consequences for the traditional conception of ethologi-cal science, as well as for human-animal relations more broadly.

Monash University

Giles Clark

Spinoza in Psychoanalysis Reflections on his Philosophy and the Psychotherapeutic Mind

In 2005 I gave a clinical psychoanalytic paper at a conference for professional practi-tioners, called ‘A Spinozan lens onto the confusions of borderline relations’ (published in The Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 51, No. 1. Feb.2006). Without going into any clinical case details I would now like to reflect further upon this application and utilisa-tion of Spinoza to psychotherapeutic theory and practice, but in a non-clinical way. I would here talk about why and how I have found or made a particular active perspective, a relational attitude, out of Spinoza’s concepts of the conatus, mind-body relations, pas-sion and action, and knowledge of the third kind, (or intuitive knowledge). I shall discuss how I have adapted these concepts into psychodynamic language, including their repre-sentation in understanding the psychopathology of difficult psychosomatic relations. This will include my saying a bit about how my use of these ideas helps me think and feel through the ‘emotional storms’ of a therapeutic encounter, especially in the vortex of ‘borderline personality disorder’, how they help me to psychosomatically re-order these confused and destructive internal and external relations. I would even suggest that de-structive disorders of the self demonstrate a so-called ‘psychotic metaphysics’ that can be

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well understood from a Spinozan perspective. However I re-emphasise that I shall not here go into any clinical case detail, because that would be professionally unethical, and to do so is anyhow unnecessary for the purposes of sharing these ideas

One of the issues to reflect upon is how and why Spinozan and neo-Spinozan think-ing (both the contents of his thought and his ‘form of thinking’) can be transferred into a relational and ‘practical’ realm whilst still remaining a deductive metaphysic. So here I am opening my particular psychoanalytic experience and relevant clinical theory to a per-sonal edition of a Spinozan vision and a neo-Spinozan conceptualisation of embodied minds, emotional psychosomatic relations, and an ethical position/approach towards un-derstanding ones place in a problematic ‘peopled world’. These views and concepts add to my psychotherapeutic understanding and agency; they are a vital part of my functional thinking and ‘reverie’ in a particular intersubjective environment. However my work cer-tainly does not expect to inform philosophy. I believe that psychoanalytic theory and practice can benefit from some philosophy; as to how much or whether any philosophy can benefit from psychoanalysis … I cannot say.

The Australian and New Zealand Association of Jungian Analysts, and The International Associa-tion for Analytical Psychology

Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea

The Spinoza-Maypole

The maypole is a communal field that operates collectively, yet with specific materi-als, intents, and outcomes. Historically used as a human marker of cultural-economic rit-ual, the maypole sits in the Spinozan field of ethical propositions that seek to identify the gestural movements of human expression. Since the use of the optical telegraph in 1794, communicative situations have cast down variable ribbons into the Spinozan identified plane of consistency (as Deleuze and Guattari address). This paper will discuss our con-temporary condition of intensive connections as radial vector situations wherein relation-ships between powers – as in the Deleuzian puissance - form immanent, ethical connec-tions. The Spinozan notion of a gathering cluster will be examined in terms of the crowd axiom it situated, questioning the contemporary febrile and yet restrictive community that digital conditions have engendered.

This is a collaborative paper by Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea who teach in the Cinema Program at the University of Melbourne. They are working on a collaborative project called the digital maypole.

University of Melbourne and

Alexander Douglas

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Spinoza and the Human Worm

The trope of the human as worm is common in 17th century philosophy. Hobbes refers to himself as “a poor worm” in his verse autobiography. Leibniz’s Theodicy mentions a the-ory of worldly suffering which regards humans as worms crushed under the feet of God. In a world where misery and human powerlessness are most often held in contrast to the goodness and omnipotence of God, Spinoza’s take on God, life, and power is refreshingly affirmative. His worm, in the letter to Oldenburg, is not miserable and lost, but is rather a curious and energetic wanderer through a divinely imbued Nature. I would like to exam-ine what Spinoza makes of the ‘human worm’ trope in his vision of life.

Australian National University

Eric Duffy

Labyrinthine Substance

Proposition 7 of Ethics II is a central moment within Spinoza’s Ethics, but in Hegel’s reading of the Ethics every definition, axiom, demonstration, corollary, scholium, and lema either leads up to or points back at 2P7. Hegel believes that all philosophy must start with Spinoza’s insight that thought and Being are identical because it makes possible the subtending unity of difference and objectivity itself. With a close reading of the Ethics, we can refute Hegel’s claim that the realm of ideas is larger than the realm of things. In showing that there is an object for every idea and vice versa, we can clear up a common interpretational quandary of the Ethics, while at the same time our framing of the project will bring into relief what is at stake for both Spinoza and Hegel and thereby make each thinker’s overall project clearer. Duquesne University

Simon Duffy

The Role of “joyful passions” in Spinoza’s Theory of Relations

In his interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of relations in Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze assigns a specific role to joyful passions. They are characterised as a significant determinant in the dynamic changes or transformations of the characteristic relations of finite existing modes. The theme of joyful passions is pivotal in distinguishing Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s theory of relations from that offered by Macherey in Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza, la cinquième partie. The proposed paper will explicate the role that joyful passions play in each of their accounts of Spinoza’s theory of relations with a view to characterising their different readings of Spinoza and the significance of Spinoza to their respective philosophical projects.

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University of Sydney

Alex Düttmann

A Matter of Life and Death

In this paper, I will investigate Spinoza’s proposition that the free man thinks of death least of all. My inquiry will lead me to contrast a Spinozian view of life, death and free-dom to a Derridian one: eternity versus a certain finite infinity. In my conclusion I shall stage a dialogue between the two positions.

Goldsmiths College

Hélène Frichot

On Finding Oneself Spinozist Refuge, Beatitude and the Any-Space-Whatever

But if one truly installs oneself in the midst of these propositions, if one lives them, things are much more complicated and one finds that one is Spinozist be-fore having understood why. (Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy)

This present investigation, or activity of becoming Spinozist, begins with a fascination in a concept taken up toward the voluntary conclusion of Deleuze’s life; the concept of a life. And in the midst of this concept we discover a further perplexing term, that of beati-tude. Beatitude is the mode of being in which one achieves the maximum of active power or force of existing, and the minimum of reactive passions; the mind becomes a cause of its own ideas, and the body that of its actions, in relation to an infinite milieu. Following Deleuze’s Spinozist account, the question of a life, which attains to absolute potential and absolute beatitude, installs one in the midst of a plane of immanence, which implies a mode of living, a way of life, an affirmative and ethico-aesthetic pursuit. We are in the midst of things, as Deleuze and Guattari are fond of telling us, and in being so unsteadily placed we discover ourselves in the context of certain contemporary political and ethical problems through which we must grope in an experimental manner. The structure of be-atitude promises a refuge of sorts from such striving, and also from both sad and joyful passions; it is like the limited place or shelter from which we make all our necessary de-partures and returns. I will approach the notion of beatitude through the structure of any-space-whatever, a spatial formation Deleuze treats in his cinema books and also where he examines Samuel Beckett’s television plays. As Deleuze writes with respect to the any-space-whatever, “One can exhaust the joys, the movements, and the acrobatics of the life of the mind only if the body remains immobile, curled up, seated, sombre, itself ex-

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hausted. … What matters is no longer the any-space-whatever but the mental image to which it leads,” a mental image I would like to examine through Spinoza and Deleuze’s concept of beatitude. Can beatitude, achieved through Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, take on a spatial character, considered as much in extensive as in intensive terms?

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Anthony Gardner

Wandering with (and against) Kabakov

Rather than focus specifically on Spinozan thought, this paper addresses critical practices of wandering within Ten Characters, an installation created in 1988 by one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s key influences, Ilya Kabakov. Circulation through Ten Characters cata-lysed critical ruptures within hegemonic ideologies of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ at the end of the Cold War, ideologies relevant to the context of the installation’s display (ini-tially in New York, subsequently in Washington D.C.) and to various expectations of physical engagement with the work. The series of barriers, absences and withdrawals ac-tually encountered through Ten Characters – and the installation’s resultant dissidence to ‘democracy’ – articulate a new political impetus to ‘wandering’ within contemporary art.

University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales and

Tanya Gerstle and Carl Nilsson-Polias

Spinoza on Stage The Search for Equilibrium

In traditional theatre, the actors are directed by one person who sits where the audience will eventually sit. Pulse is a process of ensemble theatre improvisation that effectively removes the director from the process of theatre creation and instils in the actor the eye of the director. One can find a metalanguage to categorise the complexities of Pulse and, indeed, theatre in general, through the application of Spinoza’s terminology of motion and rest.

VCA and

Chris Henschke

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God and the Cosmological Constant

The philosophy of Bennedict Spinoza was a fundamental force behind Albert Einstein’s quest to understand the universe, embodied in his theories of relativity. As Spinoza used methods of reasoning to seek out the nature of God through an understanding of nature and existence, Einstein also sought to “know the mind of God”, using reason and logic to gain deep insights into the nature of matter, space and energy. However, after Einstein’s theory of general relativity was published, scientists found it predicted strange phenom-ena, such as an expanding universe, the big bang, and black holes. Einstein refused to ac-cept these extreme implications, as they went against his philosophy of a logical, eternal, and ultimately perfect universe which was heavily influenced by Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’. Thus Einstein introduced the ‘cosmological constant’ into his formulas to stop these phenom-ena - this cosmological constant can be seen as Einstein’s attempt to impose Spinoza’s God on an imperfect cosmos. For many years, Einstein argued with his colleagues on this issue, and it was only when he was faced with observational evidence did he fully accept his own theory, later remarking that the cosmological constant was "the biggest blunder" he ever made.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Thomas Hirschhorn

The “Spinoza Monument” and Other Works

A slide-projection commented by the artist, about his artistic logic and friendship between Philosophy and Art.

Installation Artist

Daniel Hourigan

Knowing the Suspension Spinoza and the Master-Signifier

Slavoj Zizek has so far had limited interest in the work of Baruch Spinoza. But the atten-tion he does pay to Spinoza is crucial to his critique of the ideology of late-capitalism. This debt returns Spinoza to Zizek through the interplay of Heidegger’s absent engage-ment with Spinoza and Lacan’s review of Spinoza’s purported pantheism in Seminar XI. In his more recent discussions of theology, Zizek binds himself to the Spinozist legacy by addressing the disconnection of deontology from the constitutive gap separating it from ontology. In Spinoza Zizek finds the precise formulation of the command to “Enjoy!”

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Griffith University

Eleanor Kaufman

How Far Beyond One? Deleuze, Badiou, Spinoza

This paper examines the relations between Deleuze and Badiou as they are mediated by Spinoza and by a preoccupation with the one and the two. Badiou condenses all of Deleuze’s oeuvre work to one central and repeated concept, namely the assertion of Being as univocal. Yet Badiou also suggests that there is a latent dualism in Deleuze’s thought, that Deleuze’s professed univocity is really an equivocity in disguise. In the same fash-ion, though Badiou abandons the notion of the One, he is preoccupied by the question of number in general and in particular by the relation of the one and the two, even stating in his recent book Le Siècle that “the century is a figure of non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One.” In a certain sense, Badiou remains insistent on the two, by refor-mulating what might seem like a three-part dialectic in Sartre into an unresolved and thus more open-ended two, and by opening up Deleuzian univocity into what might be called its unconscious dualism. Yet, Badiou’s recent meditations on poetic works by Perse and Pesoa, and even his longstanding interest in Mao, show a simultaneous preoccupation with what might seem to be an almost Spinozist form of univocity.

UCLA

A. Kiarina Kordela

Secular Pantheism and the Irrelevance of (Anti-Platonism)

Drawing on (1) Saussure’s definition of the signifier as a differential value, (2) Lacan’s reading of Spinoza’s pantheism as the subjection of the world to the universality of the signifier, and, (3) Marx’s subjection of the world to the universality of value, this paper argues that Spinozian substance (i.e., the substance whose attributes manifest empirically in the modes of secular capitalist modernity) is differential value. This Spinozian-Marxian ontology entails that what Badiou designates as the central problematic of all Platonism (including Anti-Platonism) – i.e., the question of whether the nomination of the univocal Being is itself univocal or whether two names are required – is obsolete with regard to substance qua differential value, for, as the paper shows, its nomination surprisingly in-volves three names.

Macalester College

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Genevieve Lloyd

“Spinoza” An Enlightenment Character Ideal?

Spinoza has often been cast as a dark symbol of the more radical and negative strands in Enlightenment thought – as the godless atheist who saw the world as purposeless; as the enemy of divine and human free will. By focusing on his treatment of ideas of providence and necessity, this paper will attempt to recast Spinoza as offering a positive character ideal, centred on the idea of “living with necessity.” His idea of “free necessity,” I will argue, may be more important for our own re-thinking of our Enlightenment heritage than other, more familiar ideas, centred on the freedom of the will.

Macquarie University

Stephen Loo

Wandering the Parallel

Deleuze’s materialist ontology, subscribing to the Scholastic belief that being is an inter-nal dynamic of both cause and effect, is transformed into a practical framework only by way of Spinoza’s expressive theology, whereby the infinity of attributes (in the world) are the expressions of Being which participate in, and are immanent to, Being itself. Having wandered this way, Spinoza’s thinking, which calls upon particular relations between bodily affectations and abstract “common notions,” forces Deleuzean practical philoso-phy to grapple with complex parallelisms between idea and substance, and thus episte-mology and ontology. But along this way, Spinoza also opens Deleuze’s philosophy to Alfred Whitehead’s concept of “prehension,” a dynamic vector character which pre-exist the coming together of entities, and Gilbert Simondon’s process of “transduction” in the state of the pre-individual, as fellow travellers’ parallel explications – never completely reconcilable and therefore ever increasing in potentiality – of Spinoza’s theology.

University of South Australia

Bruce H. J. McKellar

Spinoza’s “On the Calculation of the Rainbow” and Modern Developments in Light Scattering by Drops

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I will put Spinoza’s calculation in its historical context, and then discuss some additional optical effects, such as the glory, which are produced when light is scattered by water droplets, and which are of artistic interest. I then explain how the scattering of light by aerosol droplets in the atmosphere can be used to determine properties of the droplets.

University of Melbourne

John Mackinnon

The Infinity Seekers

The purpose of this paper is to discuss one of my art works titled “The Infinity Seekers” which had as its focus a desire for something to be complete even though incomplete works are never finished. Its aim is to examine image and object making which address the idea of doing it. An essential need in formal art practice is that something must mani-fests itself as a presence – a recognizable complete or finished thing. In other approaches the idea of unity perceived as the full and entire artwork is spread or stretched across physical and conceptual boundaries. These enter a temporal space, an incomplete thing. It is now common to find the idea of slowness in artworks; slowing things down such as time/motion in a video sequence means supposedly that we see more. Slowness appears as a lens that clarifies, yet this detail becomes an abstract vision in the greater picture. For Spinoza, the only complete thing was the totality, in other words all things are incom-plete. Following from this it could be said that any attempt to finish a work is doomed to failure then everything else is necessarily incomplete.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Michael Mack

Towards an Inclusive Universalism Spinoza’s Ethics of Sustainability

This paper discusses the ways in which Spinoza’s Ethics delineates a non-hierarchical understanding of humanity and its place in nature. Spinoza does not opt for the absolute supremacy of any one entity. Instead he argues for the coexistence of different ways of life (here he is of course indebted to Averroes). It is this pluralistic and non-hierarchical aspect of his ethology that makes Spinoza a more appropriate philosopher for contempo-rary social thought than Hobbes, Descartes or Kant. Spinoza envisages a world that does without hierarchical divisions (be they racial or religious or economic etc.) that give rise to violence in the first place. Whereas Hobbes, Descartes and Kant opt for certainty in their respective political philosophies, Spinoza allows for uncertainty and difference.

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Spinoza blurs the distinction between conceptual boundaries: the corporeal is not the im-perfect, because there is no such thing as imperfection. We are all equally imperfect or rather perfect. Spinoza radically breaks down the hierarchical divide between those who succeed and those who seem to fail. This then is the disruptive force of his philosophy.

University of Sydney

Adrian Martin

Avatars of the Encounter

“We always tend towards this lost miracle, this Sierra Madre which is the magic identifi-cation, the fusion of two beings in a sudden, shared domination of time” (Robert Benay-oun). From André Breton’s Nadja to the films of Wong Kar-wai, from Maurice Blan-chot’s The Infinite Conversation to Nick Cave’s “Are You the One I’ve Been Waiting For?,” the theme of the encounter was been an obsessive one for philosophers, artists and lovers. Whether in pop culture’s endless odes to ‘love at first sight’ or in Octavio Paz’s old-age rumination that “the realm of love is a space magnetised by encounter,” we find rich images of birth (or rebirth) - but also the negative of this: the encounter that never happens, the disastrous destiny set in train by a mismatched encounter, the encounter chillingly ‘ghosted’ by manipulation and delusion. This was, too, a theme for Spinoza: the good and the bad (or ‘toxic’) encounter, what conditions it, how we can describe it. Using a range of modern examples, I intend to explore this ‘space of the encounter’.

Monash University

Juliana Merçon

Becomings: On the different relations with others and the self

In our relations we are often distracted, investing our efforts in the conservation of things which little contribute to our own conservation. Spinoza’s use of the verb distrahere en-tails the separation of the subject from herself, her affirmation of a mode of existence which prevents her from increasing her own powers. How then is an attentive mode of existence configured? Becoming one’s own self involves the expansion of rational desire, the cultivation of forms of connection in which self-conservation and integration with the world constitute a same experience. Exploring the ethical transition – as a passage from becoming other to becoming with others – is the objective of this paper.

University of Queensland

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Christopher Norris

Spinoza and the Conflict of Interpretations

My paper will focus on various aspects of Spinoza’s reception-history, in particular his influence on recent (post-1960) developments in philosophy and critical theory. It will seek to explain the most remarkable feature of that history, namely that so many diverse and often downright antagonistic movements of thought have been able to claim Spinozist warrant and to do so, moreover, on the basis of a close and detailed engagement with his texts. At the same time his work has offered a meeting-point for otherwise barely com-municating disciplines or areas of interest. Among them are philosophy of mind and cog-nitive science (through Donald Davidson’s notion of ‘anomalous monism’), Althusserian ‘structuralist’ Marxism with its source in Spinoza’s doctrine of ‘adequate ideas’, and Gilles Deleuze’s radically opposed yet no less Spinozist account of desiring-production and ‘deterritorialised’ energy-flows. I shall look at these developments mainly with the purpose of revising, updating, and extending some lines of argument pursued in my 1990 book Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory.

University of Cardiff

Irina Polyakova

Around Spinoza’s Idea of Religiousness Philosophical Discussions in 19th Century Russia

The 19th century in Russia is known as a period of an active reception and criticism of West-European philosophy. If such phenomena as Russian “Hegelianism”, Russian “Shellingianstvo”, Russian “Kantianstvo” are well known, Russian “Spinozism” as the special phenomenon isn’t speak about. Nevertheless Spinoza’s influence on Russian thought is more than evident. Spinoza’s idea of the god has caused different versions of understanding (V.S. Solovyov, L.M. Lopatin, A.I. Vvedensky, E.and S. Trubet-skoy).There is a point of view, rather conventional among orthodox Russian religious thinkers, according to which the morality can’t exist without the religion faith. The paper considers “Russian interpretation” of such problems of Spinoza’s philosophy as religious substantiation of morality; the nature of the soul.

Russia, Kaliningrad

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Elizabeth Presa

Spinoza’s Work

Spinoza experimented with grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. Fascinated by optics and natural phenomena he allegedly wrote a treatise on rainbows. I approach Spinoza through a phenomenology of glass and crystal – of grinding and engraving, of splintering shards and floating particles, of light and water. A short text by Jean-Luc Nancy “Fragile Handle with Care” focuses my attention

VCA

Spencer Roberts (with Louise K Wilson)

Process Processed

The Deleuzian approach to cinema suggests that it is possible to philosophise us-ing non-traditional materials and methods. With this in mind, our paper will explore ways in which Spinozist themes might be addressed using strategies that supplement writing and discussion.

Artworks that embody the notion of a relational field provide an interesting focus for reflecting upon the symbiosis between content, form and production that charac-terises much artistic practice. A number of installations will be considered, and their power to engage with Spinozist thought will be examined.

The works in question are loosely concerned with the broadcast of information, whilst the character of each transmission is diverse.

Jon Roffe

The Errant Name Infinite Modes in Badiou’s Reading of Spinoza

This paper will examine the fascinating reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics offered by Alain Badiou in Being and Event. It is my contention that – as in all of his readings of other philosophers – Badiou brings a unique perspective to bear on Spinoza’s thought. In fact, like Gilles Deleuze, Badiou places Spinoza at the highest point of a certain imma-nent thought of being, the difference being that unlike Deleuze, Badiou thinks that Spinoza’s bold effort to think being without the void fails.

My argument will proceed by examining Badiou’s striking claim that the name ‘infi-nite modes’ does not have a coherent referent in Spinoza’s thought, that it is a kind of er-rant signifier which covers up the void in Spinoza’s discourse. Indeed, if we were to imagine a Badiouian history of philosophy, it would be one in which the rigorous location

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of the void (whether explicit or not) in various thinkers would be the point of contact with their thought. I will then turn to follow the meandering movement of this term in Spinoza’s own text, and consequently suggest that this errancy or theoretical unhemlich-keit can be understood differently, challenging Badiou’s location of the void in this in-stance of the history of philosophy.

University of Tasmania, and Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy

Robert Savage

The Uncomprehended Tear Paul Celan’s Approach to Spinoza

“Jew by birth, and then deserter of Judaism, and finally atheist” – so begins Pierre Bayle’s famous dictionary entry on Spinoza. Three Spinozas, then, each of which has his own name: Baruch, Benedict, and the subject of Bayle’s article, “Benoît.” What does it mean, however, to call the mature Spinoza by his birthname, rather than by the Christian name he adopted in response to his expulsion from the Jewish community of Amsterdam? On what grounds can one commemorate Spinoza as a Jew, after and in view of the cherem, after and in view of the Shoah? My paper will address these questions through a reading of Paul Celan’s poem “Pau, spatter.”

Monash University

Matthew Sharpe

So Where Are We Now, Then? Strauss’ Spinoza and/as Modernity

Any comprehension of American neoconservatism needs to pass by way of a comprehen-sion of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Any comprehension of Leo Strauss’ work has to confront the issue of Strauss’ radical critique of modernity. Yet central to Strauss’ critique of modernity is his reading of Spinoza’s political philosophy in Spinoza’s Cri-tique of Religion and Persecution and the art of Writing. For Strauss, Spinoza is impor-tant as both a Jewish author and a philosopher. Spinoza’s (unprecedented) defence of po-litical liberalism is hence for Strauss a pivotal episode in both the ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and moderns, and the lasting tension between the two sources of Western civili-sation, “Athens” and “Jerusalem.” This paper will critically examine Strauss’ reading of Spinoza as almost the first modern, with what he would probably term an ‘unnatural’ eye also to the political world of today.

Deakin University

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Christopher Skeaff

Absolute Sovereignty and Unlimited Freedom Of Expression? Spinoza on the Civil Condition

Spinoza’s defence of an uncompromised form of absolute sovereignty involving, for ex-ample, a state’s complete rights over religious practice, is a strong feature of his work that cannot simply be dismissed, yet it sits oddly with our perception of him as a staunch ad-vocate of free expression. I argue that if we follow the movement of Spinoza’s thought, within his Theological-Political Treatise, and on through his later Political Treatise, we can better understand why such an ostensible tension is not merely the expression of a simple contradiction. For he is careful to distinguish the state’s rule of law, which rests on the power of the people, from the authority of law, which is self-authenticating and which itself must be shielded from rule. Spinoza’s unique construal of authority serves, in fact, to stress the priority and integrity of popular freedom (unlimited public expression) in guarding political life against all forms of domination, no matter how ‘legitimate’.

Northwestern University

Luke Trusso

From the Timid to the Ambitious in Spinoza’s Rhetoric

Perhaps Spinoza knew the extent to which words arouse the mind not only to erudite pomp, but more importantly to self-preservation and bodily action. The Ethics in particu-lar offers a veritable labyrinth of rhetorical ebbs and flows that weave in and out of rea-son, or more appropriately, in and out of rational precision. Ever conscious of the fluctu-ating manners of language, Spinoza’s prose moves back and forth between arithmetic formulas, radical propositional logic, and the more relaxed commentary of the scholia, all of which are cross-referential. More than just securing metaphysical claims about nature herself, we are in a sense reading an inner dialogue between richly complex rhetorical strategies that illuminate the heated torrents of the nature of a peculiar theoretical voice. The scholia indeed flank the geometrical pretensions of Spinoza’s system, but also sur-round it surreptitiously in glorious proto-psychoanalytic aplomb.

Duquesne University

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Anthony Uhlmann

Spinoza’s Third Kind of Knowledge and Thinking in Literature

In this paper I will attempt to develop an understanding of thinking in literature by considering Spinoza’s parallelism: that the order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas. If the world is predetermined, how can such a world accommodate beings such as ourselves who can never adequately understand the power of the infinite causal chain? Spinoza affirms that we too correspond to a degree of power: that is that we can make, we can produce. Yet how is this possible in a predetermined world?

The determined world must open up to our production, and it might be considered to do so in terms of understanding through the third kind of knowledge. That is, thought can escape towards what is but is not yet known, towards what comes into being (for us) in being intuitively ‘understood’, with understanding here involving its creation. By ‘under-standing’ I mean the experience or feeling of having grasped something without necessar-ily being able to translate or explain what has been grasped.

In this paper I will develop the idea that relating itself involves this kind of under-standing: here, however, the grasping occurs in the act of relating, it inheres in the process and strikes us as a sensation. I understand ‘relating’ both in the general process of appre-hending connections or motifs, and in the process of recounting events as in a story. I will consider the idea of ‘intention’ with regard to literature, arguing that rather than defining this in terms of an author’s statements, that intentions (as the power of relations) might be thought to inhere in works, and cohere in their apprehension, and that this explains some-thing of a work’s ability to carry and translate affects. Such understanding, that is, is not strictly logical or discursive: rather, as with Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, we ex-perience it immediately, as a kind of intuition. I will draw examples from Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, and Patrick White to try and clarify these ideas.

University of Western Sydney

Dimitris Vardoulakis

“To-walk-oneself” Agamben’s Reading of Spinoza

According to Agamben, “through Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause in which agent and patient coincide, Being is freed from the risk of inertia and immobility.” As an exam-ple, Agamben offers Spinoza’s explication of the verb pasearse – meaning “to walk one-self” – in the Hebrew Grammar. However, even a cursory look at Spinoza’s texts shows that immanent causality does not refer to human agency, but to God. I will show how this ‘misreading’ by Agamben is related to his theory of sovereignty, and I will argue that Agamben’s theory of sovereignty and his theory and practice of reading are intimately

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connected. From this perspective, Spinoza becomes a central figure in Agamben philoso-phy – a figure which both configures its conceptual range, as well as exhibit its own im-manent self-disfigurement.

Monash University

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