Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School

Winter School Flyer

2024 MELBOURNE CRITICAL THEORY SUMMER SCHOOL

8 July-12 July
Times of Catastrophe

The 2024 Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School will be held from 8 July to 12 July at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus.

We invite participants to immerse themselves in a full week of intensive collaborative study and discussion in the company of our leading keynote instructors. In 2024 we are delighted to welcome Oliver Feltham (American University of Paris) and Jessica Whyte (UNSW). Attendees will be offered a substantial programme of masterclasses, reading groups, public lectures, and site visits.

Every year, the Melbourne Critical Theory School will take up a pressing topic to confront contemporary critical theory and philosophy. Our theme for 2024 is ‘Times of Catastrophe’. We invite our instructors and participants to reflect on the place of critical and speculative knowledges in the face of an increasingly volatile planet, the sixth great extinction, contemporary genocide, and the technological expropriation of human symbolic capabilities.

We welcome participants at all career stages, and especially encourage graduate students and early-career researchers to apply.

Structure:
Each participant will attend two 2-hour masterclasses, four 2-hour morning reading groups (reading packs will be supplied), and two 2-hour public lectures throughout the week. In addition to the core program, several optional activities will be scheduled.

Fees:
$90 student/unwaged
$145 waged
Participants are responsible for independently organising their travel and accommodation.

How to apply:
To apply please prepare a 500-word statement giving details of current/previous education and the relevance of the Winter School’s theme to your academic interests. 
Submit via our form by 5 May 2024. 
Places are strictly limited. Successful applicants will be notified in mid-May.

Bursaries:
We are able to offer several travel bursaries of up to $500 to graduate students and scholars unable to access institutional funds travelling from overseas, interstate, or regional Victoria. Bursary recipients will also have their participation fee waived. Please indicate in your application email whether you wish to be considered for a bursary.

Instructors:

Photo of Oliver Feltham

How can we act in time?, Oliver Feltham (American University of Paris)
The most obvious way to unfold this question is to focus on how we might no longer avert, but at least slow, limit and reduce the extent of our ecological disaster. Yet if we leap into questions of climate and environmental policy – rolled back or watered down according to the economic or political conjuncture – or climate activism, we might miss what is at stake in the simpler question how can we act in time? My approach will be to follow Hobbes and Spinoza in categorizing actions as a subset of the passions. Hence the question can be rearticulated: how do we find ourselves implicated in collective relationships to temporality via the passions? How do specific configurations of the passions socialize us into a particular experience of time? In the terms of Bernard Aspe’s take on Heidegger, how might an experience of time manifest our ‘being-together’, the actual collectivity that enfolds us? On the basis of Vittorio Morfino’s research into plural temporalities in Marx and the Marxist tradition, the challenge for a theory of time as a collective passion is to show that, in what is taken to be one and the same society, there are plural temporalities at work. The second and more difficult challenge is to show that some of those temporalities are not fully or exclusively human, or machinic, but natural. It is only as cognizant of such plural times that an action might take the measure of catastrophe.

Readings:

Oliver Feltham is an Australian philosopher working in Paris. He has published two works on the genealogy and comparative ontology of political action: Anatomy of Failure: Philosophy and Political Action (London: Bloomsbury 2013) and Destroy and Liberate: Political Action on the Basis of Hume (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019). He translated Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, wrote a monograph on Badiou’s philosophy, and has published on Jacques Lacan. He has recently written two tragicomedies, Twig and Gull, on ecological catastrophe as lived through by animals (but some of their friends die). He is currently working on the intersection of time, nature, society and government in nineteenth century European philosophy. He is Professor of philosophy at the American University of Paris.

Headshot of Jess Whyte

The Power of Economic Sanctions, Jessica Whyte (UNSW)
In a context in which economic coercion is becoming ever-more central to geopolitical conflict, there is a pressing need to examine the long-suppressed question of economic power. In the wake of the Cold War, economic power was disavowed under the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology that treated the world market as a site of mutually-beneficial, voluntary relations. At the same time, a proliferation of economic sanctions reshaped economic relations and stifled the supposed independence and economic development of much of the post-colonial world. Economic and financial sanction are both enabled by and exacerbate the deeply unequal integration of the post-colonial world economy that is the legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism. They leverage the indebtedness and dependence of countries of the Global South and the global centrality of the US dollar to coerce states and societies. The results of such economic coercion can be devastating, but the abstract mechanisms through which it operates have made it difficult to identify causation or even adequately conceptualise the form of power that is wielded in sanctions strategies. At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. What, then, is economic coercion? How is economic power mobilised in international relations and in warfare? How can we best understand a form of power that deliberately degrades the infrastructure that sustains biological life? The aim of this discussion will be to situate economic sanctions on a continuum that stretches from the overt use of military force to the everyday capitalist coercion that what Karl Marx called the “mute compulsion of economic relations.”

Readings:

Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history, and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism, and militarism. Her work has been published in a range of fora including Contemporary Political Theory; Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly, and Theory and Event. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY 2013), and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). She is an editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Her current project is on the development of economic sanctions after the Cold War.

Contact:
For further details contact Joe Hughes <jhughes2@unimelb.edu.au>.