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Thursday, February 9, 2012

1.25 – 5.00 pm

University of Western Sydney

Bankstown Campus, Building 20, Room G.06

Cost: Admission Free

Please RSVP to philosophy@uws.edu.au

 

Franz Kafka is perhaps the most often discussed modernist author by philosophers. From Benjamin and Adorno to Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze, to mention just some of the most prominent philosophers, Kafka has been the subject of many essays and books. What has been so alluring about Kafka so that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings? The “Sydney Seminar” Kafka and Philosophy provides a series of possible answers to the above question.

 

The “Sydney Seminar” Kafka and Philosophy provides a series of possible answers to the above question. Paul Alberts takes up the issue of legal positivism in The Trial by staging a “confrontation” between Kafka and Hans Kelsen. Dimitris Vardoulakis compares the conception of the law in The Trial to Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise in order to show how it is possible to salvage a sense of freedom in Kafka’s worlds. According to Chris Conti, Kafka’s Trial is important because it signals the search of a new genre, the metaphysical crime novel. Henry Sussman argues that there is a virtual element to Kafka’s compelling and memorable literary scenes because they absorb and enmesh us within their parameters with the insistence of virtual reality, comprising free-standing self-referential worlds, to which all readers have access.

 

Programme

1:25pm           Welcome: Prof. Peter Hutchings 

(Dean, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney)

 

1:30–3:00pm  Chair: Sigi Jöttkandt

Paul Alberts (University of Western Sydney)

Knowing Life Before the Law

Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Western Sydney)

Kafka’s Empty Law: Laughter and Freedom in The Trial

 

3:00–3.30pm   Coffee Break

 

3:30–5:00pm   Chair: Gail Jones

Chris Conti (University of Western Sydney)

Kafka’s The Trial: In Search of the Metaphysical Crime Novel

Henry Sussman (Yale University)

The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment

 

Paul Alberts teaches in philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, and is working on ways of making continental philosophy applicable to understanding nature and environment.

Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Western Sydney) is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), the editor of Spinoza Now (2011) and co-editor of Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (2011).

Henry Sussman (Yale University) is the author of numerous books, including Around the Book: Systems and Literacy – Kafka, Benjamin, Derrida (2011), The Trial: Kafka’s Unholy Trinity (1993), and Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor(1979).

Chris Conti teaches at the University of Western Sydney and is the author of Proofs: 104 Short Stories (2011) and the co-editor of Landscape, Place and Culture (2011).

 

The Seminar is supported by the Australian Modernist Studies Network (www.amsn.org.au).