The philosopher's courtly love? Leo Strauss, Eros, and the law

This essay poses a critical response to Strauss' political philosophy that takes as its primary object Strauss' philosophy of Law. It does this by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. The paper has four parts. Part I, `The Philosopher's Desire: Making an Exception, or “The Thing Is...''', recounts Strauss' central account of the complex relationship between philosophy and `the city'. Strauss' Platonic conception of philosophy as the highest species of eros is stressed, which is that aspect of his work which brings it into striking proximity with the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the dialectic of desire and the Law. Part II, `Of Prophecy and Law', examines Strauss' analysis of Law as first presented in his 1935 book, Philosophy and Law, and central to his later `rebirth of classical political philosophy'. Part III, `Primordial Repression and Primitive Platonism', is the central part of the paper. Lacan's psychoanalytic understanding of Law is brought critically to bear upon Strauss' philosophy of Law. The stake of the position is ultimately how, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Law is transcendental to subjectivity, and has a founding symbolic force, which mitigates against speaking of it solely or primarily in terms of more or less inequitable `rules of thumb', as Plato did. Part IV, `Is the Law the Thing?' then asks the question of what eros might underlie Strauss' paradoxical defense of esoteric writing in the age of `permissive' modern liberalism - that is, outside of the `closed' social conditions which he, above all, alerts us to as the decisive justification for this ancient practice.

Philosophy and the view from above in Alejandro's Amenabar's agora

 This paper examines the depiction of neoplatonic philosopher, geometer and astronomer Hypatia in Alejandro Amenabar's 2010 fil Agora.  The paper uses Pierre Hadot's work, and his arguments that ancient philosophy was conceived as a way of life, aiming at the ideal existence of the sage, and characterised by spiritual exercises.  The paper argues that Amenabar's film employs the technique of the view from above, one such spiritual exercise, wherein the agent relooks at his or life sub spaecie aeternitatis or 'from above', to frame Hypatia's life and death, and the end of the pagan epoch in Alexandria.

International power transitions, critical realism, and the rise of China

This thesis employs the philosophy of critical realism to develop an innovative theory and methodology for the study of international power transitions. The theory is then applied in a future-oriented case analysis to enrich explanation and understanding of a major real world policy challenge - the rise of China.

Absolute freedom and major structural change

Comments on the contribution of philosopher Slavoj Zizek to the reception of the works of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in universities. Analysis of philosophy, religion, politics and society; Notion of an act of absolute freedom; Consequences of an act.

Howard, Downer and the Liberals' realist tradition

The successive Howard Governments sought not only to make foreign policy in response to new regional and global agendas, but to respond to and to seek to manage new forms of electoral challenge with new forms of nationalism. This has resulted in a set of important departures from the major Liberal tradition in international affairs, the claim to a realist approach to foreign policy, and has led to the need to manage the consequences of those departures. The boundary that realism sought to draw between the domestic and international politics, as the spheres of values and interests respectively, became increasingly blurred. In relations with the Asian region the expression of strong domestic (nationalist and internationalist) agendas led initially to distancing from Asian engagement. However, from 2002, a more realist-focused external policy led to new forms of state to state re-engagement in pursuit of national interests. In the commitment to military operations in Iraq, the Anzac legend is interpreted to supply nationalist legitimation which would not normally be required for wars fought for realist (i.e. defensive) reasons. A future Liberal prime minister would lack Howard's touch here. In the debate in the Liberal Party over defence doctrine, an attempt by the Defence Minister to reformulate the realist doctrine of Defence of Australia into an expeditionary construct was rejected.

Global citizenship

Outlines the characteristics of global citizenship. Categories of transnational citizenship; Problems in theory and practice of global citizenship; Importance of global citizenship theories and practices to overcoming problems in religion and culture.

Issues in Australian foreign policy : July to December 2010

Two unforseen developments impeded the Labor government’s capacity to pursue its foreign policy objectives in the period under review. Firstly, Labor’s precarious standing in the parliament tilted the government’s policy agenda in favour of issues that the Greens prioritised. Gillard addressed some of these issues, for instance by holding the parliamentary debate on Afghanistan and by pursuing Japan over whaling in the Southern Ocean, but not to the degree that the Greens demanded. Immigration was emblematic of the government’s travails. The Greens advocated an increase in the refugee intake, but the Coalition favoured the resumption of offshore processing. Just when Labor’s proposed Timorese solution was becoming a realistic possibility, the High Court’s decision devalued the entire notion of offshore processing. The only consolation for the government was that the court had reduced the options available to all political parties.

Secondly, the Wikileaks saga revealed that Rudd may no longer be — and perhaps never was — Labor’s trump card in the realm of foreign policy. American assessments of the foreign minister’s character and judgment were in parts scathing. The Obama administration, nonetheless, appeared to readily and usefully absorb his analysis of Chinese politics. Quite how revelations of Rudd’s conversations with Clinton will affect his relations with the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party is another matter. It may well be that Rudd’s influence on Chinese leaders was always wildly overestimated, but in any case it seemed likely that the foreign minister would spend some time rebuilding ties with Beijing in 2011.

A third development — which hitherto had applied more in the realm of perception than reality — similarly threatened to limit the options open to future Australian governments of all stripes: the intensifying debate over alliance management that Hugh White’s essay instigated. Judgments about what sort of region — and what sort of China — Australia will face were imprinted in issues such as the rare earths find and the AUSMIN meeting. By the end of 2010, few issues could be discussed without reference to the China factor.

Adorno reframed

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of ‘high art’, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book challenges this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Adorno Reframed is not only a comprehensive introduction to the reader coming to Adorno for the first time, but also an important re-evaluation of this founder of the Frankfurt School. Using a wealth of concrete illustrations from popular culture, Geoff Boucher recasts Adorno as a revolutionary whose subversive irony and profoundly historical aesthetics defended the integrity of the individual against social totality.

Introduction: secularization and its discontents

Sigmund Freud’s 1927 work The Future of Illusion expresses the great psychoanalyst’s most whiggish assessment of the situation of Western, post-enlightenment societies. In it, Freud reanimates the ancient tradition of the materialist-Epicurean criticism of religion, with its skepticism concerning all invisible powers. For Freud, famously, the religious belief in higher, supernatural deities—particularly, the monotheistic God—represents a wish-fulfillment and illusion (Freud 1927: 30, 43). This illusion takes its particular shapes from our earliest childhood experiences of helplessness, and the longing for an all-protecting, omnibenevolent father. With the progress of science, and its benefits in technology, Freud opined that the period of the cultural pre-eminence of religion in the West was over. Civilization and its Discontents, written 3 years later, expresses a similarly sceptical assessment of religion. Whether founded in an oceanic, mystical sentiment of oneness, or the refined language of the theologians, religion remains for Freud ‘patently infantile’ (Freud 1930: 86). Between 1927 and 1930, however, Freud’s assessment of the wider prospects of modern Kultur shifted, if it did not entirely reverse. With the fortunes of fascism rising, and the first clouds of renewed European war forming on the horizon, Freud now argues that the psychological price demanded by the modern world’s manifold civilizational advances is perhaps too high. The sexual and aggressive impulses modern society demands subjects renounce must return in the forms of organized violence, collective and individual neuroses—and in the same form of unconscious guilt Freud had argued elsewhere animated the totems and taboos of the great religions (Freud 1913, 1938). Although Freud did not draw the conclusion, the logic of his wider Kulturpessimismus points to the claim that the psychologically deep-set ‘illusions’ of religion could expect a long and viable future.

Lying idiots: reality television & lie to me

This article addresses perhaps the key question for Television Studies: Who does television think you are? It argues that Reality Television answers this question by producing its viewers as, in the Classical Greek sense, idiots (meaning private and ignorant persons). Idiots are the perfect target for the advertising dollar that supports commercial television production. As Reg Grundy observes, Reality Television is anything but reality. With its tight framings of reality, it paradoxically operates to sever the viewing self from reality—from the “truth” of life. Lie to Me is the type of television we are left with after the demise of Reality Television. Lie to Me makes us self-conscious, in the strongest sense, and thus sustains the mission of Reality Television. By dragging the notion of reality into its self-serving fictions, it puts the viewer into the dangerous position of being unable to lie to television. If Reality Television constrained reality to falsity, Lie to Me implicates the viewer in the zone where falsity transforms into reality. Lastly, this article enquires into the possibilities, in today’s television ecology, for a mode of TV citizenship that would counter the abject viewing position of the consumerist idiot.

The potential utility of Daoist theory and practice in psychology

This thesis attempted to demonstrate the potential for adaptation from the Chinese philosophical tradition of Daoism into modern psychology. The candidate was able to succesfully demonstrate a link between Daoist thinking style and reduced stress levels, especially in Chinese individuals.

Book review : 1835 : the founding of Melbourne and the conquest of Australia

Book review of 1835: the Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. By James Boyce (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2011), ISBN 978-1-86395-475-4

'O que é o "subalterno" da filosofia da religião? / What Is the “Subaltern” of the Philosophy of Religion?

The The 18th-19th centuries orientalist preoccupations with mythology and ancient perennis lacked both a critical-theoretical sensitivity to historiography anchored in radical historical consciousness and a deep sense of philosophical argumentation, as distinct from discerning mythic patterns of textual (intra-textual or internal) disputation and its interpretative ramifications from another felicitous perspective, usually theology mitigated by whatever remains ‘modern’ in the arts. Philosophy of Religion on the other hand remained heavily straddled in the rigors of logic, reason, analysis, dialectic, reason, reductio, aggressive refutation, within established frameworks drawing from the other branches of philosophy, namely, again, logic, epistemology, ontology and metaphyics. This paper presents a view 'from below' to demonstrate and argue how philosophy o religion must change in the post-colonial era and pay more attention to indigenous patterns of theological thinking and critiquing of Western enlightenment-centred philosophy of religion. It is in Portuguese though.