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Does that mean we have Shop

to read Foocolt?
Issue 15, Oct
by Estelle Tang , August 24, 2011 •  0
2013
In this issue
of Kill Your
In our new column, Investigations, we invite writers
Darlings Michelle
to delve into topics that intrigue them. The first Dicinoski,
Investigation comes from Andrew David Stapleton, author of The
who earlier this year decided to study philosophy. Ghost Wife,
tackles the
During my honours year, a research methods long-overdue
class was offered in the first semester. In part, need for
marriage
the class was held to attend to the problem of
equality in
research for creative arts students. How does a Australia;...

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FROM: $7.95
short story, a collection of poems, a dance, a
piece of theatre or a painting constitute
research?
Online
By and large, the answer referred to the Subscription
discursive nature of knowledge – that it is Reasons to
subscribe to Kill
generated rather than discovered – and there
Your Darlings:
was often talk of other cultures whose Save up to 25%
storehouse of knowledge was transmitted on RRP Free
through oral storytelling or dance or painting. access to online
There was, of course, an appreciation of editions KYD
delivered direct
different categories of knowledge – no one
to your...
thought a novel, say, produced the same type of
understanding as an advance in pure FROM: $35
mathematics, but, it was stressed, this difference
needn’t necessarily imply a hierarchy. Even the
idea that the sine qua non of research was that Offers —
it be of immediate and practical value was
rejected.
Subscriber
Art, it seemed, within the ARC-sanctified
Special
creative arts departments of the modern Until the end of
university, was epistemologically sound. There April, subscribe
to Kill Your
was, however, a catch. Darlings and go
into the running to
Each piece, no matter the discipline, would win a double pass
to
become host to a terrible parasite: an exegetical three Melbourne
Theatre
essay engaging with some already constituted Company plays
field of research relevant to your practice or – Glengarry Glen
Ross, The
output. Exeunt Art and enter Theory. Effect and The
Sublime – worth
And so, in class, as our lecturer – an ashen- over $400.

haired, black-clad, rimless-spectacled Joyce

scholar – enthused about some thinkers who
might prove intellectually significant for our Join our mailing list
burgeoning theoretical mindgrapes, a student —
soon interrupted her.

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“So, like, does that mean we have to read Want to keep up with Kill
Your Darlings news, issues,
Foocolt?”
giveaways, events, blog
content and more? Sign up
(Of course, ‘Foocolt’ here was just a placeholder
for our newsletter here.
for any obtuse, presumably French, sophist.)

At the time, I found this resistance confounding.

Attempting to understand something from a
theoretical standpoint seemed not only SUBSCRIBE

beneficial to my writing, but apposite when

doing that writing within a university.
KYD First Book
One of my supervisors rightly pointed out, Club »
though, that it wasn’t theory I was engaging
with, it was philosophy. Whereas for some, to Meet tomorrow's
study creative arts in an institution meant biggest authors
today at KYD's First
becoming, at the very least, capable of reading
Book Club. We're
and regurgitating that nebulous discourse hosting events with
sometimes pejoratively referred to as ‘Theory’, five debut authors
for me, doing philosophy alongside writing throughout 2014.
fiction not only proved helpful with that writing,
but also for engaging with other disciplines and,
however minimally, also affected the way I lived. May Kill Your
Simply: philosophy could do, albeit in a very Darlings First
different way, some of the things I valued in Book Club:
fiction, and vice versa. Maxine
Beneba
And so when earlier this year I took my first
Clarke’s
classes with the Melbourne School of
Foreign Soil
Continental Philosophy (MSCP) I had some We are delighted
questions for my teachers that touched upon to exclusively
premiere the book
these tensions – the relationship between art trailer for our
and philosophy, and the role of this discipline, as inaugural Kill Your
Darlings First Book
well as the university, in cultural life more Club selection,
Maxine Beneba
broadly. Jon Roffe and Bryan Cooke of the Clarke’s short story
School sent me their answers via email. These collection Foreign
Soil.
are (an edited version of) two of them:[1]

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Read more »
From reading Cameron Shingleton’s account of
the MSCP’s inception, the School seems to
have begun in frustration. What do you see as
the MSCP’s role in mitigating these View all book club
frustrations, and why aren’t the universities posts »
fulfilling this role?

BC: While I was not present at the founding, I KYD Podcast »

think that that frustration (mainly at the state of
Join the KYD team
the modern university and the poverty of its for a smart and
philosophy programs) has played a role not only cheeky look at pop
in the formation of the school, but in its culture, including
continuing existence and even its success. I think stories, special
interviews, music
our work has – as a result – always spoken to the
and more.
increasingly large number of students who find
themselves shocked and depressed by the
cynical emptiness of undergraduate (and
The brand
post-graduate) life in our increasingly profit-
new Kill Your
driven, bureaucratically governed,
Darlings
‘quantification’-obsessed degree factories.
Podcast
At the same time, I think that it’s important not We are very
pleased to launch
to exaggerate the role of the MSCP’s critical or the first Kill Your
Darlings podcast
negative self-positioning: if the MSCP was, of 2014! Produced
indeed, born in frustration, it also emerged out by Jessica Alice
and Meaghan
of, and is sustained by the joy that each of us Dew, the new
hour-long format
takes in the subjects, thinkers, problems, and has allowed us to
approaches to thought, that we think of as bring in more
contributors and
neglected, excluded or simply disdained by the go into more
universities and their degree structures. For depth with each
quarterly
many of us, what the MSCP stands for is not so production. In this
podcast we speak
much a ‘rogue’ or ‘eccentric’ area of philosophy, …
but rather everything about life, thought, art, Read more »
history, politics and cultural memory, that is
abandoned by or even invisible to the university
in its present state. The brand new Kill Your
Darlings podcast [

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JR: Looking back now, I would say that 1:02:28 ] Hide Player |
Play in Popup |
frustration was certainly a central concern: Download

frustration with the lousy state of education,

with the poor grasp of the philosophers we
View all podcasts »
cared about, frustration that we felt, from the
point of view of the education sector in
Australia, more or less invisible. Tweets Follow

Coupled with this motivation, though, there was Kill Your 34m
a very real sense that, simply put, we could do Darlings
something good, that the material we were @kyd_journal
Join the Kill
going to discuss was philosophically significant, Your
exciting and pertinent to the contemporary Darlings
/@TheStellaPrize
situation. What is still called, in a somewhat Shortlist Book
Club tonight as
derogatory fashion, ‘continental philosophy’ had we discuss
and has its share of charlatans and prostitutes Tweet to @kyd_journal
who are more interested in the dizzying parade
of proper names and the contact high of what
passes in the academy for celebrity, to the very
great detriment of the genuine philosophical
concerns championed by the thinkers that have
been the core of our curriculum since we began
(Lacan, Kant, Deleuze, Lyotard, Hegel, Derrida,
Žižek, Heidegger, etc.).

In sum, the MSCP began because this frustration

found a group of talented philosophers in whom
it fomented the desire to do something positive.
The directedness of the School, the passion the
lecturers have for their material, and the forward
momentum that still seems to derive from
enthusiasm about philosophy itself, all of this
retains a brute charm that, to me at least, signals
at least the possibility of genuine thinking.

As for why the spirit of genuine thought has

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departed the university, I don’t know if there’s

any easy answer. The sociological responses
come easily to mind, and they seem convincing:
the difficult economic context for educational
institutions (if this is really what they still are),
the backwards social context here in Australia
and no doubt elsewhere in the West. It is true
that we are in mourning for the university; we
imagine ourselves to have lost an invaluable
public sphere in which the genuine pursuit of
knowledge could take place untormented by the
vicissitudes of everyday life, but this increasingly
looks to me to be a fantasy.

This is not to say that I think we should all lie

back and think about a Certificate IV in Business
– to the contrary. The desire for real education
will never find a natural satisfaction, but must be
the object of a creative effort. And certainly this
is what the MSCP has as its goal.

David Foster Wallace once described the

function of fiction as being to comfort the
disturbed and disturb the comforted.
Philosophy too seems to be characterised by
this dual function – the lofty, edifying
humanist project of cultural betterment or
emancipation, and a more anti-humanist or
shocking, and perhaps even violent, eruption
of the new or monstrous. As philosophers, how
do each of you negotiate these poles, or
perhaps you think the very opposition between
them is bunk?

BC: I like David Foster Wallace very much, and I

think that his remark is entirely applicable to

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philosophy, about which he, of course, knew

much.

At the heart of his comment is I think a simple

truth: that philosophy exists neither to give
comfort to nor to simply shock the bourgeoisie.

This is because on the one hand, there are few

things more pathetic than the self-avowedly
‘radical’, which is too often a tedious posture of
the most slavish and timid conformity. At the
same time, I don’t think philosophy can be
comfortably assimilated to humanist ideals if for
no other reason than philosophers will always
reserve the right to question what is being
defended or venerated under the name of
‘humanism’. For example, why wouldn’t a given
philosopher, mock, as for instance Nietzsche did,
the humanist veneration of ‘culture’, as a
symptom of precisely the absence of the
‘culture’ to which humanists were apparently so
devoted?

Another thing in favour of anti-humanism: I like

the fact that philosophers do things that make
educated, cultivated, urbane people splutter,
even as they exert a strange fascination for this
same class: think of Socrates. At the root of this
is the fact that there is something necessarily
monstrous about philosophy: even and especially
because philosophers inevitably turn to
questions of politics. Philosophy has always been
about taking thought to its limits, into regions
where sensible people fear to tread, thereby
risking not only mystifying abstraction, but
stupefaction, melancholia, ‘utopianism’ and even

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insanity. To think otherwise is, as Deleuze points

out, to mistake thought for recognition.

And who would want this? We live in a world in

which there are forces (tectonic, intergalactic,
financial, political, military, technological) whose
power and influence precisely suggest the limits
of the humanist model for understanding the
world. If ‘humanist’ means ‘minimally concerned
with human beings and their lives’, then, yes,
philosophy is humanist. The problem, however,
is that people too often imply that concern with
human beings and their lives demands a
devotion to that which the present moment or
society already counts as interesting or
important. And I think philosophy perpetually
refuses, even exists to refuse, this blackmail: it is
eminently concerned with practice, but never
pragmatic in the sense that makes bureaucrats
and business managers happy.

JR: I think that Foster Wallace is half right, and in

turn so is your analogy between philosophy and
literature. In fact, I think the word ‘function’
here could use some disambiguation. What is
commonly called literature does indeed both
trouble and comfort, as does what we tend to
call philosophy. It seems to me, though, that art,
like philosophy, should only strive to trouble us.
Philosophy and art both are, or ought to be, as
relentless as they are fugitive, brooking no
resistance in their drive to tear the skin off of
the normal, to shine darkness into daylight.

Why, or rather how, do literature and philosophy

comfort, if they are nothing but the tip of the

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spear or the sharp edge? I think the answer lies

at the level of sympathy: it is when we find
ourselves in the company of the equally
unclothed, ill-prepared, dispossessed and
reduced, that is to say in the company of the
great artistic figures, or at the edge of thinking,
bereft of certainty, in the company of great
thought, that our own precarious situation is
rendered capable of being thought and felt.

The deep feelings evoked by Beckett, for

example, arise on this basis. The visage of a head
in a jar, a couple confined to trash cans, or the
lost ones whose minimal forms of movement
constitute their lives inside of a world
constituted by a giant rubber cylinder, these
resonate with us not because we want to
destroy what is human in us, but because this is
what we are – a few words, a few small stones, a
couple of decisive gestures, or one or two still
lives and a bowl of fruit (Cézanne).

This sympathy is, I think, a contingent secondary

effect of some art and some philosophy, and the
fact that it is not and ought not be the goal of
either to produce this effect does not render the
help it provides us with void. In fact, the more
that art tries to offer succour to the suffering,
the less it is capable of doing so, just as the more
philosophy strives to comfort our mute but
terrified sense of our place in the world, or hold
up the bourgeois life as the pinnacle of human
history, the more inhuman, cruel, disgusting and
finally illegible to human beings it becomes.
There is nothing less comforting than the
intellectual commodification of comfort, and

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there is far more unthinking cruelty, in a certain

respect, in the writings of Alain de Botton than
there are in those of Friedrich Nietzsche or
Georges Bataille.

For many years, I held to the kind of humanism

that you’re invoking here, but to demand of art
and philosophy that they provide us with
comfort – even and above all at those moments
when we need it the most – is to excuse
ourselves from having to do philosophy and
create art, and to denature philosophy and art
themselves. I have always felt Adorno’s claim –
that ‘Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely
through its inhumanity in regard to it’ – to be
deeply true.

Enrollments for the MSCP’s semester two

classes are still open; they’re offering courses
on Deleuze, Kant and Derrida. And if you want
to get a sense of some locally published, but by
no means parochial, contemporary philosophy,
you can check out Parrhesia or some of
re.press’s titles.

Andrew David Stapleton is a writer and

philosophy student working in Melbourne.

[1] The standard but nonetheless sincere

caveat that any mistakes here are mine
and all insights those of the interviewees.

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