Sixth Class - In Defense of Genocide: Radovan Karadžić

Date: Tuesday 6 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm

Venue: see your email for details

Below is a website published by Kevin Heller, this week's Free School presenter. Please feel free to look over these short legal/political opinion pieces and if any are of particular interest an email conversation before class could be good.

Kevin Heller

Radovan Karadžić

Apropos to our conversation last night, you may use Wikipedia to research Radovan Karadžić. Kevin Heller has been involved in the defense of Karadžić at the International Criminal Tribunal, where he is currently being held. The overall project of international law and what this could possibly encompass is a huge question and here we have an opportunity to field questions to somebody who has been directly involved in some of its most complex cases.

Fifth Class – Free Discussion

Date: Tuesday 30 March, 7.00 pm

Venue: Nick's house, see email for details

Prescribed readings (found in your reader)

Impromptu at Vincennes. Jacques Lacan

The Nietzschean Audience. Geoff Lowe (with Jacqueline Riva)

To paraphrase Geoff Lowe, I meant to read all about Lacan in preparation for this question but I didn't have time. "Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic." Read the two readings prescribed for this week thinking about how and where knowledge is formed and articulated, after last week's class it may be good to think about knowledge and the University. Identify the key points / argument from each reading with the view to a class discussion.

Reference to: Paola Pivi, Aphasia, the University

Fourth Class– The End of Beauty, Taste and Judgement

Tuesday 23.03.10

John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 7.00 pm

please meet at 6.55 as we will enter building as one group.

class will be taken by Justin Clemens

The End of Beauty, Taste and Judgement
These days, it seems that nobody really knows what they’re doing in the realm of philosophical aesthetics. As a result, we get automatic repetitions that don’t realise they’re repetitions: a ‘back to basics’ approach (‘it just has to be beautiful/skilful/ethical’); pseudo-scientific approaches that allegedly support a new ‘world art history’ (‘we all know from evolutionary biology that all humans share a creative instinct’); interpretative marginalia (‘what does that small yucky mark at the lower right of the canvas really mean?’); etc. I want to discuss how these pseudo-solutions emerge as the consequence of a failure of modern philosophical aesthetics — particularly as bequeathed European modernity in the form of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement — and return to Kant’s positions to see what else they might have to tell us today. This means talking again about ‘beauty,’ ‘taste,’ ‘form,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘the sublime.’ Seriously.

Prescribed reading: Kant's Critique of Judgement – First Part. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.

available here http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/

Third Class - Determinism

The class this week has been moved to Thursday 18 March in order to accommodate our guest speaker Fiona Connor.

Fiona is was born in New Zealand and is a founding member of Gambia Castle, Auckland. She is currently participating in the renowned Masters program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles.

Fiona is in melbourne to exhibit in the New010 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). This exhibition has an opening reception this Wednesday, the night before the class. All Free School students are invited and encouraged to come as the content of the class will be touching on aspects of Fiona's practice.

http://www.gambiacastle.net/fionaconnor.html

http://www.michaellett.com/artist/?artist=Fiona+Connor&show=Something+Transparent+%28please+go+round+the+back%29&info=work
http://www.blackweldershow.com/artists.html

The location for Thursday's class will be

RMIT

visiting artist studio

Building 95

24-26 Earl Street

Carlton Victoria

We will meet out the front of the building at 7pm.

It would great if you could RSVP for this class so we know who is able to attend.

Best,

Free School

Free School Presents

Simon Denny*

Vaudeo in context

screening of recent videos and artist talk

8.30pm

Friday 5 March 2010

Studio 2

200 Gertrude Street

Fitzroy

*this is a Free School Presents public event, all welcome.

Second Class

Free School Second class will be held at

Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran

(tram 6 from Swanston street, first stop past Chapel, Train to Prahran Station, 10 min walk up High Street)

class will begin at 7.00pm

Second class will be presented by

Michael Taussig

Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology

Columbia University

Anthropology

Biography

I began fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year. My writing has spanned different things in roughly the following order; two books in Spanish for local people on the history of slavery and its aftermath, and books and articles in academic journals on the: 1) commercialization of peasant agriculture, 2) slavery, 3) hunger, 4) the popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, 5) the impact of colonialism (historical and contemporary) on "shamanism" and folk healing, 6) the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, 7) the making, talking, and writing of terror, 8) mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism, and secrecy, 9) defacement (meaning iconoclasm), 10) a two week diary detailing paramilitary violence, 11)a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, 11) currently writing a book entitled "What Color is the Sacred?".

Representative Publications:

1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.

1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.

1992. The Nervous System.

1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.

1997. The Magic of the State.

1999. Defacement.

2003. Law in a Lawless Land.

2004. My Cocaine Museum.

2006. Walter Benjamin's Grave.