On the 12th-14th July I went to the Australiasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference.

The topic was 'Trauma, Historicity, Philosophy' and, understandably, many papers floundered at attempting to address this theme. What has trauma to do with philsophy, being, as it is, a category for psychoanalysis? Most just deployed it as a synonym for the hectic, the bad, the fraught aspects of whatever theory they were pursuing.

In the first key-note address, György Márkus, a long-time family friend and emeritus Professor at Sydney boldly tackled this very disjuction. In deft critical moves shifting from the stoics to Kant's dynamic sublime he posed the question of whether philosophy can have imput into the Freudian collective historical consciousness, guide the collective irrational reactions to mass-scale trauma wracking modernity.

The first response uttered by an awed audience member was "Do you think Kant would have thought that speeches could be sublime?" It was a sentiment I thoroughly echoed.


The other absolute knock-me-over paper was 'The Shame of Trauma, the Trauma of Shame' from Agnes Heller, like George a student of Lukàcs. Her capacity to fuse a vast cultural backlog - now Don Giovanni and Hamlet - to epiphanous and learned insights into human emotional reactions truly stunned.

I'm going tonight to see her paper on Postmodernism depite my fluey condition.


Following the conference, we went to the Melbourne city centre for shopping and art galleries. Following a disapointing Picasso exhibition, it was up to Genki and Savers to come up trumps, which they duly did.