I: Panel topic: 'Feminist resistance in southern African women's fiction'

Speakers: Prof Anél Boshoff, Law Faculty, University of Aberystwyth, Wales, and Dr Louise du Toit, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg

We are interested in forms of feminist resistance that may be found or traced in women's fiction writing in postcolonial southern Africa. Due to a general lack of feminist-oriented (or even women's) voices within the discipline of African Philosophy as such, we are exploring African women's literary output for philosophically interesting forms of feminist or women's resistance, both to the dominant suppositions of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and to the patriarchal-colonial and patriarchal-neo-colonial alliance typical of the African context. This resistance can include the rejection of the Law of the Father in favour of an alternative feminine symbolic order, and the disruption and undermining of the dominant symbolic order from within. These two strategies may also be linked up with the theoretical positions of French feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva respectively, and with Hélène Cixous' distinction between the crone (the outsider figure) and the hysteric (disruption from within). During the discussion, Boshoff will explore the latter position in detail, and Du Toit the former, both using the same novel, namely Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwean author Tsitsti Dangarembga.

II Panel: 'Poetic Singularity and Reading: In the Name of Derrida'

Speakers: 1. Professor Joanna Hodge (MMU) 2. Dr Sean Gaston (Brunel) 3. Dr Eftichis Pirovolakis (Sussex)

Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan) Derrida's Specters: Futurity, Finitude, Forgetting 'No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.' (p. 31) This paper develops an interrogation of the claim on singularity made in Specters of Marx (1993), by revealing half concealed by the terms of the sub-title a series of names, through which to delimit a question to the site at which meaning and thinking arrives. The sub-title is 'The State of the debt, the work of Mourning and the New International', and the main contention of the reading is that emphasis on the last term has obscured the importance of the first two. From 'the State of the Debt' the names of the founders of phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger, can be seen to emerge. Beneath 'the work of mourning', those of Freud and the unfaithful disciple Jung are barely masked. The New International announces more clearly a series of names: Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. This series in its linear descent leads attention away from a folding of the analysis in Specters into the enquiry about a certain Jewish-German psyche, announced suitably enough in an addendum to the 1988 paper, 'Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew and the German'. There is to be traced here a diversion of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and political economy from their initial formulations by a series of unfaithful disciples, into a politics of fascism, of racism and of the coup d'état. This is a singular history whereby a rejection in Europe of a certain Jewish-German gift remains to be explored, even to be identified in its full dangerous potentiality. Protention, prognosis and the programme are deflected into an operation of forgetting, which is the forgetting of ressentiment, not the forgetting of Nietzschean free spirits. The paper proposes to twist together a certain Husserlian hope with a certain Nietzschean forgetting in order to give traction to a Derridean notion of a to-come, no longer freighted by the burden of its debt to sectarian messianisms. The singularity announced in Specters is accessible not by appeal to a Marxian messianic, not to a Freudian talking cure, but by appeal to a Husserlian forgetting of impossibility

Sean Gaston (Brunel) Thinking-Reading Reading Blanchot and Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida suggests that one never stops learning to read: in reading one is always losing one's place, losing a claim to the place, in the midst or middle of a text. This is contrasted to the role played by the reading that comes before and after the cogito in Descartes's Meditations and to Heidegger's analysis of the misreading of presence in Being and Time and his later association of reading with gathering (Sammeln) in Introduction to Metaphysics. Reading Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida suggests that it is only through reading that one encounters thinking. Reading-thinking is perhaps a losing the place that is taken by the unique place of re-collection, and the chance for a chance encounter that always finds itself in the midst or the middle of a text

Pirovolakis, Eftichis (Sussex), 'Impossible Singularities'. This paper, motivated by a certain uneasiness about the more or less widespread tendency to evoke the concept of 'singularity' in order to qualify a literary text or literature in general, reflects upon three distinct ways in which singularity might be regarded as impossible. In the first part, I provide a few examples of this tendency (Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur and, more recently, Derek Attridge) and briefly delineate its basic assumptions. According to a largely Aristotelian understanding of the potential-actual relation, all three thinkers, despite their differences, construe singularity teleologically as a momentary actualization by the reader of a potentiality inherent in the literary work. This interpretation and the corollary emphasis on singularity, which allow for a certain impossibility anchored in the reader's initiative or ability, are often aligned with a deconstructive approach to literature. However, the second part of the paper suggests that Derrida's portrayal of singularity, in 'Shibboleth: For Paul Celan', as an experience of the 'mad date' is not exactly congruous with this trend. Whenever he has recourse to the term 'singularity', Derrida is always cautious to underscore its essentially impossible character with a view to resisting regarding this notion through the prism of a possibility actualized in the here-now of a reading effort. By insisting on a hiatus between, on the one hand, an a priori absolute singularity or what he calls 'the pure poem', and, on the other, a de facto exigency of generalizability, Derrida configures singularity as a necessary but impossible possibility. This structure divides the here-now of both the text and the reading act, thereby complicating their interpretation in terms of a possible actuality or occurrence.

IV Panel: 'Models as make-believe'

Speakers: 1. Roman Frigg (LSE) 2. Adam Toon (Cambridge) 3. Stacie Friend chair (Heythorp)

1. Models and Fiction. The first step in tackling a scientific problem often is to come up with a suitable model. When studying the orbit of a planet we take both the planet and the sun to be spinning perfect spheres with homogenous mass distributions gravitationally interacting with each other but nothing else in the universe; when investigating the population of fish in the Adriatic Sea we assume that all fish are either predators or prey and that these two groups interact with each and nothing else according to a simple law; and when studying the exchange of goods in an economy we consider a situation in which there are only two goods, two perfectly rational agents, the information available to them is not restricted in any way, and their dealings are done in no time, do not incur transaction costs, and there is no money.1 In other words, what are presented with is a highly stylised and distorted rendering of the system under investigation. A popular introduction to physics describes the situation as follows: 'In physics a model is a simplified version of a physical system that would be too complicated to study in detail. [...] Suppose we want to analyze the motion of a baseball thrown through the air. How complicated is this problem? The ball is neither perfectly spherical nor perfectly rigid; it has raised seams, and it spins as it moves through the air. Wind and air resistance influence the motion, the earth rotates beneath it, the balls weight varies little as its distance from the earth changes, and so on. If we try to include all these things, the analysis gets hopelessly complicated. Instead, we invent a simplified version of the problem. We neglect the size and shape of the ball by representing it as a point object, The first of these is the Newtonian model the solar system that is discussed in most elementary physics textbooks (see e.g. Young and Freedman 2000), the is second the so-called 'Lotka-Volterra model' (Volterra 1926), the third is what is now called the 'Edgeworth box' (Edgeworth 1881).

2. Models and make-believe. Often, in order to explain or predict the behaviour of a system, scientistsmust first model it. Modelling a system usually involves making assumptions that are false of that system. Planets are not perfect spheres, the nucleus is not a liquid drop and the molecules in a gas are not billiard balls. And yet it seems that scientists do represent a system when they model it. How are we to understand this form of representation? To answer this question, I draw upon Kendall Walton's make-believe theory of fiction. I propose that we understand scientific models as representations, in Walton's sense: models function as props in games of make-believe. Applying this account to a range of different scientific models, I shall show how it allows us to meet a number of challenges facing theories of scientific representation.

V Panel: On Iris Murdoch

Speakers: Dr Anne Rowe (Kingston), F.C.P.White (Kingston) Professor Avril Horner (Kingston)

1: Iris Murdoch and the 'Ethical Turn': Iris Murdoch, both as novelist and philosopher, played a central role in what has come, since 1990, to be called the "ethical turn". Vehemently rejecting the label of philosophical-novelist, Murdoch is nonetheless a writer whose philosophy and fiction are complementary halves of a single ethical vision. Murdoch believes in the Good, and she believes in Art, as both a form of the Good, and as a means of apprehending it. She is among the twentieth century British philosophers who returned ethics to the foreground of philosophy when linguistic analysis had banished it. Murdoch's moral vision is continued in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who both promote interactive interpretation of literary and philosophical texts. Murdoch's fictional vision both celebrates human existence and subjects it to a compassionate but stringently ethical critique. Contigency and muddle are juxtaposed with absolute moral demands. Criticism of Murdoch's work has matured from early attempts to identify her simplistically as an Existentialist (which she denies) or a Platonist (which she affirms), to later subtle and illuminating cross-disciplinary studies of her philosophy and her novels. This paper will examine Murdoch's own self-positioning on the literary-philosophical grid, views of her fiction by philosophers, and of her philosophy by literary critics. It will contend that Murdoch's innovatory and influential work in both disciplines has only begun to be explored, in collections of essays such as Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory (1998) and Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (2007), and that Murdoch will prove to be a key figure in both late twentieth century moral philosophy and literature, and in the interface between them.

2. Whither shall I flee spirit? 'Everything I have ever written is holy' Iris Murdoch said in the 1990s when she was near the end of her forty-year-long writing career. Yet her Irish Protestantism had lapsed by the time she declared herself a Marxist in the 1930s, and she made a life-long denial of the existence of God and of any idea of Theism. However, she continued to engage in Christian debate and explored the possibilities offered by other faiths, eventually declaring herself, paradoxically, a 'Christian Buddhist'. This paper examines both the personal and professional conflicts that Murdoch's apostasy generated in her life, her philosophical writing and her art. She appeared to want, or need, the Church to uphold its traditional functions without herself having to believe in them and was accused of wanting to participate in religion with only a tourist's enthusiasm. The paper will outline the nature of her decline of faith and how her philosophical writings on theology and her exploration of it in her novels reveal some startling contradictions and dense moral dilemmas, not only for Murdoch and her characters, but for all those who feel torn between the emotional desire for God and rational scepticism. It will then explore current theological debates generated by thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling and identify the relevance of Murdoch's position to these issues with reference to a number of novels, including The Bell (1958), The Time of The Angels (1966), The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Nuns and Soldiers (1980). Finally, the paper will explore Murdoch's vision of the merging of Christianity and Buddhism with her own particular brands of Platonism and Mysticism, and how she presents this vision in her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma. This paper will pay particular attention to the ways in which Murdoch's novels test her philosophical positions, occasionally to the point of negating them

3. Refinements of Evil. Iris Murdoch and the Gothic. Iris Murdoch, whose writing career spanned over forty years, produced a handful of novels that critics have identified as Gothic, among them The Bell (1958); The Unicorn (1963) and The Time of the Angels (1966). These are structured through Gothic effects: a fallen priest, a legend concerning a drowned nun, a young woman incarcerated in an isolated building in a Celtic landscape, a father's sexual exploitation of his daughter - to name but a few. This paper will examine Murdoch's use of Gothic plots, tropes and devices during this period and will argue that they constitute an exploration of how to represent evil. For a writer preoccupied with morality and the Platonic 'good', this presents a particular challenge. As Michael wonders in The Bell, 'Could one recognize refinements of good if one did not recognize refinements of evil...'. Moral good in Murdoch's fiction is demonstrated by the ability of certain characters to love unselfishly and wisely. In her appropriation of the Gothic mode (which sometimes verges on the parodic), Murdoch seeks to explore desires which masquerade as love but which are founded on the need to control, manipulate and exploit others. At their darkest, such desires lead to 'nightmare(s) of violence' (The Unicorn) and the 'diabolical plot' of incest in which Elizabeth finds herself trapped in The Time of the Angels. Curiously, Murdoch's self-conscious appropriation of the Gothic mode has been relatively neglected by scholars, as if her excursion into melodrama and the irrational was somehow an inappropriate exercise for one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. This essay will reappraise Murdoch's use of Gothic, arguing that it represented an interesting experimental stage in her development as a novelist.