A reminder that this year's Women in Philosophy Lecture will be delivered by Dr 
Rebecca Hill (RMIT) this Wednesday 29th October 5-7pm at Macquarie University’s 
Wallumattagal Campus. The title and abstract are below, and registration and 
further details can be found using this link:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=wRTFghenh0C-BtQNIHCtUi4oDF9qy0tNn1rRltvvpMxUMlZOMFhQQldWRFVWR1dRMlY2RkM5UFI4Sy4u

All welcome!

Abstract: "Feeling make you": Neidjie’s teaching of Country and Bergson’s 
vision of Maternal Love
This lecture offers a reading of Bunitj clan elder Bill Neidjie’s teaching of 
Country in Story About Feeling and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s “fleeting 
vision” of “certain forms of maternal love” as an intuition of the “essence of 
life” in Creative Evolution. These two thinkers belong to vastly different 
traditions, and each thinker describes a world that is irreducible to the world 
of the other. Despite this divergence, both philosophers explicitly contest the 
enframing of world materialized in industrial modernity and techno-capitalism. 
I also claim there is a common resonance in their respective elaborations of 
onto-ethics. Neidjie teaches of the fundamental obligation to care for Country, 
to love the world. He stipulates that to care for Country is to feel the 
fundamental mysterious force of feeling that makes the world. Bergson’s 
Creative Evolution is a work of western metaphysics that strives to think the 
essence of life through a method of affective intuition. This project has an 
ethical orientation, and it is the ethical dimension of Bergson’s affective 
intuition that I seek to relate to Bill Neidjie’s thought. I read Bergson’s 
“fleeting vision” of “certain forms of maternal love” among many animals and 
among plants “in solicitude for … [their] seed” as an avowal of a 
trans-individual and trans-species ethic affirming the creating and nurturing 
of the coming of life. I suggest that this ethic has an affinity with Neidjie’s 
teaching of care for Country.

___________________

Dr Jane Johnson

ARC Future Fellow

Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities

Room 238, Michael Kirby Building, 17 Wally's Walk

Macquarie University - Wallumattagal Campus, NSW 2109, Australia


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