My review of Hollis Phelps’ Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology has just been published in French Studies. It is available in fulltext and PDF.
Amaleena Damlé’s The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French has just been published in Edinburgh University Press’s Crosscurrents series. In an interview with Amaleena I explored some of the issues raised by the book. CHRIS WATKIN: To paint with very broad brushstrokes as we begin, into which debates is this book
Later this month (26-27 April) I have been asked to contribute to a conference organised by Telos at Swinburne University in Melbourne. The conference, Reconceiving Naturalism, has been convened to explore the need for richer naturalisms. I plan to speak on Meillassoux’s Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science. This short volume had a former life
The cover has just been finalised for Wahida Khandker’s Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences, in the Crosscurrents series. The endorsement from Cary Wolfe reads: Ranging across a remarkable array of crucial texts in the recent history of philosophy and the life sciences, this book provides both an invaluable critical overview of the work of
Drafting the latter chapters of The Human Remains has given me occasion to think in a sustained way about the possibilities and limits of narrative identity, including how the notion can be employed beyond humanity. In addition to revisiting Paul Ricœur’s work on narrative identity I have been grappling with the way in which Michel Serres
On the first of April (yes, really) I’ll be giving a paper at the Deakin University Philosophy seminar series entitled ‘Catherine Malabou and Synaptic Personhood’. The paper argues that the way Malabou seeks to understand the relation between brain and mind as an instance of explosive plasticity, cutting across the dichotomy of reductionism and anti-reductionism, risks
A couple of years ago I had the privilege of speaking at Lund university on the subject of Quentin Meillassoux’s treatment of the anthypothetical principle of logic in L’Inexistence divine and elsewhere. Thanks in large part to the persistent hard work of Admir Skodo, the conference papers have been reworked, expanded, and found their way
In On Touching Derrida makes much of Freud’s posthumous fragment “Psyche ist ausgedehnt; weiss nichts davon”, and the fragment is also treated in Nancy’s Corpus. As far as I can see, the translation is always given as something approximating “Psyche is extended; it knows nothing of it.” My question is this: how do we know
I am delighted that Crosscurrents will be publishing Wahida Khandker’s new book Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences in July 2014. The book is a study of pathological concepts of animal life in Continental philosophy from Bergson to Haraway. Here is the blurb: Amongst contemporary debates about our relation to non-human animals, our use of them
I am currently working on a book provisionally entitled The Human Remains: French Philosophy in the Image of God. The first part of the book looks at the ways in which the imago dei motif is explicitly taken up in contemporary French thought. The second, longer part takes debates from the philosophical reception of the
A piece I prepared for a symposium on Kevin Hart at last year’s Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy has just been published in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. The piece is entitled ‘De omni re scibili‘ and deals in part with a distinction between two contrasting paradigms of interdisciplinarity (in this context, between philosophy and
How do we decide if a particular philosophy is covertly theological? One all-too-common response to this question boils down to little more than a theological bird-watching expedition in which we don our binoculars, pick up our guide books and descend upon an unsuspecting article or book in the hope of catching sight of a Lesser Spotted Miracle
I’m currently working on Michel Serres’ four books on humanism from 2001-2009, in which he seeks to break down the qualitative distinction between the human and the non-human in a fundamental way. In these books and elsewhere he develops what I think it is best to call an ‘econarratology’, though see the qualification of that
Editions Excelsis have just published La foi chrétienne et les défis du monde contemporain (The Christian Faith and the Challenges of the Contemporary World), for which I had the privilege to write a 5000 word article on Christianity and relativism, moving through the bible, Augustine, Pascal, Derrida, debates in the French parliament and C. S. Lewis.
The Heraclitean panta In Plato’s Cratylus, Heraclitus is quoted as holding that ‘πάντα χωρεῖ’ (panta chōrei, everything changes), a reality he sees symbolised in the element of fire: All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. (Heraclitus, Fragment 22 in the Diels-Kranz collection of
Last January I had the great pleasure of chatting with Philipa Rothfield about dance and philosophy, and she invited me to contribute something on Jean-Luc Nancy and dance to Dancehouse Diary, a quarterly publication by Dancehouse, the centre for independent dance in Melbourne. The piece, called ‘When I think, I dance’, deals with some of the themes in
A few years ago I gave a talk on two pieces by Damien Hirst and the seed sculptures of Romanian artist Liviu Mocan, promising Liviu I would write it up as a short article. He has an exhibition in the beautiful Cambridge Round Church at the moment, and so it seemed the right time to come
My article ‘Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, Nancy’ has just been published in French Studies. You can click through to a PDF version from this page. The article is part of the project on humanism and anti-humanism I am working on at the moment. I argue that Badiou and Rancière both end up, despite themselves, with problematic understandings of
In September I will have the great pleasure of taking part in a symposium at the University of Lund, Sweden, entitled “Paul Ricœur in Dialogue with Theology and Religious Studies.” In addition to looking forward to hearing what is set to be a fantastic array of papers, I hope to be able to contribute something to
My review of Joe Hughes’ Philosophy after Deleuze has just been published in French Studies. Note: the link above gives access to the full review, whereas if you go directly to the French Studies site you are restricted to an extract.
My review of Marie-Eve Morin‘s book on Jean-Luc Nancy in the Polity Key Contemporary Thinkers series has just been posted at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
With a new issue of Analecta Hermeneutica just out there has been some discussion this past week of Peter Gratton’s article on Meillassoux’s ontology of divine inexistence (here, here and here, with some reaction on Gratton’s own blog, Philosophy in a time of error). The discussion put me in mind of a paper I gave way
Later this year Crosscurrents will be publishing Nicholas Davey’s important new book Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer. In addition to the blurb below, I am thrilled that Nicholas has kindly agreed for me to post here the complete introductory chapter, which is also available as a PDF. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s poetics completely overturns the European aesthetic tradition.
In a few months Crosscurrents will be publishing Mathew Abbott’s The Figure of This World, an important new book on Agamben and political ontology. I took the opportunity to put some questions to Mathew about his intentions for the book and how it develops current debates. CW: Let’s start with where this book sits in the landscape
In Jubiler ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Rejoice, or the Torments of Religious Speech), Latour’s attempt to re-think religious discourse in the face of the double-click fantasy is drawn out of a consideration of lovers’ discourse, and it bears an interesting resemblance to Jean-Luc Nancy’s treatment of love in L’Adoration. Both texts
Bruno Latour’s Jubiler, ou les tourments de la parole religieuse (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002) is set to come out this year in English wish Polity Press as Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Though Latour claims that the book exhibits a rigorously scientific approach, it certainly reads as something of a complex
Difficult Atheism is set to be released in paperback this month: £25 or $40, available for pre-order on Amazon.
Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’, one of the set texts for week on Chinese modernism in the modernism unit, raises the interesting question of the relation of madness to modernism per se. It is already becoming clear in the course that the discourse around the limits of rationality is central to many different trends within
If you are exploring a research topic for the modernism unit and don’t know where to start in your secondary reading, it is a good general rule of thumb to begin by seeing if there is a relevant essay in one of the Cambridge Companions. These essays provide excellent introductions to areas of a particular
This page gives some useful preliminary pointers to studying James Joyce’s Dubliners. The “selected web links” section looks particularly useful.
Perhaps it is because I have just finished the delightfully written To the Lighthouse, but reading Kafka’s ‘A report to an academy‘ this week for the up-coming modernism unit I am struck by the ambiguous narratorial position of the ‘former ape’ giving the report. Kafka’s brilliant conceit positions the speaker on the limits of humanity,
The uneasy relation of language to meaning that is characteristic of much modernism punctuates Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Taking walk with “the atheist” Charles Tansley, Mrs. Ramsay, tired of being talked at, begins to let her mind wander in a way that detaches Tansley’s words from their intended meaning, first with the words taking on
Given the length at which To the Lighthouse dwells on the everyday thoughts of its characters, it comes as a brutal shock to read in the grim second section that: Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms,
If you are after some light relief amid preparations for the modernism unit, read this.
In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at
In the passage below, which I present without further comment, Woolf offers her reader a glimpse into the contradictory intricacy of “love” with an astounding economy of expression: Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at
What is ‘rhythm’? It is neither a ‘thing’ (a material object) nor necessarily related to a human action. We usually think about rhythms in time, but the term need not be temporal. The OED gives one of the definitions as ‘Regularity in the repetition in time or space of an action, process, feature, condition, event,
This is the second in a series of two posts about the ‘subject’ and ‘objects’ of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in relaiton to the literary studies unit on modernism I will be teaching this coming semester. Literary criticism, in step with Cartesian dualism, has tended to operate according to a dichotomy of active subjects and
This is the first substantive post related to the unit in literary modernism I am teaching next semester. These posts are not intended to be proto-essays, nor necessarily particularly deep. I just want to jot down quick thoughts about what struck me in reading through the set texts, with the hope and intention of stimulating
In preparation for the modernism unit next semester I’ll be starting Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse this week. Grab yourself a copy (the OUP edition is the one we’ll be using in the unit) and read along with me.
Preliminary secondary reading To give you a grounding in some of the main lineaments of modernism, you may also want to read Michael Levenson’s ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (to which you have access through the university library website). If you feel the wind in your readerly sails, have a look at the