Alain Badiou
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My paper “Nancy is a thinker of Radical Emancipation”, with a response by Jean-Luc Nancy
A plenary talk given at the ‘Thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy’ conference, University of Oxford, 29 March 2019. 1. Nancy against the emancipation narrative It is not an uncommon view, and it is one fuelled in part by Nancy himself, that his thought is inimical to an agenda of emancipation and liberation. He treats the
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French Philosophy Today paperback now shipping
I just received my copy of French Philosophy Today in paperback. You can find it on Amazon here. Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Catherine Malabou, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour: this comparative, critical analysis shows the promises and perils of new French philosophy’s reformulation of the idea of the human. See here for chapter summaries.
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I’m planning to tweet live video of my research seminar on Michel Serres and the Question of Alterity next Tuesday
Next Tuesday I will be giving a seminar at Deakin Univesity, Melbourne, on Michel Serres’s understanding of alterity. The paper comes from the first chapter of my book on Michel Serres, on which I have been able to do some more work recently. I’m trying to get permission from Deakin to tweet a live video
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French Philosophy Today paperback now on Amazon pre-order
I am delighted to announce that the paperback edition of French Philosophy Today is now (finally!) available for pre-order on Amazon. The U.S. site has it at $39.95 and most European sites set the price at around €25. Curiously, amazon.co.uk has the paperback at £150, which I assume is a mistake soon to be corrected. Here is
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What is a theological concept? Part 3: Alain Badiou’s interruption of the mytheme by the matheme and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Christmas Projection”
In this third post in the “what is a theological concept?” series I focus for the first time on a specific philosophical moment: Alain Badiou’s account of the interruption of the mytheme by the matheme. I am particularly interested in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of this Badiouian move, for Nancy sees in the interruption of the
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How art can create a new future: Stephen Zepke, Sublime Art
I am delighted to report that Stephen Zepke’s Sublime Art is nearing publication, with the cover now being proofed. How art can create a new future Sublime art exceeds the present. It is an undetermined expression that in coming into being creates new universals, new modes of life and new coefficients of freedom. Stephen Zepke tracks
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The Return of Religion, Kettle Logic, and the Secular Dilemma
At this year’s Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy conference I had the pleasure of responding to Gregg Lambert’s new book Return Statements: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Philosophy. I chose to focus on the very idea of the “return of religion”, its multiple senses, and their potential conflicts. The paper is downloadable from academia.edu and
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French Philosophy Today to join Difficult Atheism on Edinburgh Scholarship Online
I’ve just learned that French Philosophy Today will shortly join Difficult Atheism on Edinburgh Scholarship Online. This, I hope, will come as good news to at least some of those who have been in touch with me about the price of the hardback edition.
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French Philosophy Today reviewed at NDPR
French Philosophy Today has just been reviewed over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here are some highlights: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famously defined philosophical production as concept creation. If they are correct, then Watkin’s work is not just a scholarly commentary of philosophy but also itself an inventive philosophical work. If Alain Badiou, the
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Talk in Melbourne on Aug 5 – Varieties of Contemporary Atheism: Badiou, Nancy, Meillassoux
On August 5 at 11am I will have the pleasure of speaking at the Melbourne University of Divinity philosophy seminar on the subject “Varieties of Contemporary Atheism: Badiou, Nancy, Meillassoux”. The talk seeks to synthesise and develop some of the main lines of thinking from Difficult Atheism and to open the argument of the book to
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 1 – Badiou
Over the coming days I will be posting brief summaries of the argument of French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour, chapter by chapter. Here is the main argument of Chapter 1, on Badiou. This first chapter probes the limits of Badiou’s “formalised inhumanism”. It argues that it
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French Philosophy Today: New figures of the Human, low-res cover
Today I received the first low resolution mock-up of the cover for my new book: French Philosophy Today. New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. Many thanks to Rebecca Mackenzie and Julien Palast for your wonderful work.
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Modernism Unit: Alain Badiou on Krapp’s Last Tape and “the space that lies between French and English”
To accompany the lecture on Beckett in the modernism unit, here is a lecture by Alain Badiou on Krapp’s Last Tape, in which he also reflects on “the space that lies between French and English”, a space he describes as “a perpetual torment”. He provides a commentary not only upon the play, but also on the negotiation
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A table showing who is part of the new materialism, and an argument as to why it is not a “turn”
I’m currently writing the introduction to The Human Remains, discussing the figure of the human in the new materialism. I thought I would share the table I drew up of all the thinkers identified as part of the new materialism in different monographs and collected volumes. I have excluded individual journal articles from the list
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New review of Difficult Atheism at Marx and Philosophy
Over at Marx&Philosophy, Bryan Cooke (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last year’s Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy conference) has posted a review of Difficult Atheism. The opening paragraph gives a flavour of the review’s tone and also of Bryan’s style, which, for all the right reasons, is best left undescribed: Christopher Watkin’s
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My review of Hollis Phelps Alain Badiou Between Theology and Anti-Theology published in French Studies
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.
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Current Research: The Human Remains
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
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Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, Nancy
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