I am delighted that my article “Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres” has just been published in the latest number of the Australian Journal of French Studies. Many thanks to Ash, Leslie and Gemma at the ANU who worked hard on the editing and wrote a splendid introduction to the AJFS special edition.
In this excerpt from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought I address the question of whether Serres should be considered an “ecological” thinker.
On the day of Michel Serres’s death, I reflect on what drew me to write on this beguiling, prescient, inimitable thinker
This the fourth of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
Here is the Introduction from my 2011 book From Plato to Postmodernism: The Story of Western Culture Through Philosophy, Literature and Art. The Introduction is entitled “To the man with a hammer …” human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but […] life
[vc_row row_height_percent=”0″ overlay_alpha=”50″ gutter_size=”3″ column_width_percent=”100″ shift_y=”0″ z_index=”0″ shape_dividers=””][vc_column][vc_column_text] This the third of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating
This the second of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
This the first of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
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
I have now tidied up the video from yesterday’s seminar on “Michel Serres and the Question of Alterity in Recent French Thought” and improved the quality of the audio. Here is the new YouTube version:
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
My extended review of Ignaas Devisch’s excellent Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community has just been published on the H-France website. The PDF can be downloaded here.
Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through Michel Serres’s 1980 Le Parasite: a dense, poetic, brilliant text that seeks to tear down and rebuild the way we think about everything. In reading the book I kept a running list of intertexts to which Serres refers, a document that runs to some
The third of the podcasts on Derrida and Reformed theology has now been released. The first considered questions of metaphysics and the second focused on Derrida’s ethics; this final podcast discusses Derrida’s engagement with theological themes. I begin by discussing Derrida’s cautious affirmation that “I rightly pass for an atheist”, and try to dismantle the myth that, for
In this episode I talk very briefly about the growing willingness to accept, from the mid 1990s onwards, that deconstruction is indeed ethical, before tackling the myth that Derrida is a relativist. I unpack the phrase “tout autre est tout autre” (“every other is wholly other”) from Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard on Genesis 22 and
This post is part of the series of draft entries for a Michel Serres dictionary. Abbreviations: Conv: Serres and Latour, Conversations on Culture, Science and Time TI: Serres, Le Tiers instruit One of Serres’s three book-length engagements with literary authors, l’Hermaphrodite was written significantly later than Jouvences (1974, on Jules Verne) and Feux et signaux
Le Système de Leibniz was published during the heady anni mirabiles of late 1960s French thought. It appeared in 1968, the same year as Roland Barthes’s short essay ‘The Death of the Author’, one year after Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and two years after Foucault’s The Order of Things. Like Derrida’s and
I have just uploaded a paper on Michel Serres to academia.edu. Here is the abstract: This is an expanded version of a paper originally given at the English and Theatre Studies research seminar at Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My intention both for the original paper and for this
With much coffee and the huge kindness and indulgence of my wife I have just finished the first complete draft of my book on figures of the human in contemporary French thought. The project formerly known as The Human Remains has evolved into the argument that one of the most comprehensive and productive ways to
My review of Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière has been published in French Studies. You can find the full text and PDF versions on the French Studies website.
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.
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
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
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
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.