Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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Interviews with two Monash colleagues: Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh, and linguistician Alice Gaby
As part of a new role helping develop and foster research in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics (LLCL) at Monash, I am conducting an occasional series of interviews with colleagues about how their current research projects fit into the bigger picture of the questions and themes that run through their work. The
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My article on Michel Serres, Biosemiotics and the “Great Story” of the Universe published in SubStance
My article “Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology” has just been published in SubStance. It is available from institutions with a subscription to Project Muse here. Abstract: In four key but as yet untranslated texts from 2001-2009, Michel Serres builds on his earlier biosemiotics with an econarratology he calls the ‘Great Story’ (Grand
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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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Rethinking alterity and logocentrism after phenomenology with Serres’s L’Hermaphrodite: Sarrasine sculpteur (1987)
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
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Women and Surrealism, by Chris Worth
This is a guest post by Dr. Chris Worth. One of the topics raised in the question time after Benjamin Andréo’s first lecture on Dada and Surrealism was a really good one about whether, despite their avant-garde aspirations, many of the key figures in the movements continued to take a very male-oriented to art and
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Draft entry for a Michel Serres Dictionary: Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (1968)
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
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New Accumulator Test for Excel-based Vocabulary Learning Tool
I have added a new “Accumulator” test to Vocab Book, the Excel-based vocabulary learning tool I wrote last year. The new test simulates a tried and tested learning method: Imagine a vocab book in two columns with English words or phrases on the left and their target language translations on the right. At school I used
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Michel Serres app now available on Google Play
I’ve written a little app to aggregate information from around the web (news, Twitter, Youtube, Google Scholar, Google Trends…) on Michel Serres. It’s nothing flash but it allows me quickly to scan various sources to see if there’s anything new on Serres, without having manually to visit plural URLs. It is free to download from