Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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The Archive
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Question about Freud’s “Psyche ist ausgedehnt” in Derrida and Nancy
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
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Interview with Wahida Khandker about her forthcoming book Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences
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
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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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De omni re scibili: Kevin Hart
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
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Of ornitheology
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
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Michel Serres–from Biosemiotics to Econarratology
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
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La foi chrétienne et les défis du monde contemporain
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.
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The Pantasm: Heraclitus, Michel Serres, and the Changeux-Ricœur exchange. On naming the human
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
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Dancehouse Diary: When I think, I dance
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