Video & Audio
Lectures, interviews, panel discussions, and recorded appearances.
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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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Difficult Atheism reviewed in Derrida Today
The latest issue of Derrida Today includes a review of my Difficult Atheism by Christina Smerick. You can read the whole review online for free here. Watkin’s thesis is bold and unapologetic, and shapes the path of his reading and thinking with intense focus. His main concern, bordering on a battle cry, is that the ground gained by atheism
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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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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 6 – Bruno Latour
This is the sixth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. Chapter 6 considers the figure of the human that emerges in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 5 – Michel Serres
This is the fifth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. With Michel Serres’s universal humanism (Chapter 5) the argument returns to the question of host capacities in
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 4 – Malabou, The Epigenetic Human
This is the fourth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. Chapter 4 turns to the question of human identity over time in Malabou. After setting out the
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Jean-Luc Nancy and Visual Culture just published, with my chapter on Nancy, dance and equality
Just published: Nancy and Visual Culture. Here is the abstract for my chapter, entitled “Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation”. ‘We are facing a very new demand in terms of art’ remarks Nancy in Allitérations, ‘the demand that art be “made by everyone”’. And yet we also know very well that the arts require individuality, singularity
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 3 – Malabou, The Plastic Human
This is the third in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. The transition from Badiou and Meillassoux to Malabou leads us away from a host capacity
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My review of Ignaas Devisch’s Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community now available on the H-France website
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.
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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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Stob lecture 2025 Video. The Human Remains: Fragility and Fulfilment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Here is a video of my 2025 Stob lecture, exploring the philosophical and theological implications of AI. My title was “The Human Remains: Fragility and Fulfilment in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. I set out to argue that this is a very exciting time to be a philosopher or theologian, because AI is forcing on…
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Armitage Lecture 2025: “Custodians of the Common Good: Christian Education in a Post-Christian World”
In June I had the honour of delivering the annual Isaac Armitage Lecture at the Shore School, Sydney. My title was “Custodians of the Common Good: Christian Education in a Post-Christian World”. The video is now available: More information about the lecture can be found here.
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The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity: Introduction
An introduction to the book The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity: Tracing the Roots of Colonialism, Secularity, and Ecology, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2025. In this video, the first in a new series and rather longer than the others, I read the book’s Introduction, entitled “The State…
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Video: Panel on Biblical Critical Theory at ETS Conference
This panel, held to explore themes raised in Christopher Watkin’s book Biblical Critical Theory, was held at the 2023 conference of the Society for Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, in San Antonio, Texas. The session was the Kirby Laing Centre’s Scripture and University Seminar. Welcome: Dr. Jonathan Arnold, (Cedarville University) Panelists: Dr.…
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Video: Panel on Biblical Critical Theory at ETS Conference
This panel, held to explore themes raised in my book Biblical Critical Theory, was held at the 2023 conference of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Antonio, Texas. Moderator: Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt (Wheaton College) Panelists: Dr. Kristen Deede Johnson (Western Theological Seminary) Dr. Malcolm Foley (Baylor University) Dr. Greg Forster (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School)…
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AUDIO TALK: Michel Serres and the Parasitic Unmaking of Modernity
This is the audio of a talk I gave at the International Philosophical Seminar (IPS) in June 2022. It begins by showing how Michel Serres rethinks the foundational modern moment of the state of nature, and it then sketches a way of understanding modernity in terms of three recurring moments: a flattening, a division and…
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Podcast: “Renewing our Mental Models With Michel Serres”
In June 2022 I had the privilege of giving a keynote address for the NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract conference at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with the title “Renewing our Mental Models with Michel Serres”. The talk is now available as a podcast below. Abstract: As our understanding of the world changes over…
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VIDEO: Towards a General Theory of Figures
This is a video of a paper I gave to the The Research Unit of Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, part of the Institute for Architectural Sciences in the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology, at the invitation of Prof. Vera Bühlmann. In the talk I bring…
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Video: Our fractured state of nature: environment, emancipation, ecnonomy
This is a recording of a paper given at the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy Conference, December 2021. Paper title “Artificial state of nature: how an aporia of myth shapes our experience of emancipation and the market” Abstract This paper argues that there are two contradictory modern Western understandings of nature, vividly captured in the…
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Video: Where is Rousseau’s state of nature?
This is a recording of a paper I gave at the 2021 Australian Society of French Studies Conference. Paper title: Siting Rousseau’s state of Nature Abstract: Rousseau’s account of the social contract relies, both logically and rhetorically, on his reconstruction of the so-called “state of nature”, a supposed pre-contractual condition of human life. There is…
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SPEP 2020 video and paper: Remembering and Thinking with Michel Serres
This September I had the privilege of taking part in a panel at SPEP 2020 (postponed until 2021) alongside Marjolein Oele and Brian Treanor. “Remembering and Thinking with Michel Serres” ranged over issues related to Serres’s contemporaneity, his natural contract idea, and the distinctiveness of his thought. Here is a recording of Brian’s paper and…
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Video: Advice on securing a large academic grant
I have been asked a few times in recent months what advice I would give to colleagues applying for competitive grants and fellowships, such as the Australian Research Council Discovery Project or Future Fellowship schemes. While my expertise is limited to my own experience and my one-time success in the Future Fellowship scheme, I’m more…
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TALK Rewriting the Social Contract – the Role of Christian Social Institutions
This guest lecture was delivered at Parliament House, Canberra, on 22 February 2021, at the invitation of the Church Community Restoration Project, an alliance of Christian community organisations committed to partnering government, individuals and communities as they face the challenges of a COVID-19 recovery in Australia. The lecture draws on research from the Australian Research…
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YouTube videos of ‘Ends of Autonomy’ colloquium papers: surveillance, neoliberalism, climate
This week my Warwick colleague Prof Oliver Davis and I co-hosted the second ‘Ends of Autonomy’ colloquium, eqploring how freedom is changing today in the light of new technologies, climate change and neoliberalism. Where presenters gave their consent, sessions were recorded and uploaded to the Ends of Autonomy Colloquia YouTube channel. Below are the videos…