Video & Audio
Lectures, interviews, panel discussions, and recorded appearances.
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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
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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…