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Difficult atheism : post-theological thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux
Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.
Book
Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres
What do we talk about when we talk about French and Francophone Studies? If we could approach French Studies as a Martian anthropologist seeking to understand its rationale but ignorant of its history, what might we conclude? As it happens, such disciplinary questions engage one of the major concerns at the heart of French philosophy over recent decades: the problem of the same and the other. Departing from the orthodox accounts of sameness and otherness, the work of polymath and academicien Michel Serres offers us a new approach to understanding the relation between identity and alterity, an approach he explores in terms of the motif of chirality. Serres not only delivers a radical challenge to one of the most fundamental commonplaces of recent French thought, namely the opposition between sameness and alterity, but in so doing he also helps us to find new ways of understanding and articulating the nature and specificity of French and Francophone Studies today.
Journal Article
Difficult Atheism
Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.
eBook
Phenomenology or Deconstruction?
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy.
eBook
Why Michel Serres?
Serres’s eclectic, encyclopedic approach to knowledge, his refusal of disciplinary boundaries and fads, and his particular rigor as a thinker matched the convictions of the editors of SubStance and made him a natural ally and friend of the journal, someone whose presence is also visible in work published by the editors themselves. [...]had I been able to do it, something would still have been missing on the page, something that proved evident in another conference organized a year later (May 14, 1993) by Sydney Lévy, co-director with Michel Pierssens of SubStance, the title of which, What does Hermes know? Serres’ intonations, sculpted and colored by his beautiful accent from the southwest of France, were supported by his body effecting a sort of standing dance: it propelled itself forward on the tip of the toes to come back and down after the peak of intensity of the sentence had been reached. [...]you could also see it leap and stop in his body, constantly out of balance, akin to Paul Valéry’s pendulum oscillating between sound and sense.3 No doubt Michel Serres had perfectly assimilated the principles of ancient Greek rhetoric, which stated that, besides the art of convincing with general organization and configuration of discourse, there was the art of convincing through the person of the orator.
Journal Article
Not More of the Same
Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of difference. Drawing on both translated and as yet untranslated works, I argue that the Serresian ontology of inclination, along with his conceptual personae of the hermaphrodite and the parasite, informs ethical and political positions that offer a distinctive ethics and politics that present fresh insights about the relation between the singular and the universal, the contingency of market exchange, and the nature of violence.
Journal Article
REWRITING THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR: RANCIÈRIAN REFLECTIONS
For decades now, critics of the \"death of the author\" thesis have worked themselves up about a paradox that supposedly undermines Barthes's and foucault's treatment of the theme: these french theorists cannot banish the authorial voice from their own writing. Taking a lead from Jacques Rancière, this article tells a different story of the death of the author, one that makes better sense of this supposed case of double standards and that uses nietzsche's ideas on authorship to show that Barthes and foucault are doing something much more powerful and interesting than simply contradicting themselves.
Journal Article
Michel Serres' Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology
(Serres, “Exact and Human” 14) From the five volumes of his Hermès series (1968–1980) and through to The Natural Contract in 1990, Michel Serres has rooted the origins of human language firmly in the rhythms and calls of the natural world.1 To date, the Anglophone reception of this complex and varied oeuvre has been slender to the point of emaciation, but one area where he has received some small fraction of the attention he deserves is in his elaboration of a theory of semiotic meaning in dialogue with information theory and fluid dynamics.2 Since 2001, however, Serres has been expanding his account of biosemiotics3 with four key texts (2001, 2005, 2007, 2009) that move into the area of narratology, developing a new non-anthropocentric humanism in terms of what he calls the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Récit) of the universe. In the four books exploring the humanism of the Great Story, he expands this biosemiotic analysis to encompass a new econarratology, describing this expansion with an image from aeronautics: A four-stage rocket launches the birth of language, the emergence of the ego and the dawn of narrative which, in telling their story, forms and creates them but forgets their origin: first it bursts forth from heat towards white noise; from this brouhaha to the first signals; then from these to feeble melodies; finally from these to the first vowels… When I write my own stories and confessions, do I realize that, as a fractal fragment of the universe, I am imitating galaxies, the planet, masses of molecules, radioactive particles, the bellowing of a dear or the vain unfurling of a peacock’s plumage? (Récits 80) In other words, the idea that nature tells its own story is not an unwarranted metaphor; on the contrary, ‘storytelling’ understood as a human cultural practice is already a metonym of a much more widespread phenomenon. [...]Serres does not share Morton’s problem with windows.
Journal Article