Books by Christopher Watkin
Contemporary French philosophy is laying fresh claim to the human. Through a series of independen... more Contemporary French philosophy is laying fresh claim to the human. Through a series of independent, simultaneous initiatives, arising in the writing of diverse current French thinkers, the figured of the human is being transformed and reworked.
Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our own brains. This comparative assessment makes visible for the first time one of the most important trends in French thought today.
http://www.amazon.com/French-Philosophy-Today-Figures-Meillassoux/dp/1474414737
Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death ... more 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.
Bridging the gap between what is taught in schools and the cultural knowledge required at univers... more Bridging the gap between what is taught in schools and the cultural knowledge required at university, this book gathers together the cultural history of the West into one concise volume, Nearly four thousand years of Western history come together in one unfolding story in which philosophy, literature and art all reflect and shape the twists and turns that have built today's world, weaving its way from the West's Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romanticism to the postmodernism of the twenty-first century. With the help of diagrams, illustrations and timelines, terms like 'gothic' and 'baroque', 'idealism' and 'the death of God' are explained and set in context, along with important names from Aristotle, Abraham and Charlemagne to Michelangelo, Blake and Derrida.
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? contains new readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and... more Phenomenology or Deconstruction? contains new readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes generates a new understanding of "being" and "presence" that exposes significant blindspots in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the future of phenomenology along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through careful studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Nancy, Watkin shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserl or Heidegger takes into account Derrida's critique of ontology while maintaining a commitment to the ontological. This new reading fundamentally recasts the relation between deconstruction and phenomenology and marks the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for future "deconstructive phenomenology."
Articles and book chapters by Christopher Watkin
SubStance, 2020
Reflections on the unique and timely philosophy of Michel Serres.
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 2020
An interview exploring the complexity of contemporary French philosophical atheism, in the light ... more An interview exploring the complexity of contemporary French philosophical atheism, in the light of Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux (Edinburgh UP, 2011).
Reconstructing Identity: A Transdisciplinary Approach, 2017
The growing field of neuro-philosophy raises important questions about how we understand the pers... more The growing field of neuro-philosophy raises important questions about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time and how we use the language of personhood and humanity: If my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? Do I acquire a different self? Furthermore, if I do, who or what is the " I " who can acquire such different selves, different identities or different personalities over time? In a number of recent engagements with neuroscientific thought 1 the French philosopher Catherine Malabou offers a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity which privileges her notion of " plasticity " 2 and seeks to provide a consistent response to the question of identity over time. Though plasticity is a common term in neuroscientific discourse, Malabou nevertheless insists on what she calls a " destructive plasticity " or a " plasticity of transition " which, she claims, is absent from the customary use of the term, and it is through this destructive plasticity that she seeks to provide an understanding of identity over time able to account for brain trauma and changes in personality. In this chapter I will examine Malabou's notion of destructive plasticity and its usefulness for a materialist account of identity over time, before suggesting that Malabou's position reinvigorates an account of identity stretching back nearly two thousand years in the Western tradition.
Michel Serres’s relation to ecocriticism is complex. On the one hand he is a pioneer in the area,... more Michel Serres’s relation to ecocriticism is complex. On the one hand he is a pioneer in the area, anticipating the current fashion for ecological thought by over a decade. On the other hand, however, ‘ecology’ and, a fortiori, ‘eco-criticism’, are singularly infelicitous terms to describe Serres’s thinking if they are taken to indicate that attention should be paid to particular ‘environmental’ concerns. Such local, circumscribed ideas as ‘ecology’ or ‘eco-philosophy’ are, for Serres, in fact one of the causes of our ecological crisis, and as far as he is concerned no progress can be made while such narrow concerns govern our thinking. This chapter intervenes in the ongoing discussion about the relation of Serres to ecology by drawing on some of Serres’s more recent texts on pollution and dwelling, and this fresh material leads us both to affirm and challenge the existing treatments of Serres and ecology. We affirm the insistence on the inextricability in Serres’s approach of two senses of ecology: a broader meaning which refers to the interconnectedness and inextricability of all entities (both natural and cultural, material and ideal) and a narrower sense which evokes classically ‘environmental’ concerns. However, Serres’s recent work leads us to challenge some of the vectors and assumptions of the debate by radicalising the continuity between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ phenomena, questioning some of the commonplaces that structure almost all ecological thinking, and arguing that the entire paradigm of ecology as ‘conservation’ and ‘protection’ is bankrupt and self-undermining. After outlining the shape of Serres’s ‘general ecology’ and its opposition to ecology as conservation, this chapter asks what sorts of practises and values a Serresian general ecology can engender when it considers birdsong, advertising, industrial pollution and money to be manifestations of the same drive for appropriation through pollution. A response is given to this question in terms of three key Serresian motifs: the world as fetish, parasitic symbiosis, and global cosmocracy.
‘We are facing a very new demand in terms of art’ remarks Nancy in Allitérations, ‘the demand tha... more ‘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 and difference. How can art satisfy both of these two demands: that it issue from the collective or the common and that it also satisfy the requirement for isolation and secrecy? The question becomes broader and more pressing with Nancy’s conclusion: ‘We have here an aspect of our general difficulty with equality and democracy’.
Taking Nancy’s remark as a provocation, this chapter probes how dance in particular, and visual culture more broadly, not only perform or reflect but also develop and advance Nancy’s thinking and writing on equality. Throughout Allitérations, Nancy is careful not to reduce thought to dance or movement to description, nor simply to translate between the two, but to give each its singular and untranslatable sense. Though dance is visual, Nancy repeatedly distances it from the image, which he associates with a mimetic paradigm, in order to develop an understanding of dance as a visual methexis that is neither object nor image.
The performance recorded in Allitérations seeks to work at the limit between movement and text, with exscription and bodily sense sitting at the threshold of thought and dance, but Nancy’s own movements as recorded in Allitérations – both physical and philosophical – not only resist being reduced to signifying thought but also place themselves at the foremost limit of his thinking of equality as it is elaborated in Être singulier pluriel and elsewhere. This, then, is the pattern for our investigation of equality: how can the visual methexis of dance and art more broadly ‘speak’ and ‘think’ about equality without being immediately reduced to thought, and beyond the customary limits of thought? How can thought and dance together elaborate and, in so doing, move beyond the terms of an equality that marries the demand for the ‘by everyone’ with the requirement of secret individuality?
In four key but as yet untranslated texts from 2001-2009, Michel Serres builds on his earlier bio... more 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 Récit) of our universe. Serres’ econarratology throws down a challenge to develop new ways of thinking the relation between nature and culture and between the human and the non-human. It also allows us to extend the powerful tool of narrative identity beyond its anthropocentric straitjacket into the area of ecology, but this requires a supplement from Paul Ricœur’s work on narrative to save it from a problematic internal inconsistency.
For decades now, critics of the “death of the author” thesis have worked themselves up about a pa... more 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.
Draft of a chapter written for _Nancy and the Political_ (Edinburgh UP, 2015).
Both Nancy and Ba... more Draft of a chapter written for _Nancy and the Political_ (Edinburgh UP, 2015).
Both Nancy and Badiou probe the contemporary power of the political, seeking to refashion communism as, respectively, an ontology that issues an imperative and an as yet unrealized hypothesis to be seized in the present. In both accounts of politics, the limit of the human and the animal plays a crucial yet hidden role. Badiou’s articulation of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’ poses troubling problems for the relation between the limits of the human and the limits of the political, whereas in the second volume his Deconstruction of Christianity Nancy reworks his notion of the human animal as a ‘being of sense’ in a way that poses awkward questions for his ontology of those who have nothing in common. For both Nancy and Badiou—but in opposite ways—the question of the limits and scope of the political is inextricably intertwined with the nature of the human/animal distinction.
My intention for this short paper is that it be a collaborative venture. I will briefly stake out... more My intention for this short paper is that it be a collaborative venture. I will briefly stake out a position on sense and ethics in relation to Jean-Luc Nancy, and then pose a set of questions to which I do not have the answer, in the hope that I can generate the beginnings of a discussion. The position I want to stake out is this: that Nancean sense-making brings with it an ineluctable ethical dimension. And the question I want to pose to you is: what implications might this have for an artist, sculptor, or filmmaker who is seeking to take Nancy’s thinking into account?
Under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the theme of absolute alterity still ... more Under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the theme of absolute alterity still dominates the thinking of the ethical in Continental philosophy. This article examines an alternative ethical d´emarche, Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘singular plurality’, which refuses to start with the opposition of same and other, arguing instead for a primacy of relation, the ‘in-common’ and the ‘with’. The article first distinguishes Nancy’s ‘singular plural’ from other recent attempts to disengage ethical thinking from the Levinasian framework, before showing how Nancy proceeds otherwise than in terms of sameness
and alterity while still maintaining an ethical impetus. Foregrounding what is politically and philosophically at stake in the difference between Nancy and the Levinasian/Derridean model, the article concludes by considering how Nancy can be defended against critics who mistakenly argue that he discounts alterity.
Review article on _La Déclosion_, volume 1 of Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity.
Paul Ricœur repeatedly maintained that his philosophical reflection was autonomous from theologi... more Paul Ricœur repeatedly maintained that his philosophical reflection was autonomous from theological influence. Those who seek to contest this view have hitherto sought to deny the autonomy of philosophy from theology, but this article makes a more radical argument: not that philosophy is not autonomous, but that autonomy is not philosophical. According to Ricœur’s own understanding of the structure of philosophical systems, the very notion of autonomy to which philosophy makes claim can only be thought as a theological notion. The argument has two parts. First, philosophy is theological in its own structure, and secondly, the relation between philosophy and theology can only be thought theologically.
The question of whether logic itself is susceptible of proof, and of what form a proof of logic w... more The question of whether logic itself is susceptible of proof, and of what form a proof of logic would take, has occupied philosophical minds from Plato to our own day. Both Plato and Aristotle make mention of a principle of dialectic that is anhypothetical, not itself relying on hypotheses or on the dialectic it would seek to found. The challenge of demonstrating an anhypothetical principle of logic is taken up by the contemporary French thinker Quentin Meillassoux who, rejecting Plato and building on Aristotle, offers an indirect proof of his assertion that ‘only contingency is necessary’. In this paper I read Meillassoux through Jean-Luc Nancy’s meditations on love in order to argue that, bold as Meillassoux’s proposal is, he can in fact be shown to prove quite the opposite of what he intends, though more important than this failure is what it reveals of the rich and productive interplay between love and logic hinted at in the term ‘philosophy’ itself. This is not a paper arguing for love against logic, or even love at the limits of logic, but for the recognition of a love that is inextricable from logic and yet can never straightforwardly become its object.
French Studies, 2013
Abstract: Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière has rightly identified equality both a... more Abstract: Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière has rightly identified equality both as a central theme in their own thinking and as the key notion in contemporary radical political thought more broadly, but a focus on the differences between their respective accounts of equality has failed to clarify a major problem that they share. The problem is that human equality is said to rest on a particular human capacity, leaving Badiou's axiomatic equality and Rancière's assumed equality vulnerable to the charge of having a blind spot for some of society's most vulnerable. This article introduces an alternative understanding of equality drawn from the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, an equality that does not rely on a human capacity to guarantee or verify it but rests on Nancy's notion of sense. The article explores the advantages of Nancy's account of equality in relation to sense over and against an alternative reading that focuses on Nancy's evocation of the suffering human body, before addressing, in conclusion, the problems with which Nancy's idea of equality will have to grapple, and why, despite these problems, it is still preferable to the Badiouian and Rancièrian approaches.
Papers by Christopher Watkin
You write that, "[i]t might at rst blush appear that the opening of the twenty-rst century has se... more You write that, "[i]t might at rst blush appear that the opening of the twenty-rst century has seen one more 'turn to religion.'" (p.12) This is then problematized, in Badiou's case, as a turn away from politics or, in Nancy, as merely the contortions of the exhaustion of religion. What are your thoughts on the possibilities and dangers afforded by the (re)turn to religion? Christopher Watkin: To begin with, I don't think that the notions of a "turn" or a "return" to religion do justice to the complexity of what has happened in philosophy over recent decades, or to what we can see in society more broadly. The idea of such a turn is beset with the same reductionism as the classic secularization thesis. Part of
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Books by Christopher Watkin
Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our own brains. This comparative assessment makes visible for the first time one of the most important trends in French thought today.
http://www.amazon.com/French-Philosophy-Today-Figures-Meillassoux/dp/1474414737
Articles and book chapters by Christopher Watkin
Taking Nancy’s remark as a provocation, this chapter probes how dance in particular, and visual culture more broadly, not only perform or reflect but also develop and advance Nancy’s thinking and writing on equality. Throughout Allitérations, Nancy is careful not to reduce thought to dance or movement to description, nor simply to translate between the two, but to give each its singular and untranslatable sense. Though dance is visual, Nancy repeatedly distances it from the image, which he associates with a mimetic paradigm, in order to develop an understanding of dance as a visual methexis that is neither object nor image.
The performance recorded in Allitérations seeks to work at the limit between movement and text, with exscription and bodily sense sitting at the threshold of thought and dance, but Nancy’s own movements as recorded in Allitérations – both physical and philosophical – not only resist being reduced to signifying thought but also place themselves at the foremost limit of his thinking of equality as it is elaborated in Être singulier pluriel and elsewhere. This, then, is the pattern for our investigation of equality: how can the visual methexis of dance and art more broadly ‘speak’ and ‘think’ about equality without being immediately reduced to thought, and beyond the customary limits of thought? How can thought and dance together elaborate and, in so doing, move beyond the terms of an equality that marries the demand for the ‘by everyone’ with the requirement of secret individuality?
Both Nancy and Badiou probe the contemporary power of the political, seeking to refashion communism as, respectively, an ontology that issues an imperative and an as yet unrealized hypothesis to be seized in the present. In both accounts of politics, the limit of the human and the animal plays a crucial yet hidden role. Badiou’s articulation of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’ poses troubling problems for the relation between the limits of the human and the limits of the political, whereas in the second volume his Deconstruction of Christianity Nancy reworks his notion of the human animal as a ‘being of sense’ in a way that poses awkward questions for his ontology of those who have nothing in common. For both Nancy and Badiou—but in opposite ways—the question of the limits and scope of the political is inextricably intertwined with the nature of the human/animal distinction.
and alterity while still maintaining an ethical impetus. Foregrounding what is politically and philosophically at stake in the difference between Nancy and the Levinasian/Derridean model, the article concludes by considering how Nancy can be defended against critics who mistakenly argue that he discounts alterity.
Papers by Christopher Watkin
Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our own brains. This comparative assessment makes visible for the first time one of the most important trends in French thought today.
http://www.amazon.com/French-Philosophy-Today-Figures-Meillassoux/dp/1474414737
Taking Nancy’s remark as a provocation, this chapter probes how dance in particular, and visual culture more broadly, not only perform or reflect but also develop and advance Nancy’s thinking and writing on equality. Throughout Allitérations, Nancy is careful not to reduce thought to dance or movement to description, nor simply to translate between the two, but to give each its singular and untranslatable sense. Though dance is visual, Nancy repeatedly distances it from the image, which he associates with a mimetic paradigm, in order to develop an understanding of dance as a visual methexis that is neither object nor image.
The performance recorded in Allitérations seeks to work at the limit between movement and text, with exscription and bodily sense sitting at the threshold of thought and dance, but Nancy’s own movements as recorded in Allitérations – both physical and philosophical – not only resist being reduced to signifying thought but also place themselves at the foremost limit of his thinking of equality as it is elaborated in Être singulier pluriel and elsewhere. This, then, is the pattern for our investigation of equality: how can the visual methexis of dance and art more broadly ‘speak’ and ‘think’ about equality without being immediately reduced to thought, and beyond the customary limits of thought? How can thought and dance together elaborate and, in so doing, move beyond the terms of an equality that marries the demand for the ‘by everyone’ with the requirement of secret individuality?
Both Nancy and Badiou probe the contemporary power of the political, seeking to refashion communism as, respectively, an ontology that issues an imperative and an as yet unrealized hypothesis to be seized in the present. In both accounts of politics, the limit of the human and the animal plays a crucial yet hidden role. Badiou’s articulation of the ‘human animal’ and the ‘immortal’ poses troubling problems for the relation between the limits of the human and the limits of the political, whereas in the second volume his Deconstruction of Christianity Nancy reworks his notion of the human animal as a ‘being of sense’ in a way that poses awkward questions for his ontology of those who have nothing in common. For both Nancy and Badiou—but in opposite ways—the question of the limits and scope of the political is inextricably intertwined with the nature of the human/animal distinction.
and alterity while still maintaining an ethical impetus. Foregrounding what is politically and philosophically at stake in the difference between Nancy and the Levinasian/Derridean model, the article concludes by considering how Nancy can be defended against critics who mistakenly argue that he discounts alterity.
However, the reader seeking to come to terms with the book faces a three-fold problem. To begin with, Serres dialogues with a forbidding array of intertexts ranging from ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy through medieval and early modern French to more recent texts. Without a knowledge of key passages from these intertexts it is simply impossible to appreciate Serres’s argument, an argument which is, itself, quite intentionally parasitic on the texts with which it interacts.
The second problem for the reader is that, although both the original French and subsequent English translation of Le Parasite contain a list of intertexts as an appendix bearing the title “Histoires, animaux” (“Stories, animals”), the list is incomplete. Thirdly, and to compound the problem, Serres does not systematically mention the particular text with which he is interacting at any given point, nor indeed that he is interacting with a particular text at all. It is left to the reader to pick up the allusions and reactions for herself. The English translation provides footnotes to some but not all of these references, but the reader is nevertheless left to track down the intertexts and read the relevant passages. This leaves a great deal of work to do in order to access and appreciate the brilliant and important moves that Serres is making in Le Parasite.
The current document has been prepared to save some – perhaps most – of that extra effort. The reader will find herein not only a comprehensive list of Serres’s intertexts but also both French and English versions of the key passages with which he interacts. Each passage given below is accompanied by references to the pages of the French (Grasset, 1980) and English (Minnesota Press, 2007) editions of Le Parasite where Serres alludes to it or mentions it directly.
After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres's prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the "figures" that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.