I am an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in European Languages (French Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. At its broadest, my research seeks to make sense of how people make sense of the world, and how they interact with ideas and positions different from their own. In my first book Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009) I explored the complex relationship between two major philosophical tendencies in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. Difficult Atheism (2011) then examined how three contemporary thinkers—Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux—make sense of the worl…
I am an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in European Languages (French Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. At its broadest, my research seeks to make sense of how people make sense of the world, and how they interact with ideas and positions different from their own. In my first book Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009) I explored the complex relationship between two major philosophical tendencies in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. Difficult Atheism (2011) then examined how three contemporary thinkers—Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux—make sense of the world without the gods of metaphysics, poetry and religion, and how their three positions critique and refine each other. In French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour I shifted the focus from God to a humanity, arguing that very different contemporary thinkers each rely on a ‘host’ to make sense of the human, whether it be a capacity, substance or narrative. Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (2020) continues my investigation into different ways of making sense of the world by presenting the first systematic treatment in English of a key twentieth and twenty-first century philosopher whose genuinely cross-disciplinary work finds complex ‘North-West passages’ between the sciences, humanities and arts.
Current project: Rewriting the Social Contract (ARC Future Fellowship 2021-25)
For more information about the social contract project, please visit the Social Contract Research Network page: https://www.monash.edu/arts/languages-literatures-cultures-linguistics/social-contract-research-network
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