Bøker av Christopher (Senior Lecturer in French Studies Watkin

Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Catherine Malabou, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour: this new generation of French philosophers is laying fresh claim to the human. Across a number of new strains of philosophy, they are rethinking humanity's relationships: 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. Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils of these new philosophies. And he shows just how high the stakes are for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable society.

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 university, this book gathers together the cultural history of the West into one concise volume

Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of 'being' and 'presence' that exposes significant blindspots inherent 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 possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through detailed studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricur and Nancy, he shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida's critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological. This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future 'deconstructive phenomenology'.