Welcome to More Christ. We seek to bring some of the world’s most interesting and insightful guests to discuss life’s central and abiding questions. In this ninety fourth episode in a series of discussions, I’m joined by Dr Christopher Watkin. Chris is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. At its broadest, his 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 his first book Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009) he 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 he 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. His later book, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought continues his 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. His latest book, Biblical Critical Theory, is the focus of our discussion and builds upon his previous endeavours in fascinating ways.
