Ordinary Epic

My doctoral research has grown and developed over the years, as one might expect, beginning with a study of Michel Henry’s phenomenology of the body that eventually turned into a much broader project concerning the relationship between literature and the body. The notion of the ‘ordinary epic’ is the fruit of this development and seeks to rethink both the ordinary and epic narrative form on the basis of the novel reconfiguration of the relationship between literature and the body found in the works of Henry and François Laruelle. Opposite the imperialism and monologism of the classical epic form, the research poses a democratic epic that is rooted in the corporeal experience, the invention or inventive powers of the ordinary, and the middle voice.

Kierkegaard in France

Along with Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, I coordinated a seminar series on the reception of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought in France during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We fortunate enough to have so many engaging and interesting discussions about this issue from Emmanuel Falque, Joshua Furnal, Mélissa Fox-Muraton, Kate Kirkpatrick, Amber Bowen, Pierre Alban Gutkin-Guinfolleau, Iben Damgaard, Katerina Koči, Henry Somers-Hall, Andrea Bellantone, Jeff Hanson, Olivier Salazer-Ferrer, and Ramona Fotiade

More information can be found here: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/29230/

Recordings from the series will be posted later this year.

There are plans underway to publish the proceedings of these seminars. More information to follow.

Meditations on the Ordinary Body

I am patiently putting together a series of reflections on the ‘ordinary body’ as part of a short book-project that began life as a reflection on Claude Bruaire’s statement that every iteration of the real implies a relation to the body, whether explicitly formulated or not. The question that guides this project: what kind of body and relation is implied by  contemporary formulations of the real and realism(s)? The book develops a response to this question through a series of bodies found in the works of Michel Henry, François Laruelle, Emmanuel Falque, Emmanuel Levinas, Katarina Kolozova.

The ordinary becomes the site for thinking this serialisation of the body and the relation between the body and the real in an inventive and subversive way.

A first gesture towards what this might mean can be found here:

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/para.2021.0367