ABOUT ME

I was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954. I majored in philosophy at Sydney University, where I did 5 years of postgraduate work in epistemology and the philosophy of science and taught in the Department of General Philosophy during that time. I felt fairly isolated as I admired and was working on the thought of Paul Feyerabend, who nobody seemed to take seriously. As my department was dominated by continental philosophy (Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser, Foucault) I tried to synthesize my work on Feyerabend with my study of continental philosophers under the rubric of “pluralism”, but I felt that these authors still retained dogmatic monistic elements that Feyerabend had superseded. I then discovered the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard and taught myself French to be able to read their books. ANTI-OEDIPUS and RHIZOME in particular were a revelation to me. So I dropped everything and came to Paris in 1980 to attend their lectures, which were brilliant. After 7 years in Paris I moved South to the French Riviera (books are fine but I also need sun and warmth!) where I studied linguistics with Jean-Claude Souesme. I obtained the agrégation (option:  linguistics)  in 2001 and am now an English teacher (professeur agrégé) in a French senior high school. I am interested in recent French philosophy,principally: Bernard Stiegler,  Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Bruno Latour; but I also like Michel Onfray, Zizek, Graham Harman, Stanley Cavell, Hubert Dreyfus, William Connolly. I read modern SF writers like Alastair Reynolds, Gene Wolfe, Peter Hamilton, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, Paolo Bacigalupi – but I also like many less recent writers too. My favorite SF writers are Neal Stephenson and China Miéville, and my two favorite philosophers are Paul Feyerabend and Gilles Deleuze.