After completing a master’s degree in International Law in Paris, I moved to London. After working as a barman for Break for the Border and barista for the Monmouth Coffee Co., I found myself, with no previous experience or training, curating exhibitions of contemporary art. In 1992, I co-founded with Peter Cross Rear Window, an independent arts trust that staged a series of exhibitions and conferences in temporary sites across London. I stopped curating exhibitions by the end of the millennium, embarked on a PhD and started working in academia, co-creating the Curatorial / Knowledge PhD Programme (2006-2019), and editing a new book on this topic, The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (Bloomsbury, 2013). My interest in curating has evolved over time preferring to think of it now as essentially detached, not only from that Enlightenment metaphysical referent (“art”), but also from the artificial constraints of art discourses. My last monograph on this topic, Curating as Ethics was published by Minnesota University Press in 2019. This new book comprises a series of reflections on the ethical promise of curating. It attempts to circumnavigate the usual tropes put forward by exhibition historians to demonstrate that curating can constitute an ethics.
Over the years, I developed a strong interest in philosophy. This led me to complete a first monograph, On Futurity / Malabou, Nancy & Derrida (Palgrave, 2007), which comprises a series of essays on the notion of futurity in contemporary continental philosophy. Fine tuning this interest in philosophy, I then wrote a short monograph on the relationship between masculinity and time, The End of Man (Punctum Books, 2013). I also developed a particular interest in African philosophy, especially the work of modern and contemporary Rwandan thinkers. This interest led me to write After “Rwanda” (Rodopi, 2013), which focuses on the idea of peace after the Rwandan Genocide and, much later, to create a Research in African Philosophy Network with John Drabinski, Grant Farred and Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, amongst others.
My latest monograph, On Pyrrho and Time, was published in October 2024 by Palgrave Macmillan. In this book, I put forward a new approach to time on the basis of a thesis of total instability. Basing myself on a couple of fragments, one by Pyrrho of Ellis—a fragment often referred to as the Ou Mallon—and one by Aenesidemus of Knossos, I challenge the idea that time is either that of the physicist, for which it is always calculable or that of the philosopher (namely Quentin Meillassoux), for which it is radically chaotic. The aim of this new book is, once more, to challenge the complacency of thinking time as what abides to human rationality.
Finally, but most importantly, I’ve just finished writing a new monograph on emending one’s mind. It is inspired by the work of the greatest thinker of all times: Spinoza. Instead of providing yet another explanation for Spinoza’s many Definitions, Axioms, Propositions, Demonstrations, Corollaries, and Scholia, this new book, which has taken me so far 10 years to complete, attempts to carefully follow the seventeenth century philosopher’s step-by-step guide to improve body and mind through reason and scientific intuition.
My writing has often been described as “idiosyncratic” or as “defying easy categorization.” I tend to write in a style that isn’t strictly speaking “academic,” preferring to put forward a personal experience instead of a cold and detached analysis. The “I” thus tends to dominate over the “it.” Having said this, this personal experience remains nonetheless scholarly in as much as I take philosophy to be a scientific endeavour that requires quasi-mathematical rigour.
My texts either responds to specific commissions or follows my own intellectual trajectory. The former tends to take the shape of essays and comes across in the vast diversity of authors studied. This diversity is simply a curiosity to try and think the world anew by exploring unfamiliar authors, ideas, and arguments. The latter tends to take the shape of books and focuses on specific authors who are explored in greater depths: Derrida, Levinas, Nancy, Kagame, Heidegger, Spinoza.
Overall, besides safeguarding myself from madness, I always write, for good or bad, to make sense of time: its advent, staging, gender, neglect, use, abuse, and its articulation in the field of ethics.