Some background. After completing a master’s degree in International Law in Paris, I moved to London. After working as a 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 an activity essentially detached from both the Enlightenment metaphysical referent (“art”) and from the artificial constraints of art discourses. My last monograph on this topic, Curating as Ethics (Minnesota, 2019) 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 with a particular focus on questions of time. This led me to complete a first monograph, On Futurity (Palgrave, 2007), which comprises a series of essays on the idea of the future 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, 2013). My latest monograph addressing issues in temporality, On Pyrrho and Time (Palgrave, 2024) puts forward a new approach to time following 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 (here, Quentin Meillassoux), for which it is radically chaotic. The aim of this book is, once more, to challenge the complacency of thinking time as what abides to human rationality.
Parallel to these projects in philosophies of time, I also developed a particular interest in ethics. Following a long stay in central East Africa, I wrote 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. I’m always eager to learn more from African philosophers, especially Rwandan thinkers. My focus on questions of ethics changed over time. Instead of addressing complex post-war ethical issues, I directed my attention to one’s own ethics: can one really improve oneself? This led to a new monograph on emending one’s mind, inspired by the work of the greatest thinker of all times: Spinoza. Instead of providing yet another explanation for Spinoza’s complex arguments, this book, Spinoza: Journal of an Emendation (Brill, 2026), which took 12 years to complete, attempts to carefully follow his step-by-step guide to improve body and mind. I am currently writing a companion piece to this book, a new monograph on piety and politics.
I’m an unruly thinker and writer. 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 often tends to prevail 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 ideas and arguments that are outside of my comfort zone. 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.
Thanks for reading. I hope this writing project and website are of interest. Take care.