Paul Earlie

My principal area of research is modern and contemporary French thought, with a focus on its transmission through a variety of media and rhetorical modes. I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, before completing my DPhil in French at the University of Oxford, on the role of psychoanalysis in the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. I spent a year of my doctoral research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and two years as a Laming Junior Fellow at the Queen's College, Oxford. I also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Belgium at the Université libre de Bruxelles, which sparked my interest in classical rhetoric and its modern reverberations. I have published a book-length study of Derrida's career-long engagement with psychoanalysis: Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis (OUP, 2021). Based on detailed analysis of Derrida's work, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, the book sheds new light on the role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida’s responses to key questions, such as the psyche’s relationship to technology, or the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse. It argues that Derrida’s writings on psychoanalysis can provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. For a round-table discussion of the book's argument and conclusions, see the colloquium, 'Psychoanalysis after Theory: Art, Culture, Criticism' (7 May 2021), held in partnership with the Freud Museum London (online recording available here). I am currently working on a second monograph project, Thinking through Media in Recent French Thought, which takes a comparative media studies approach to understanding how writers and philosophers in France have engaged in creative and complex ways with the mass media, from radio to television, film and social media. My aim is to challenge the view that the latter are intrinsically anti-intellectual modes that threaten democracy and culture and instead to think about the ways in which popular media forms can also be sites of cognitive contestation, critique, and democratic renewal. An article, 'Event Television: Derrida's Small Screen', has recently been published in Postmodern Culture. Part of this project also involves co-curating a student-led online exhibition on how public intellectuals in France have used the mass media to question orthodox forms of thinking: intellectualsandthemedia.org. A second project builds on my interests in the philosophical reception of classical rhetoric, on which I have already published several articles. The most recent of these articles, 'How Not to Win: Cassin and Badiou', appeared in a special issue of Paragraph on Cassin's work that I co-edited with Penelope Deutscher; it was published in early 2025. Since 2021, I have been co-editor, with Arnaud Pelletier, of the Revue internationale de philosophie. I am a member of the executive board of the Institute for Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition. I always welcome enquiries from potential MPhil and Phd students in any area of modern and contemporary French thought and culture. I am currently supervising four postgraduate research students on the following topics: - Adrian Varaschin Mazzarolo, 'The Unmotherly Tongue: Reading the Psyche in Adopted-Language Literature' - Junzhe Zhou, ‘Founding the “The Negative Community”: Literature and the Loss of the Subject in Nancy, Bataille and Blanchot’ - Asal Farhadicheshmehmorvari, 'Aesthetics and Philosophical Analysis in Art: Collaborative Dynamics in Edgar Degas' Ballerina(s) Paintings' - Daud Parvaiz, 'Media History in the Work of Jacques Derrida'

18/09/2025 Roland Barthes Paul Earlie French Studies Article Accepted/In press 04/09/2025 Event Television Paul Earlie Postmodern Culture Article Published 18/03/2025 How Not to Win Paul Earlie Paragraph Article Published 01/01/2026 Barthes Gets Involved: How (Not) to Perform Racine Paul Earlie, et al. Other contribution Published 01/01/2025 Beautiful Images: Thinking through Media with Simone de Beauvoir Paul Earlie Understanding Modernism, Understanding Beauvoir Chapter in a book Accepted/In press 04/09/2025 Event Television Paul Earlie Postmodern Culture Article Published 18/03/2025 How Not to Win Paul Earlie Paragraph Article Published 18/03/2025 Introduction Penelope Deutscher, Paul Earlie Paragraph Article Published