Date/Time
Date(s) - March 18, 2027
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Categories No Categories
This talk argues that early modern state-of-nature narratives are not best read as accounts of human origins, but as truth-making devices. Using Rousseau and drawing on Michel Foucault, it shows how they work through three moves: flattening social complexity into a universal baseline, partitioning the world into sharp oppositions such as natural/artificial and free/corrupted, and normalising that baseline as a standard for judging society. This helps explain both their power and their weakness: they seem to offer a standpoint outside society, yet often smuggle social ideals back in under the name of nature. The talk closes by contrasting this approach with the biblical appeal to a measure of the good outside the created order, which avoids both nostalgic appeals to nature and the illusion of a neutral standpoint beyond history.
Biography: Christopher Watkin is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Monash University, and General Editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies. He is the author of The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity: Tracing the Roots of Colonialism, Secularity, and Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Biblical Critical Theory (Zondervan Academic, 2022), and Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). His research explores intellectual history and theory, with particular interests in modernity, political thought, and the conceptual vocabularies through which societies make sense of themselves.
https://ubcgcu.org/2026/06/14/new-2026-27-ubc-gfcf-lecture-series/