Dr 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 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 Based on detailed analysis of Derrida's work, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, the book sheds new light on the role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida’s responses to key questions, such as the psyche’s relationship to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 Intermedially in Recent French Thought, which takes a comparative media studies approach to understanding how public intellectuals 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. Part of this project 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', will appear in a special issue of Paragraph on Cassin's work that I have co-edited with Penelope Deutscher, which will be published in early 2025. 

Since 2021, I have been co-editor, with Arnaud Pelletier, of the Revue internationale de philosophie. 

I welcome enquiries from potential Phd students in all areas of modern and contemporary French thought and culture. I am currently supervising three doctoral students: 

• 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'