Professor James Williams

Contact Details

E-Mail: j.r.williams@dundee.ac.uk
Telephone: (01382) 384208
Room Location: 4.2, Tower Extension

Research Interests

Professor James Williams's interests are in contemporary French philosophy (Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Postmodernism and Poststructuralism). He supervises PhD students across a wide range of topics in these areas and welcomes further researchers in these areas or in his current research. Past PhDs he has supervised include work on Deleuze and Badiou, Derrida and Hegel, Deleuze and post-colonialism, Deleuze and Leibniz, Deleuze and Spinoza, and Deleuze and Benjamin. Current PhD projects include research on Deleuze and the concept of ground, Deleuze and the Presocratics, Art and the archive, Deleuze and language, film and the philosophy of listening, and Deleuze, Badiou and Sartre. He also has interests in aesthetics, political philosophy, metaphysics and the history of philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche and Whitehead).

Professor Williams is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council peer review panel. His most recent research is on the metaphysics of time and a book on Deleuze and time for Edinburgh University Press due to come out in March 2011 (Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: a Critical Introduction and Guide). He is also working on the concept of time in related thinkers, such as Whitehead and Bergson. Broadly, the aim is to show how Deleuze and others offer metaphysical positions interacting in interesting ways with contemporary problems in scientific and philosophical work on time, but with a more profound access to the existential and creative roles of time.

From 2008 to 2010, he was a co-investigator for the Australian Research Council, Discovery Project, Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Arguments for the Methods and Value of Philosophy' run by Dr. Jack Reynolds, La Trobe University, Melbourne, an ARC Discovery Project. The project has led to a book co-edited with Jack Reynolds, James Chase and Ed Mares: Postanalytic and Metacontinental (London: Continuum, 2010).

His current undergraduate teaching includes Level 1 Plato and Nietzsche lectures and Honours modules on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and on Marx's Capital. These modules are taught through close readings and individual student projects where the works of Nietzsche or Marx are set creatively and critically alongside a topic selected by each student (past projects include Nietzsche and the Russian revolution, Nietzsche and Woolf, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Nietzsche and Buddhism, Nietzsche and The Wire, Nietzsche and free will, Nietzsche and the burlesque, Nietzsche and Plato, and Nietzsche and contemporary art practice).

Publications

Books

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
Postanalytic and Metacontinental ed. with Reynolds and Chase (London: Continuum, 2010)
Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze (Clinamen, 2005) see also: http://deleuze.tausendplateaus.de/?p=11
The Lyotard Reader and Guide, with Keith Crome (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
Understanding Poststructuralism (Acumen, 2005)
Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburth: Edinburgh University Press, 2003)
Lyotard and the Political (Routledge, 2000)
Lyotard (Polity, 1998)

Selected Chapters

'Reason and anti-reason in Whitehead, Henry and Deleuze', in The Grandeur of Reason: Reason, Tradition and Universalism, ed. by Cunningham and Candler (London: SCM Press, 2010) pp. 299-315.
'Jean-François Lyotard', in History of Continental Philosophy, Volume 6, ed. by Alan Schrift (London: Acumen, 2010) pp. 133-51.
‘On the problem of the selection of events for Deleuze and Davidson’, in Postanalytic and Metacontinental, ed. by Reynolds, Chase, Williams and Mares (London: Continuum, 2010).
‘Deleuze and structure: how far can you bend it?’, in Deleuzian Events: Writing/History, ed. by Berressem and Haferkampf (Berlin: Lit, 2009).
‘Ageing, perpetual perishing and the event as pure novelty: Péguy, Whitehead and Deleuze on time and history’, in Deleuze and History, ed. by Colebrook and Bell (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) pp. 142-160.
‘A.N. Whitehead’, in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, ed. by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) pp. 282-300.
‘Deleuze and Whitehead: the concept of reciprocal determination’, in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, ed. by Keith Robinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp. 89-105.
‘Le figural et la vérité’, in Les transformateurs Lyotard, ed. by Enaudeau, Nordmann, Salanskis et Worms (Paris: Sens et Tonka, Collège international de philosophie, 2008), pp. 27-42.
‘Gilles Deleuze’, in Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Volume 2, ed. by Weber and Desmond (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), pp. 645-8.
‘On the power and fragility of belief: Updike, Deleuze and Lyotard’, in Belief and Metaphysics, ed. by Candler and Cunningham (London: SCP Press, 2007), pp. 183-203.
‘Series uncoupled’ in Digital VD (Edinburgh: The Hungry Dog Press, 2007), pp. 1-16
‘Afterword: on mobled power’, in Gender after Lyotard, ed. by Grebowicz (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 211-21.
‘Lyotard’, in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (Oxford: Berg, 2007) pp 129-32
‘Gilles Deleuze’, in New Makers of Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007)
‘Jean-François Lyotard’, in New Makers of Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007)
‘Deleuze and Whitehead: the concept of reciprocal determination’, in Deleuze, Whitehead and the Transformation of Metaphysics, ed. by A. Cloots and K. Robinson (Brussels: Konklijke Vlaamse Academie Van Belgie Voor Wetenschaapen En Kusten, 2005), pp. 89-105.
‘Lyotard’ and ‘The Differend’, in The Yale/Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. by John Protevi (Yale University Press/Edinburgh University Press, 2005)
‘Truth’, ‘Real’, ‘Cogito’, ‘Identity’ ‘Immanence’, in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. by Adrian Parr (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) pp 48-9, 124-7, 222-3, 289-91
‘Jean-François Lyotard’, in Key Contemporary Social Theorists, ed. by A. Elliott and L. Ray (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 210-5.
‘Deleuze and J.M.W. Turner: catastrophism in philosophy', in Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. by G. Genosko (London: Routledge, 2000 reprint)
‘Conducting intensities in education’ in Lyotard Just Education, ed. by P. Dhillon and P. Standish (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 215-30.
‘Deleuze and nihilism’, in Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity, ed. by G. Banham and C. Blake (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 107-23.
‘Deleuze and J.M.W. Turner: catastrophism in philosophy', in Deleuze and Philosophy: the Difference Engineer, ed. by K. Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 232-46. [ISBN 0-415-14270-9]

Selected Articles

‘Immanence and transcendence as inseparable processes: on the relevance of arguments from Whitehead to Deleuze interpretation’, Deleuze Studies, 4:1 (2010), 94-106 [DOI 10.3366/E1750224110000851]
‘Against oblivion and simple empiricism: Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Immanence: a life…’’, Journal of Philosophy: a Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, 5:10 (Winter 2010), 35-44 [electronic version at the Philosophy Document Centre]
‘If not here, then where? On the location and individuation of events in Badiou and Deleuze’, Deleuze Studies, 3:1 (2009), 97-123 [DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000506]
‘On the categories of explanation in Process and Reality’, Analysis and Metaphysics, 8 (January 2009), 166-86
‘Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: critical contrasts in the deduction of life as transcendental’, Sophia, 47:3 (August 2008)[DOI.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0073-4]
‘The need for metaphysics: on the categories of explanation in Process and Reality’, Theory, Culture and Society, 25:4 (July 2008), 77-90 [DOI 10.1177/0263276409091984]
‘Why Deleuze does not blow the actual on virtual priority. A rejoinder to Jack Reynolds’, Deleuze Studies, 2:1 (2008), 97-100 [DOI 10.3366/E1750224108000172]
‘How to be bicameral: reading William Connolly’s Pluralism with Whitehead and Deleuze’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10 (2008), 140-55 [DOI 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2007.00306.x]
‘Deleuze et Lewis: The Golden Man de Philip K. Dick’s en contexte philosophique', Alliage, 60 (juin 2007), 57-69
‘Poststructuralism, theory, practice’, Reflections on Creativity (Dundee: Duncan of Jordanstone College, 2007) [ISBN 1899837566; http://imaging.dundee.ac.uk/reflections/abstracts/JamesWilliams.htm]
‘Science and dialectics in the philosophies of Deleuze, Bachelard and DeLanda’, Paragraph: a Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 29:2 (July 2006), 98-114 [DOI 10.3366/prg.2006.0019]
‘How radical is the new? Deleuze and Bachelard on the problems of completeness and continuity in dialectics’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 16 (2005), 149-70 [ISBN 1897646127]
‘Cruelty and judgement in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’, Crossings, 4 (2001) (New York, University of Binghamton) 49-70
‘Nothing like maudlin’, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 32:3 (October 2001), 313-27
‘The Last refuge from nihilism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8:1 (March 2000), 115-24 [DOI: 10.1080/096725500341747]
‘Deleuze's ontology and creativity: becoming in architecture’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 9 (2000) 200-19 [http://web.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/williams_pli_9.pdf]
‘Narrative and time’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume (Spring 1996) 47-61
‘An Affirmation of independence: What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology (October 1995) 326-31

Recent Talks

'Shock treatment now, but Who? How? and Where?' public talk at Dundee Contemporary Arts on exhibition by artist Jonathan Horowitz, January 20, 2011.
'La chair, entre politiques et esthétiques: Deleuze, Freud, Saville' La Géophilosophie de Gilles Deleuze: entre Esthétiques et Politiques, Université de Lyon 3, 15 October 2010.
'Time as process: organisation and the necessity of syntheses of time', keynote address, Second International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, Rhodes, June 11 2010.
‘Contemplating pebbles’ Opening plenary lecture, ‘Real objects or material subjects’ conference, University of Dundee, March 27-28, 2010.
Royal Institute of Philosophy Open Lecture, ‘Badiou, Deleuze and Hirschhorn on war’, University of Wolverhampton, November 26, 2009.
‘Necessarily political, absolutely real, perversely enthused’ public talk at Dundee Contemporary Arts on Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, 29 October, 2009.
‘Symptomatology and libidinal economy: Jameson and Lyotard read speculative realism and object-oriented-ontology’ The Symptom in Theory, ENCAP, Cardiff University, 8 September, 2009.
‘Feel the burn: Deleuze and Augustine on time’, plenary paper, Deleuze Studies International Conference, University of Cologne, 2009.
‘Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of time’ Deleuze camp 3, 6 hours of papers, University of Cologne, August 3-7, 2009.
‘Immanence and transcendence as processes’, keynote address, Queen Mary, University of London, 23 June, 2009.
‘Sélection et contingence: l’événement et la pratique chez Deleuze’, École normale supérieure, Ateliers Deleuze philosophie pratique, 28 avril, 2009.
‘On the problem of selection in events’ Colloquium in European Philosophy, University of Warwick, 21 April 2009.
‘Series 23 and 24 of Logic of Sense’ Workshop on Gilles Deleuze’s logic of Sense, UNSW, Sydney, Feb 16th 2009.
‘Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense’, 5 days of public lectures, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, Melbourne, Feb 9th-13th 2009.
‘Centaurs and labyrinths in Lyotard and Saramago’, plenary paper, Libidinal Philosophy Conference, Melbourne University, Feb 6th 2009.
‘Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy’, international workshop on the transcendental, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Feb 5th 2009.
‘Reason and anti-reason in Whitehead, Michel Henry and Deleuze' LaTrobe University philosophy research seminar, Melbourne, Feb 4th 2009.
‘Limites et genèses de la subjectivité et de l’individuation dans la pensée de Gilles Deleuze’ Plenary paper, Vers un concept non-anthropologique de la subjectivité, Projet Europhilosophie, Université de Toulouse 2, November 17-19, 2008.
‘Openness and its physical limits: framing Deleuzian responses to world events’ Keynote and plenary, Deleuze 2008, Stavanger: European City of Culture sponsored event, November 7-8, 2008.
‘Perpetual perishing and other gloomy metaphysics’ Edinburgh University Student Philosophy Society, October 9, 2008
‘Whitehead, Henry and Deleuze on reason and anti-reason’, Opening plenary speaker, The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, Rome, September 1-4, 2008.
‘Time in Deleuze and Whitehead’, plenary paper, First Deleuze Studies Conference, Cardiff University, August 11-13, 2008
‘Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense’ Deleuze camp 2, 6 hours of papers, Cardiff University, August 4-8, 2008.
‘How to crack up and age well: literature and moral problems in Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense’ Modern French Research Seminar, Cambridge, 25 February 2008.
‘Love in the time of events: Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead on Chesil Beach’, plenary paper and closing discussion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, December 6-8, 2007.
‘Recent French philosophies of the event: Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze’ University of Stirling research seminar, November 29, 2007
‘Love in the time of events: Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead on Chesil Beach’ University of Nottingham Cultural Studies Seminar, October 31, 2007‘Nursing and the philosophy of events’ keynote opening paper 11th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference, University of Dundee, September 2nd - 5th, 2007
‘How to be bicameral: Metaphysics and William Connolly’s pluralism’ Centre for Global Justice, University of Nottingham, May 18, 2007.
‘Le figural et la vérité’ Colloque international : les transformateurs Lyotard, École normale supérieure et le Collège international de philosophie, plenary paper, Paris, 25-27, January 2007.
‘Leibniz, Deleuze and Whitehead’, A Leibniz Affair: Symposium on the readings of the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Goldsmiths College, 24 November, 2007.
‘On the fragility of belief’, International conference on belief and metaphysics, Centre for theology and metaphysics, Granada, Spain, September 14th 2006.
‘On the fragility of belief’, opening keynote paper, Society for European Philosophy/Forum for European Philosophy joint conference, Dundee, September 7th 2006.
‘Lyotard, art and music’ Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, July 10, 2006
‘Poststructuralism, theory and practice’ Reflections on Creativity, University of Dundee, April 22, 2006.
‘Poststructuralism, wounds and cures’ Health care, discourse and society; the Dundee-Stirling seminar series, 21st April 2006.
‘Deleuze, Péguy and the event in literature’ (Plenary speaker) University of Warwick, International conference on Deleuze and literature, 20th -21st March 2006.
‘Deleuze and Structure: How far can you bend it?’ University of Cologne, Deleuze, Writing, History, June 30 – July 2, 2005.
‘The fold and the event’ (Keynote speaker) Deleuze and the Fold, University of Warwick, 27 June, 2005.
‘Deleuze and Lewis and the politics of possibility’, Sydney, The Politics of Being, June 14-17, 2005.
‘Deleuze and Whitehead on metaphysical priority: where should we situate potentiality and possibility?’ (Keynote speaker) Deleuze, Whitehead and the transformation of metaphysics, Royal Flemish Academy, Brussels, 23-25 May 2005.
‘Whitehead, Deleuze et la critique du concept du possible’ Séminaires Whitehead, Paris, Sorbonne, 14 mai, 2005.
‘Table ronde avec James Williams et Fréderic Worms’, La vie pulsionelle: entre philosophie, métapsychologie, éthique et politique, Centre international d’étude de la philosophie Française contemporaine (École normale supérieure, Ulm) 13 mai, 2005.
‘Réel, possible, virtuel, fictionel : sur les modalités de l'imaginaire chez Gilles Deleuze et David Lewis’ Que prouve la science-fiction? Raison, machines, corps, Université de Lille 3, 1-2 avril 2005.

Recent Reviews

'Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence', Parrhesia, 9 (2010)115-19 [see link above]
'Charles Stivale Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship' [see link above]
'Éric Alliez, The Signature of the World. What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?', Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, (October 2007), 333-4
'Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation', Political Studies Review, 5:1 (2007), 83
'Keith Crome, Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry', Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 36:3 (October 2005), 330-1
'Rudi Visker, The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger', Radical Philosophy, 134 (November/December 2005), 55-6
'Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy', Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 15 (2005), 229-32
'Jean Khalfa (ed.) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Ronald Bogue Deleuze and Literature. Paul Patton and John Protevi Between Deleuze and Derrida.', The Philosophical Quarterly, 5:219 (2005), 363-7
'Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze', The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 34:1 (January 2003), 104-6
'Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation', The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 32:2 (May 2001), 207-8
'Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari', The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 31:2 (May 2000), 211-13
'Eric Matthews, Twentieth Century French Philosophy', The Philosophical Quarterly, (Summer 1999), 281-3
'Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy', The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, (Summer 1997), 332-3
'John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: the Genealogy of Ethics', The Philosophical Quarterly, (October 1997), 557-8
'Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition', Canadian Philosophical Reviews, XV:4 (August 1995), 233-5
'Peter Eisenman et al, Re:working Eisenman', The Philosophical Quarterly, 15:178 (January 1995), 109-10.

Recent Grants

Leverhulme visiting fellows: £20,000 (2009-10)
Carnegie Fund for the Universities Scotland, ‘Kenneth White’s geopoetics and Gilles Deleuze’s nomadology’: £1950 (April-June 2009)
HERA Paris research matchmaking event: 500 Euros (April 2008)
Co-investigator for Australian Research Council, Discovery Project, ‘Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Arguments for the Methods and Value of Philosophy’: A$213,000 (2008-2010)
Claremont Graduate University, CA, Event and Decision conference, Claremont, California: £702 (December 2007)
British Academy Small Research Grant for research at Péguy archive, Orléans: £1104 (2007)
AHRB Postgraduate Training, over two years for postgraduate training network in European Philosophy and Culture: £10,000 (2004-6)
British Academy Overseas Travel Grant for The Politics of Being, Sydney: £800 (2005)
Carnegie Fund for the Universities Scotland: Work in Paris libraries on ‘Understanding post-structuralism’: £1550 (2004)
British Academy Overseas Travel Grant for Deleuze: experimenting with intensities conference, Trent University Canada: £456 (2004)
AHRB Research Leave Scheme towards research on a critical analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: £13,151 (2003)

Articles & Reviews

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