Serge Margel - Biography#
Serge Margel has been formed in art, philosophy, anthropology, religious studies. His dissertation in philosophy in June 1992 was supervised by Jacques Derrida (who wrote the preface of Serge Margel’s first book: ‘Le Tombeau du dieu artisan. Commentaire du Timée de Platon’. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1995). He obtained the French ‘Habilitation’ in 2002 and a doctoral degree in the faculty of theology at the University of Geneva in 2005.
He has a strong background in classical languages, and his work encompasses various historical periods and number of themes, authors, and media.
Serge Margel, whose main affiliation is at the School of Art and Design in Geneva where he teaches graduate and undergraduate seminars, has been Visiting professor in several Universities in the United States, Brazil, Chile, Syria, Lebanon and various other European countries.
Since 1994, his scholarly production has been extremely rich: he published as author fifteen books with prestigious publishers (Galilée, Minuit, Belin in Paris), and is about publish another three books, one of them on the avant-gardes and the use of montage both in literature and in film. He edited and translated books and special issues of various journals, always reflecting on the problems agitation our contemporary world often through the historical perspective, as it can be seen, among others, in some of his books published before 2008, such as:
Logique de la nature. Le fantôme, la technique et la mort. Paris: Éditions Galilée,2000
Destin et liberté. La métaphysique du mal. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2002
Corps et âme. Descartes. Du pouvoir des représentations aux fictions du Dieu trompeur. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004
Superstition. L’anthropologie du religieux en terre de chrétienté Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2005 (English translation in progress)
Le silence des prophètes. La falsification des Écritures et le destin de la modernité, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006
De l’imposture. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mensonge littéraire et fiction politique. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2007
Among the most important article recently published:
Phasis, European Journal of Philosophy, 2 (« Catastrophe »), 2014, 63-70.
“Autonomie et abstraction. Le support, la surface et le plan dans les figures de Chladni in Philippe Deleglise. Les figures de Chladni, art&fiction, Lausanne, 2014, 66-75.
“Le spectre du nom. Notes sur la question lexicale d’une langue philosophique”, Rue Descartes, 82, 2014, 101-103. Trad. anglaise Oxford Literary Review, 36/2, 2014, 254-256.
“Le traumatisme des paupières. La Jetée de Chris Marker et le montage contrefactuel”, Revue Home Cinéma, 4, 2014, 27-53.
“Portrait de l’acteur en performeur. Artaud, du théâtre au cinéma”, Cahiers Artaud, 2, 2014.
“ Le sublime artificiel. Baudelaire lecteur de Wagner”, Retour d’y voir, 9, 2014.
“ Pour un projet de guerre perpétuelle. Carl Schmitt et la question des grands espaces”, in Les philosophes devant l’épreuve de la guerre, éd. par Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Éditions Hermann, forthcoming.
Serge Margel’s main academic career has been as the Project Leader of a large number of funded Research Projects of the Swiss National Science Foundation and other Swiss research institutions. He has therefore been involved for many years in team-work and committed to interdisciplinary research. He is now directing a large scale project on “Improvisation as Artistic Practice” where various arts converge. And he has just submitted a Research project to the Swiss National Science Foundation on “From a Narrative Character to a Performative Character”, in collaboration with La Manufacture School of Theater (Lausanne), Berne School of Art, Lausanne School of Art and Geneva School of Art and Design.
