Serial Thinker Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #292.2

Lev Fraenckel aka Serial Thinker is a french philosopher. He published La philo en mode Serial Thinker, in 2023 and Ma vie a -t-elle un sens ?, in 2025. He counts 55k followers on Youtube and 322k on Tik Tok.

Part I here

I’m almost stealing your thunder here, but I’m holding a book by Alain Badiou and Pascal Fautrier, The Sartre Question, open to page 50, where I read—as you connect to Sartre—:

“The pure objective reality of the worker at the production level is a unit of separation, a serial and passive unit. Division and competition are its law. Any worker resistance, any workshop revolt, is a local fusion of the series.”

Obviously, this has little to do with freedom, yet this notion of the “serial,” which echoes your name, Serial Thinker, reflects the kind of freedom Sartre describes—freedom that, according to him, can only be “serial.” So, can we bridge this to what you were saying about the worker’s freedom and Dahmer’s freedom, which emerges from a working-class background? Isn’t there also a social determinism at play? Can we make that connection as well?

Serial Thinker: Absolutely, there’s a social determinism too. When I’m in a series, what’s the series? For Sartre, it’s the line waiting for the bus. There’s a group of people put in a series, determined—what Sartre calls “determined in exteriority.” The connection between me and the others in the line is purely external; there’s nothing intrinsically linking me to them. Or, for example, I’m in a factory on an assembly line, not talking to the people next to me. I’m united by the exteriority of the machine or the boss who has authority over my life. Sartre calls this “conditioning in exteriority.” I’m conditioned externally.

What’s interesting is that the worker can free themselves. They can move from the series to the group, meaning they can create a real, authentic bond with the workers around them by coming together, especially to free themselves from the factory boss’s authority that conditions them externally. It’s like the difference in a gym during group fitness classes. There are some group classes where everyone’s on bikes, and there’s a coach yelling. I find that unbearable. I love weightlifting and go to gyms, but in some group sports, there’s a real bond between people. I don’t always do team sports because I’m very individualistic and struggle with collectives, but in a soccer team, there’s a real connection—between the defender, the striker, etc. There needs to be harmony.

You see great players sometimes, but just putting together a bunch of Mbappés and Ronaldos doesn’t make a great team. We saw that with PSG—when Mbappé left, they won the cup because a team isn’t just a sum of individuals. But in some gym classes, people are united externally by the coach’s voice telling them to push past their comfort zone, shouting stuff like that. Everyone pedals, pedals, pedals. It might be effective for burning calories, but there’s something alienating about it. You can see right away it’s alienating because there’s no real bond between the people—no defender, no striker. They’re only linked by the coach’s words and the bad music driving them.

You’re unconsciously defining your method here, as a philosophy coach for students, especially high school seniors, at the city level, showing that concepts like freedom and seriality resonate by taking a highly individualistic approach—the one of an influencer, a TikToker, reaching a massive audience. The 300,000 followers you have is the number of students taking philosophy for the baccalaureate each year. Can you explain what sets your method apart ?

Serial Thinker: When I coach students, as you put it, for their exams on social media, in videos, there’s no real dialogue between me and the student, except sometimes in the comments section where I reply, but I don’t always have time to respond to everyone. So, there’s a bit of dialogue that starts sometimes, but I think the role of a philosophy teacher isn’t to tell students what to think but to give them tools to think for themselves and develop their own ideas.

Let me give you an example. One day, I was being interviewed by TF1 journalists who came to film how my shoots work, and my assistant, a former student of mine who does the editing and filming, was there. They asked him, “What was he like as a teacher?” He said, “He was an awesome teacher, and it’s thanks to him I believe in God.” I was shocked and said, “Simon, you know I’m an atheist. How could you think my classes taught you to believe in God?” Then I realized I was being an idiot.

What must have happened is that when I teach philosophy, I defend an author or an idea to the fullest, trying to be as convincing as possible. But the next class, I’ll argue the opposite. For example, I might spend an entire class defending the proof of God’s existence as strongly as I can—otherwise, it’s not fun. If I haven’t managed to blow the students’ minds by the end of the class, it’s not fun. Philosophy isn’t fun if it’s not a bit mind-blowing, and if it’s not fun, life’s boring. It’s not even about philosophical relevance—it just has to be a bit disruptive, an existential experience.

So, to make the class as mind-blowing as possible, I try to be as convincing as I can about, say, the proof of God’s existence. But the next class, I’ll do the exact opposite, dismantling those proofs or arguing for God’s non-existence. I think Simon just missed the follow-up class. He went to the one on God’s existence but not the one after. I do the same with right-wing and left-wing arguments. When I defend liberal right-wing ideas, I do it so convincingly that some students get shocked. Then I do the same for the other side.

It’s almost a direct quote from the movie Ridicule and the rationalist exercise of the Enlightenment philosophers, that foirged the individualistic revolution, centered on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, followed by Romanticism, with Chateaubriand bridging the two. Aren’t you an encyclopedist and a romantic yourself?

Serial Thinker: Ha! Encyclopedist, I don’t love that term because it implies just piling up knowledge. I like the Enlightenment, but the encyclopedist side, maybe not, because it’s pure knowledge accumulation. What I love about philosophy is that it’s knowledge tied to existence, knowledge that hits me in my existence. That’s why I love real teaching relationships and why I’ve never given up teaching at the university, purely for the joy of maintaining that human connection.

I think what’s interesting in philosophy is that human connection with the person you’re talking to, because we all speak from a position. What’s exciting is what ideas uproot in us, what they shock or disrupt. I had a class at the university on Maimonides, and in that class, there was a veiled Palestinian woman, a veiled nun, and Orthodox Jewish women with covered heads. All these people came together for a class on Maimonides, and that’s what’s amazing. Philosophy can bring together people who might not otherwise connect or even have conflicts.

One day, I was teaching about Maimonides and said that for him, God isn’t a being with feelings or emotions, not human at all—just pure intellect. The nun raised her hand, almost shocked, and said, “Does that mean God doesn’t love us?” I thought that was brilliant because, for Maimonides, God doesn’t have a little beating heart. That’s where philosophy gets interesting—it shakes things up. For a religious Christian, it’s scandalous to say God has no emotions, because Jesus loves us. That’s what I love about philosophy.

So, yes, the Enlightenment in the sense of universal reflection can help us progress. I deeply believe in progress, so I fully align with the Enlightenment ideal there. Reason can help us. I’m an Enlightenment supporter in that sense.

But I’m not a rationalist in the Freudian sense, where reason might censor our deepest, unconscious desires. I identify more with Freud, who’s fully rationalist when reasoning about existence but doesn’t always put reason first in ethics or life. Sometimes desire matters more than reason, which can just be a censor of our desires. That ties back to Spinoza, who Freud admired. Spinoza’s a hardcore rationalist, but his rationalism makes room for desire.

In everyday language, people who call themselves rationalists often make the mistake of thinking rationalism means governing your whole life by reason, sidelining instincts or desires. I think rationalism should lead us to question what reason censors and suspect that reason sometimes just speaks for the superego.

Maimonides undertook to rationalize Judaism, Freud questioned Moses’ very existence, and Spinoza, was excommunicated—or, in Jewish terms, placed under herem, a serious punishment. Like Nathan Devers, you initially pursued a rabbinical path, studied in a yeshiva, and later distanced yourself from it. Does your philosophical reasoning stem from that background, or are you circling back to it?

Serial Thinker: I think you’re right—we always speak from a certain place, a certain culture, a certain upbringing. I identified a lot with Spinoza, who grew up in a religious world and broke away from it. But it’s not a rejection of myself at all. Judaism is fully part of my existence. It’s more a rejection of institutionalized religion, like Kierkegaard, who called himself a Christian but rejected the institution.

Take Maimonides in the 12th century—he radically questioned the religious worldview. For him, God is pure intellect, and you don’t even need revelation to access it because it’s already in our minds. If the text contradicts the intellect, you change the text, not the intellect. He’s saying the text is just a way to give morality to the people, like talking to children—telling them God gets angry, punishes, or rewards. But that’s all nonsense to him.

So, you have someone in the Middle Ages saying incredibly subversive things, so subversive that his books were burned by Jews. Even in the Talmud, there are highly subversive texts about the relationship with God. I think I’m closer to those texts and what, for me, makes Judaism’s strength: its 2,000-year tradition of studying texts, constantly questioning them. That’s what defines Jewish identity for me—not nationalism or genetics, but this link to the text, the “people of the book,” and this way of always questioning texts.
So, I think there’s nothing more Jewish than Spinoza and Freud. Spinoza was excommunicated by a somewhat foolish community, not by Judaism itself, but by people with a narrow view of religion.

Part 3 here