In 1986, he began writing for L'Autre until the journal's closure by its publisher Michel Butel in 1990.
In 1993 Éditions du Seuil published his book Les Enjeux du mobile, (Translated into English as Figuring Space) which was a study of mathematics, physics and philosophy. In this book, Châtelet tries to reflect on the perception of movement in philosophy, mathematics and physics by way of using concepts of virtuality and intensive quantities borrowed from Nicole Oresme and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, He presents his conception of the deafening but complicated relationship between mathematics, physics and philosophy through a comparison between intuition and discourse, sense and speech.
Chatelet is well known in France for his political pamphlet Vivre et penser comme des Porcs, De l'incitation à l'envie et à l'ennui dans les démocraties-marchés,(1998) It was translated and published in English (November 2014) as To Live and Think Like Pigs: Envy and Boredom in Market-Economy Democracies.To Live and Think Like Pigs was a polemical essay in which he denounced liberalism which according to him its effectiveness relied on a triple alliance between the "tertiary" spheres of politics, economics and cybernetics, or communication technologies.
In a collection of his political writing titled Les Animaux malades (Sick Animals of Consensus), he rejected what he considered as a widespread human domestication process imposed by the New World Order. He called for a new philosophy to combat the disastrous effects of the decomposition of both the libertarian optimism and cynicism which in his opinion had become a pseudo-liberal sham.