Article
Haïti Can’t Breathe
...turmoil that threatened the company’s commercial interests, among other things. If you will excuse these numerous dates, in 1957, François Duvalier came to power. Less than two years later, with...
Search results for 'Haïti Can’t Breathe'
Article
Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to Dwelling in Ethical Community
...recognition of shared vulnerability and interdependence, Murphy rightly supports the kind of ontology that this emphasis on vulnerability comes from: an ontology of human existence emerging from existential phenomenology that...
Article
Assemblages and the Un-Timeliness of Democratic Commitments
...commitment can find, through the notion of assemblages, an ally, a space encouraging its manifestation and eluding capture by that which speaks in its name and allots it its place....
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The Commotion of Souls
...last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week....
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Pierre Alferi: Compressing and Disconnecting
“L’Hypothèse du compact” is the title of a text by the poet Jacques Roubaud that appeared in the first issue of the Revue de Littérature Générale in 1995, edited at...
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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze: Esoteric Precursors of the God of Complexity
...ontological project of explaining the workings of the chaotic cosmos. There IS religion in Deleuze, even God, but It comes as one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Outsider abominations, via witchcraft, trickery,...
Article
Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream)
It seems that brain, thought and computer have become intertwined and now share a common fate. An important part of neuroscience not only requires a computational paradigm but also relies...
Article
Touch in the Abstract
...the computer, as active input falls to the fingertips. At the computer, you express yourself, communicate your desires, by executing a gesture chosen from among a very few possibilities: you...
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An Interview with Jacques Rancière: Playing Freely, from the Other, to the Letter
When I first contacted Jacques Rancière in March 2017, nearly three-and-a-half years before the completion of this interview, a few basic questions were growing heavy. Questions limited to current political...
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The Waste-Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith
For those who follow closely the contemporary American poetry scene, perhaps no recent figure has made a greater intervention in received ideas of poetic excellence than Kenneth Goldsmith. This self-described...
Article
From Where Do We Draw Breath? Air’s Absence and Blackness
...June 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/191079. Véronneau, S. J. H., et al. “Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers.” United States Federal Aviation Administration Civil Aeromedical Institute, Office of Aviation Medicine, October 1996, www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/1990s/media/am96-25.pdf...
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The Jolt of the Grotesque: Aesthetics as Ethics in The Satanic Verses
...even as he has been accused of an uncritical celebration of mixture. The performance and diagnosis of such transfer in The Satanic Verses combines the dynamics listed above with humor...
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The Story of the Raven and the Robot*
The aim of this paper is to study the relationship of companion robots to the uncanny, using popular depictions of these robots. I start by presenting a few companion robots...
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Politics and Commonality of Sensation from a Reading of Merleau-Ponty
In this paper, we will not discuss revolutionary events in Europe or elsewhere. Rather, we will use the above event as a concrete exemplar—the symptom of a problem that enables...
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Another Naming, a Living Animal: Blanchot’s Community
The dog appears. Its head is above the line. Is the dog slipping back? Its head is on the line. Is it submerging again, tasting death as the admixture of...
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Inspiration/Expiration (Completion)
This text was co-written with an artificial intelligence (AI). This so-called author wrote a sentence, then the software continued, and so on, each influencing the other, completing each other. Another...
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Breathing with Mountains
...Compositions Pierre Jardin’s geologic aspirations began with a Composition of Place, a meditative technique deployed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola stipulates that “for contemplation or meditation...
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Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks: Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization, and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell’s Alec
In this era of the graphic novel, we are used to seeing comic books—that is, comic magazines—migrate to the bookshelf in the form of bound collections. Yet do these collections...
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The Immorality of Waste: Depression-Era Perspectives in the Digital Age
In Manhattan’s Union Square, residents queue patiently, holding unwanted computers, cell phones, printers, TVs, cables, and monitors. The New York City Department of Sanitation, charged with managing 3.5 million tons...
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Deleuze and World Cinemas by David Martin-Jones (review)
...industry. Among the works that comprise this body of writing, the offerings from Martin-Jones have been reliably lucid and instructive. His readership likely extends beyond committed scholars who are looking...
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Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences
...what follows I shall focus on some narrative opportunities and constraints in the medium of comics, as compared to those of other narrative media such as printed texts and cinema....
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The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology
...always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of memory and knowledge.” Caillois’s own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates,...
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Stoned Thinking: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin
PETRIVERSE. Noun. 1). A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden. 2). Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers,...
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The Politics of the Diagram as Graphic Narrative: Chris Ware and Chad McCail
...social norms,” thereby “help[ing] us to think about and envision a better world” (Worden, “Politics of Comics” 69-70). Critical treatment of the works of American comics creator Chris Ware (b....
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Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, Postsustainability (review)
...relationship between expenditure and community in contemporary culture. How, in short, is our use of energy related to our ability to create and experience community? And how must our culture...
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SubStance Journal
...without respite. Like that boat that didn’t stop pitching like a mean and savage wind. Where am I? Come on! You can do it. Be strong. Come on, breathe! All...
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Math Anxiety: Making Room to Breathe
...positively rewarded as opportunities for learning; students compose questions instead of answers; students solve problems together rather than perform solo (Boaler). Return now to that opening scenario to watch it...
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The Death of Social Death: Im/possibility of Black Maternity in Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel
...Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character’s performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating...
Article
Breathing
...tight collaboration with Jan Fabre and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozič). The book sheds new light on...
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Safety in Objects: Discourses of Violence and Value—The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0
...that this tradition has placed in performance art to rectify subject/object inequalities for female subjects. I will then turn to two feminist “performances”— Mary Richardson’s 1914 protest slashing of the...
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Homeostasis and Extinction: Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”
...human subject, retain it as a referent. The Capitalocene corresponds to the Anthropocene with the added complexity of anticapitalist critique; the Plantationocene corresponds to the Anthropocene with the added complexity...
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Adrift: Havarie, an Acousmatic Film by Philip Scheffner
My aim in this essay is to offer a reading of the documentary Havarie (2016), a film by Philip Scheffner that is essentially based on complex and unusual relationship and...
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Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (review)
In this landmark book, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen combines and culminates the two strands of his substantial scholarly work: ecology and Medieval and Early Modern studies. Stone is ambitiously synthetic and...
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A Vulnerable World: Heidegger on Humans and Finitude
The notion of vulnerability comes from the Late Latin vulnerabilis, derived from vulnerare “to wound,” which comes from vulner-, vulnus “wound.” As the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests, it is probably akin...
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Postcolonial Anarchographics: Re-drawing History in the Trantraal Brothers’ Crossroads
Focusing on visual and textual representations of squatting and women’s resistances against apartheid in the comic book series Crossroads (2014-2016), this article examines how graphic history may enable a more...
Article
At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy
...this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that...
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The Narrativity of Post-Convergent Media: No Ghost Just a Shell and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “(ghost reader C.H.)”
While comics today have entered the world of what used to be called Western “high art,” manga—Japanese comics strongly associated with fan culture and genre—less publically breaks through into Anglo-European...
Article
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media
...theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers...
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Up From Brittany: A New Voice on the French Literary Scene
Pierre-Alain Tilliette is a Breton writer, who lives with his family in Paris, where he is Conservateur des fonds étrangers at the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville. The tragi-comic inventiveness...
Article
Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini
...philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a good example. In the years 1932 to 1933, she was connected to the dissident, Trotsky-leaning Communist Boris Souvarine and his Cercle communiste...
Article
“In the Beginning”… an Intermedial Babel
...reel they show towers at various stages of (de)composition. The images come from other gigantic installations Kiefer created, including the architectural landscape of concrete towers molded from shipping containers at...
Article
Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time
To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001),...
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The Force of Noise, or Touching Music: The Tele-Haptics of Stockhausen’s “Helicopter String Quartet”
The American composer John Adams writes “One needs the stimulation of the tactile contact with the sound” (191). He illustrates this point with a kind of tautology, for he says...
Article
Silent Discourse: The Language of Signs and “Becoming-Woman”
...human thought, complemented by calculus ratiocinator and reflecting ratio embedded in Nature. The corollary is that, ultimately, the correspondence between primitive signs and the complex ideas for which they stand...
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Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice
...and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to “be forgotten like all her brothers” (1979: 145). Kafka completed...
Article
In/habitable
...underpinning many of the spaces and experiences that Perec inventories. For these are sites of the management of species-life, sites that implement or express a modern logic of rationalization known...
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The Postlingual Turn
...the words we are producing on this page right here. It is, second, an axiom about the technologies of religion, media, communication, performance, translation, and circulation that distribute and also...
Article
Introduction: Dismantling the Man-Machine*
...and Koen Vermeir. It ran for several years. The idea was to meet about once a month and invite scholars from various disciplines around a common machine, or at least...
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The Neuroscientist’s Memoir: Dramatic Irony and Disorders of Consciousness
This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent...
Article
The TV-Box: Reconsidering a Lost Television Set, Santa Claus and the Ants
...periodization). To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to...