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Divinatory Chances
Two issues for Deleuze’s thought converge in its encounter with combinatorial divination: (1) the problem of a philosophical affirmation of the “whole of chance” or of “all chance in a...
Search results for 'Divinatory Chances'
Article
Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty
Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of...
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“Everything is Breath”: Critical Plant Studies’ Metaphysics of Mixture
...assumed responsibility for the “inspirited” land. Kimmerer comments: Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They...
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Coughin’/Coffin Air
...of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever...
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Breathing with Denise Levertov
...who would at last be wise enough to remain discreet, and refrain from any untimely interference with the life of the Earth. Works Cited Levertov, Denise. “The Breathing.” AllPoetry.com, .com/The-Breathing...
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On the Nose
...finger, rubbing it lovingly against the front gum of the mouth. Freud’s “Über Coca” looms ominously in the background, the work of a phase in Freud’s professional career complicated by...
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Introduction: Reading After Blanchot
...So how, if at all, does Blanchot speak to the present? Responses to this question are quickly complicated by the rich and varied reception of his work. A lifelong friend...
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Spatial Stream of Consciousness
...its obsessions for information, technology, and space—depicts a crossroads of subjectivity. At that crossroads, natural and computational connotations of “stream” collide, fueling the novel’s central crisis. The misadventures of Rolin’s...
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The Mother of Us All?
...mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its continued refusal to come out are addressed?” asks Sedgwick. “And isn’t some scene like that,” she asks as well, “behind the...
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Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution by Peter Swirski, and: Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory by Peter Swirski (review)
Well yes—Swirski is one of those critics who think that the relativistic postmodernism and social constructivism in much of literary studies has come to a dead end. While I did...
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Scenes in a Library: Alain Resnais and Toute la mémoire du monde
...mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memory) among the eight short subjects he directed before completing his first feature-length fiction film, Hiroshima mon amour, in 1959. In particular, I consider...
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Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature
...of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the “unborn”—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of...
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Life Writing, Identity, and the Classroom: Perspectives from Social and Educational Psychology
The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized...
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La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)
Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to...
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Nicholas Winding Refn’s Abject Male: Inhibiting Spectator-Identification in Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011)
...spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva’s theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject’s complex relationship to Refn’s œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema....
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Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity ed. by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, and Mark Sprevak (review)
Patrick Colm Hogan announced in 2002 that “cognitivist methods, topics, and principles have come to dominate what are arguably the most intellectually exciting academic fields today” (1). Today, what dominates...
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La conversation transatlantique: Les échanges franco-américains en poésie depuis 1968 by Abigail Lang (review)
...and studying French and/or American poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century was keenly aware of the fruitfulness of the exchanges between French and American poets. This book archives,...
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Less Than One Language: Typographic Multilingualism and Post-Anglophone Fiction
What comes after the language model of literary history? This essay considers that question by turning to works of contemporary fiction that operate at the edges of our most dominant...
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Soundscape and Power
In Balcony in the Forest, Julien Gracq composes a soundscape as a series of spatial events and material affects. He snatches it from “the smoke and the suburbs of Charleville”...
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Devlin’s Love: Autopoiesis and Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes
This paper uses the concept of autopoiesis to describe Harold Pinter’s approach to dramatic composition. The playwright strikes a first note and allows the play to emerge from the resonances...
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Politics and Philosophy in the Red Years: Badiou, Sartre, Althusser and the Problematic of Suture
This essay approaches Alain Badiou’s theoretical production during the period of militant fury commenced by May ‘68 in terms of his conflicted relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Badiou’s...
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Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe by William Guynn, and: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth-Century by Timothy Snyder (review)
...message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly went viral. In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge...
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“The Authenticity of Exile” between Blanchot and Levinas
In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations...
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Everything: Totality and Self-Representation, from Past to Present
This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive recording of a life. As long ago as 1762, Diderot wrote in a letter to his love, Sophie Volland: How...
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Corpus-[corpus]: hand, handiwork, Habitat, gifts, feet, footnotes, and the ‘ob-scene’
...torch of a lighthouse, over the points of its author’s compass” (ix). As I write and muse on this, my shoulders aching from the hard wood stool I have been...
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To Draw or Not to Draw: Alberto Breccia and the Ethos of Reading
It is not often that reading—let alone the reading of comics—is identified as a “need,” a function of basic physical “survival”: In Argentina, we were forced, as a question of...
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Radical History and the Politics of Art by Gabriel Rockhill (review)
...common sense trinity—what is art? what is politics? what is their relation?” and accept fully the idea that these concepts have no determinable, transhistorical essence (3). They are always in...
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Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement by Daniel Just (review)
...first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary...
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Introduction: Film and / as Ethics
...that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be...
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The Syndrome of the Thermometer: Two Machines for Reading Thoughts
...more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He...
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“The Power of a Form of Thought that Has Become Foreign to Itself”: Rancière, Romanticism and the Partage of the Sensible
...aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics,...
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Kristeva, Stoicism, and the “True Life of Interpretations”
The repertory of theories, practices, and stories associated with Greek and Roman Stoicism fills a significant compartment in the Western philosophical archive, the meaning and value of which are ceaselessly...
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Letters for the Blind
In the autumn of 1798, Immanuel Kant published what was (excluding lecture notes) his final work, The Conflict of the Faculties. The latter comprises three essays, which ostensibly address the...
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Playing with Fire-Space: Site-Specific Placement and the Techno-pharmacology of Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud
Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed. Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of...
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Posing Sex: Prospects for a Perceptual Ethics
Sexuality and sexual desire remain tantalizing conundrums for the universalizing intellect, desirous of comprehending the human condition even in its most unconditional manifestations. The representation of sexuality in the history...
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Intermediality in the Age of Global Media Networks – Including Eleven Theses on its Provocative Power for the Concepts of “Convergence,” “Transmedia Storytelling” and “Actor Network Theory”
...be allegory […]. (Coleridge 33) In the community of scholars of intermedia research, the above quoted citation is commonly regarded as Coleridge’s coining of the term “intermedium” or “intermediality” (Higgins)....
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The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21st-Century French Literature and Film by Sachs, Leon (review)
...artistic production and reception” (25). The ways in which the author draws those parallels constitute a heuristic tour de force. Sachs compellingly shows how contemporary films and narratives, a priori...
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Introduction: Translation Matters
...in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody...
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Delay, Estrangement, Loss: The Meanings of Translation in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985)
The common denominator of any translation is delay: this delay is a matter of time and space, a temporal displacement (which is one of the ways of defining “translation”), a...
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Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten
...Time Heidegger offers a way of coming to understand the human as temporally fixed as both futural and as a site of an aporetic historicality: in other words Being comes...
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The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
It should come as no surprise that the Wachowskis elected to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 tour de force Cloud Atlas into a film. Like Mitchell’s works, the Wachowskis’ 1999 film...
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From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film
In a Wall Street Journal article appearing prior to the U.S. premiere of the film Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell addresses the challenges of turning his complex novel into a film....
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Revisiting Dejima (Japan): From Recollections to Fiction in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
...the West and the East. Though staged as an aside and embedded in a failed attempt at communication, it remains seminal in the history of Mitchell’s subtle treatment of cross-cultural...
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Speculative Romanticism
...name, speculative realism encompasses an entire spectrum of philosophies “committed to upholding the autonomy of reality … against the depredations of anthropocentrism” (Brassier et al. 306). After a century of...
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Derrida’s Preoccupation with the Archive in The Beast and the Sovereign
...the two sources or two archai of the archive—that is, the archive as both threat and promise, turned toward both the past and the future, at once commencement and commandment....
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Human Exceptionalism on the Line
...thinker of origins, we should not be surprised by his forensic attention to what is particular about human genesis—those capacities whose unique achievement and comparative complexity are purportedly without precedent....
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Introduction: Fabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign
Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bête et le souverain, given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and...
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Zoopolitics
...heart, beckoning toward the establishment and institution of a border between the two, but rather one that comes to blur, to rework and accordingly to complexify the limits between them....
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Intact
“What characterizes the comical is the infinite satisfaction, the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself to be above one’s own contradiction, rather than seeing in it a cruel...
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Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us
...one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging from each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from...