Article
Timothy Scheie
Issue 125
Few modern writers command a literary stamp as distinct as Samuel Beckett’s, yet the starkness that characterizes the Beckettian imaginary (particularly in the theater), however familiar, leaves intentions elusive, messages...
Article
Heidi Peeters
Issue 123
The days of poetry seem to be coming to an end. Many theorists have been predicting the fall of the verbal regime and many theoretical volumes hailing the new visual...
Article
Jan Baetens, Douglas Basford
Issue 123
...possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc. (Robbe-Grille, 1963) are quietly coming to the fore again. This...
Article
Christopher Gontar
Issue 121
...“supersensible” or thing-in-itself. In a section of his Third Critique, Kant grappled with taste as a judgment that is subjective yet relies on a sensus communis. This gives rise to...
Article
Patrick ffrench
Issue 120
...will in time attain completion. Barthes values the proleptic, or dilatory gesture over the completed whole; the statement “Plus tard…,” moreover, works in secret as a denunciation of the “monstre...
Article
Liran Razinsky
Issue 119
...1915, is a fascinating discussion about our attitudes towards death, which comprise both a “cultural-conventional attitude” that Freud so pertinently, almost wickedly, criticizes, and the attitude common to the unconscious...
Article
Slavoj Žižek
Issue 117
...produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they...
Article
Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty, Emilie Morin
Issue 116
Current headlines demonstrate that our widespread search for abundance has become a source of general concern. The press now abounds in debates about waste management, patterns of consumption and production,...
Article
Eric Méchoulan
Issue 160
...hour behind the fleeting breath G. Share; experience; partake of; have in common When it comes, the Landscape listens — Shadows — hold their breath — H. Inhale deeply; rest...
Article
yasser elhariry
Issue 154
...conditions and possibilities of its own rebirth. I take Tarkos’s first recorded video performance as a point of departure for contextualizing the landscape of contemporary French poetry, then define the...
Article
Erica O'Neill
Issue 149
John H. Muse’s Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time examines the production of short plays across the history of Western theatre practice, from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary performance. Categorizing...
Article
José Felipe Alvergue
Issue 140
...of these works, which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, builds a useful bridge between Heidegger’s philosophy on language and the performance of language itself. This distinction, which Ziarek...
Article
Gry Ulstein
Issue 156
...reveal tensions in how we conceptualize the environment, the human, and the nonhuman. By comparing the narrative strategies in the walrus scene to similar strategies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach...
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For over 50 years, SubStance has published rigorous, creative contributions to contemporary critical debates from a range of theoretical perspectives. Consistent with our commitment to readers and authors to expect...
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...length is usually between 7,000 and 8,000 words. Please edit longer articles so the argument comes forward succinctly. Hybrid pieces length will be considered on an individual basis. Our review...
Article
Kevin Bell
Issue 155
...1973 film Ganja & Hess. Conceived by its corporate producers as a “blaxploitation/vampire” vehicle, it becomes instead Gunn’s unofficial Cannes triumph; it is, for one venerated critic, “the most complicated,...
Article
John Brenkman
Issue 155
...with Nietzsche in the antifoundationalist, postmodern philosophy of Gianni Vattimo, and with Pascal in the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, occasions pertinent comparisons to Blanchot as a reader of Pascal...
Issue
Reading After Blanchot
Article
Adam R. Rosenthal
Issue 148
...philological analysis of the word “clone,” I then turn to the conceptual parallels between vegetative reproduction and linguistic reproduction. Through a comparison between the clone and the double, I argue,...
Article
Essi Varis
Issue 148
The Unwritten (2009–2015), a Vertigo comics series created by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, demonstrates through metafictional storytelling that all fictional characters share important features with Victor Frankenstein’s infamous creature:...
Article
Matthew Scully
Issue 148
...commenting on itself, and representing itself by means of its own figures is already to take the work to be coherent and self-sufficient” (9). Wasser’s main intervention, then, is to...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 148
SubStance@Work, a peer-reviewed imprint of SubStance, Inc., is a series comprised of born-digital works that integrate non-linear structure and multimedia content in innovative theoretical explorations. New works are previewed in...
Article
Mireille Rosello
Issue 133
...the urgency of such a challenge: the refugee (Nyers; Shemak; Bohmer; Chetail). In European urban centers–regardless of whether we speak as refugees, to refugees, or about refugees–complex transnational dialogues emerge....
Article
Will Higbee
Issue 133
...French-born descendants of immigrants, whose presence within the nation demands a reconsideration of previously fixed notions of community, origins and national identity. Though certainly not limited to the perspective of...
Article
Rosalind Galt
Issue 133
...to Argentina, Iceland and Greece in the 2000s. Embedded as it almost always is within the global circuits of capitalist culture, cinema has a particularly complex relationship to globalization: these...
Article
Kelley Conway
Issue 133
...really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments...
Article
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Issue 133
...concept of the “Figure” developed in the former, I will distill an initial concept of Mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. I will then compare...
Article
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Issue 132
At least since the 1970s, vulnerability has emerged as a significant area of research in international social sciences. Combining sociology, studies of climate change, politics, and cultural geography, these interdisciplinary...
Article
Joanne Faulkner
Issue 132
...complexly overdetermined by a variety of adult exigencies, desires, and crises which, once exposed to scrutiny, may become less self-evident—even questionable. As a virtue, innocence is not cultivated through self-discipline,...
Article
Patrick Colm Hogan
Issue 131
...Indeed, when it comes to teachers and students of literature, even that question is not quite accurate. Rather, there are three separate questions. First, should verbal art matter? Put differently,...
Article
Paul Giles
Issue 131
...issues. Even when not tarnished with the popular notion of aestheticism as betokening a Wildean hedonism, the field has frequently been reductively compartmentalized in relation to a self-indulgent subjectivism, where...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 131
...in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present” (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the “developmental trajectories” of stories can...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
Contemporary companion robots are designed to be the least uncanny creatures or the most endearing ones. But, of course, it is a bit uncanny to specifically design un-uncanny creatures....
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
...of the public and the construction of a common ground. On the contrary, it seems that this allows the university to be appropriated by those with the means to do...
Issue
Impact Boom! The Commodification of the University
Article
Adelheid Voskuhl
Issue 147
...the relationship between mechanistic philosophy and mechanical artisanship correlate with our methodological and epistemic commitments, such as intellectual history, Marxist social history, or internalism and externalism, and also with our...
Article
Sydney Levy
Issue 147
What does it take to make a machine that you may love and that has the potential of loving you back? It is the necessary conceptual components, as opposed to...
Article
Mathieu Triclot, Charles La Via
Issue 147
...examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices....
Article
Anthony Mellors
Issue 130
...secret anti-commune to escape a regime bent on destroying the American economy through its utilitarian, bureaucratic, and welfare-based directives, all of which are designed to serve a coterie of muddleheaded,...
Article
Wendelin Werner, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
One of the recurring themes in discussions among mathematicians, whether in informal lunch hour talks or in more formal committees, is what might be called “simplistic impact-bashing.” We are more...
Article
Mark Steven
Issue 147
...cinema has evolved. These two theses are explored concurrently as they advance through the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, evolving a visual language of what Badiou calls “minimal communism.”...
Article
Taylor Schey
Issue 130
But just what sort of Oedipus complex does Freud depict in Totem and Taboo? His entire account of the murder and the history it unfolds concerns the actions of a...
Article
Henriette Heidbrink
Issue 130
...rely on well-known narrative schemata, and on the other hand they comprise something that is actually impossible: alternative futures. One central thesis raised by spokespersons of the forking-path-debate claims that,...
Article
Judd D. Hubert
Issue 130
This issue of Mélusine pursues the research initiated in 1982 on the surrealist book, without giving the last word on such a complex subject. Demonstrating erudition worthy of La Revue...
Article
Hunter Vaughan
Issue 129
...cognitive film analysis and metaphysical film-philosophy, shedding light on the connection between the complex details of our specific viewing experiences and the general abstraction of our social use of image-culture....
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 129
...a methodological point of view, they share the same scrupulous concern with the text and the same conceptual richness that allows them to combine, with exemplary rigor, philology and philosophy....
Article
Peter Consenstein
Issue 129
...[1995]), as well as a seven-volume (and “six-branch”) “récit autobiographique,” which David Bellos has compared to the work of Marcel Proust.1 The three books Roubaud published in 2008 and 2009,...
Article
David Oscar Harvey
Issue 128
...Wave in that both share the same historical moment and geographic space, as well as a common interest in exploring personal expression within cinematic signifying practices, and advancing the aesthetic...
Article
Andrew Ritchey
Issue 128
...us more about what is being classified” (24)? Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the distinction between a Left Bank group and the Nouvelle Vague still “tells us...