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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...
Search results for 'Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice'
Article
Politics of Foliage
It is peculiar, and perhaps formidable, that in several languages a feuille de papier (a sheet of paper) has the same name as a feuille d’arbre (tree leaf), which bears...
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Téléphone arabe
...one of my films.” – Raoul Ruiz Definition In French, the expression “téléphone arabe” has two meanings: 1) An oral communication and, furthermore, a rumor or unreliable information; 2) A...
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Phobic Postcards
...resolved to adopt Bachelard’s cure, and submit to a sort of an imaginary training. It is like re-accomplishing the labors of Hercules so as to master in imagination all kinds...
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A Gathering in a Forest: The Unsettling Environment and Culinary Ethics of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe
A meal is often a gathering: a group of people coming together to share food. A meal is always a “gathering” in the sense that Bruno Latour uses the word...
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Astronomy as Intermedia: 19th Century Optical Mobilism and Cosmopolitics
Clouds are therefore a fine metaphor for intermediary and automatic beings… Trees too are clouds: only, they are slower at occupying space. (Quéau) In the new landscape of media archaeology—especially...
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Breathing Emily Dickinson: Inspiration/Expiration
...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...
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Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission
Intermediality has become a fashionable concept: it appears whenever we speak about what we once referred to easily as the medium or media, of systems and apparatuses, mises en scène...
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Pitiable or Political Animals?
...preponderance today of a public pity for what is here posed only in the subjunctive. It is a pity about which a veritable war has been waged for two centuries...
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Violence dans la raison? Conflit et cruauté by Marcel Hénaff (review)
I will begin with the end. Marcel Hénaff’s sudden death in June 2018 opened a space of silence and surely did not prepare me to speak or write publicly about...
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Introduction: From Engagé to Indigné: French Cinema and the Crises of Globalization
...the French Resistance to the Nazi Occupation and to rise to the defense of freedom, democracy and social justice, the values for which his generation fought so valiantly. Almost a...
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The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason Demers (review)
...capital, a notion derived from Pierre Bourdieu; and “networks of feeling” (5n), a term the author borrowed from Raymond Williams. Demers observes, for example, that there was a relay or...
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What the Pines Do Not Know
On July 12, 2022, a van caught fire on a small road, the “piste 214,” that winds through the pine forest towards the beach south of La Teste. After several...
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From Breadfruit to Oranges: Haitian Tales of Belonging
In Haiti’s rural regions, like the one where my mother grew up, it is customary for midwives to preserve the umbilical cord of newborns. The navel string is then grafted...
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A Far-Future Paleontology: The Baffling Case of Brunaspis enigmatica
...for many paleontologists been a blessedly human-free zone, detached from the busy realities of our everyday lives. The science of paleontology, though, is simply one obscure part of a burgeoning...
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Narrating Threads of Transgression: Intensive Animal Agriculture in Contemporary Literature
...that inhabit its spaces. This article addresses the latest configuration of this phenomenon, examining a selection of twenty-first century novels (among them Isabelle Sorente’s 180 jours, Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn...
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Vulnerability of “Virtual” Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence
...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,...
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Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time
...what she sees as a wasteland of lumpen, non-productive whingers. Yet her epic free-market fantasy centers on a utopia populated by refuseniks—industrialists, bankers, academics, engineers, artists—who have fled to a...
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Mutants We All: Jean-Louis Schefer and our Cinematic Civilization
...memory-free instant of the passing image. This is the cinema, our world with cinema in it, our cinematic experience, according to Jean-Louis Schefer. In the enigmatic tone and unorthodox style...
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In/habitable
...to produce, as the condition and obverse of all in the world that is beautiful and comfortable (i.e., giving one a sense of security, identity, freedom, opportunity, growth, meaning), another...
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Authenticity and Distantiation from Oneself: An Ethico-Political Problem
Scholars have often taken Foucault by his words and insisted that his philosophy is completely at odds and opposed to Sartre’s—and Beauvoir’s—existentialism. However, it is my contention that Foucault’s own...
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Derrida and Durkheim on Suffering
...law, rights, justice, freedom and morality. For Émile Durkheim, founder of the French sociological tradition, the question of society is one such great question.1 Indeed, it was the question for...
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Black Rain: The Apocalyptic Aesthetic and the Spectator’s Ethical Challenge in (Israeli) Theater
The present article will examine this constant tension between the dangerously seductive power of the apocalyptic aesthetic, on the one hand, and the inherently ethical intent of apocalyptic art, on...
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The Lily of the Valley, or Love as Breathing in the Scent
...woman’s scent, which re-enchants his morose universe, dazzles him with its brilliance and eclipses vision by taking possession of its attributes. It is only afterward that he begins to examine...
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Cultural Necromancy: Digital Resurrection and Hegemonic Incorporation
...the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance....
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Poetry, Philosophy, and Smart AI
Here I look at sundry aspects of the current controversy about Generative AI and, in particular, the implications of this new and rapidly evolving technology for poetry, the arts, and...
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The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism by Delphine Bénézet (review)
Varda’s longtime moniker, “Grandmother” of the French New Wave, conjures the image of a “little old woman, pleasantly plump and talkative”–a description that Varda herself uses in Les Plages d’Agnès...
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Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope
...and the latest news: Europe’s taxpayers have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles. So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or,...
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Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities (review)
In his latest book, Jean-Pierre Boulé provides a fresh look at Sartre by conducting a reading of the author’s life and work that focuses on the construction of selfhood and...
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Subtle Bodies and the Other Jouissance
...longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects,” Butler writes, “a new configuration of politics would surely emerge...
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La carte et le territoire (review)
La carte et le territoire, winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt and Michel Houellebecq’s first novel since La possibilité d’une île in 2005, may be the author’s most compelling work...
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The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On
...narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title...
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Preface: Fidelity to the Unruly
The late twentieth century witnessed unprecedented attention to ethics in literary studies. The notion of an “Ethical Turn” was in fact coined to attest to this burgeoning academic interest. Unfortunately...
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Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives
In Nick Abadzis’s Laika (2007), a graphic narrative based on historical events surrounding the use of dogs as “test pilots” in the early days of the Soviet space program, the...
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Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time by John H. Muse (review)
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...
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Introduction: Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy
In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion...
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The Will for Self-Preservation: Locke and Derrida on Dominion, Property and Animals
...significantly impact the research questions posed by some disciplines. Political philosophy is one example of this. Although recently we have seen the emergence of new work in this area from...
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Storylines
...narrative, for example, one could have imagined narrative theory beating a hasty retreat. After all, as Metz reminds us, film is not a language system; it has no easy equivalent...
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Coarticulation: Mutual Transformation in Human and Nonhuman Relations
...even more apparent. How do you represent a nonhuman that can neither speak nor oppose in the traditional sense? Responses to this challenge have been diverse. For example, one strand...
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Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda
...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...
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Writing our Lives to Live Them: The Cognitive Forms of a Narrative Medicine
Life-writing combines, collates, or colludes many lives into one text. No work of fiction, biography, poetry, drama, memoir, journaling, blogging, or autobiography—all of them life-writing—does not do this, either blatantly...
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Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B
...IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well...
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4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet by Karin Kukkonen (review)
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition) is the defining feature of second-generation cognitive science, which replaces a computer-like cognitive processing model with one that highlights the interactive dynamism...
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Race, Class, and the Limits of the Analogical Imagination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African America
...history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the...
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Gaia Politics, Critique, and the “Planetary Imaginary”
In this article, I examine Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers’s recent writings on Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope....
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Closing Thoughts: Benjamin to Brecht
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;...
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Titanic Times: Epimetheus and Prometheus between Différance and Deferred Action
...said, ‘you shall examine’” (320d). So Epimetheus distributed to each animal qualities according to a principle of equilibrium and compensation, each becoming either swift or strong, skilled or large, and...
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The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal
In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily...
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Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)
...or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas....
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Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned
...pace that allows not only for frequent mention of things to be discussed (for example, that the reason of the strongest is always the best), but also for looping back...