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SubStance Journal

Out Now Substance 166 Volume 54—No.1—2025 Tree Nathalie Dupont, Thangam Ravindranathan See Contents A place for creative thinking We invite theoretical interventions in a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields...
Article

The Monolingualism of the Human

Christopher Peterson
Issue 134
...to this retreat” (162). To whom does this print belong? Is it proof that his greatest fear is soon to materialize—namely, that he will be savagely devoured by a group...
Article

The New Digital Flesh of Fantastic Bodies

Denis Mellier, Charles La Via
Issue 147
...digital is opening up different perspectives as the body has been acquiring an authentic digital skin in recent fantastic cinema. Cartoonization of the body, plasticity, endoscopic journeys into bodies and...
Article

Animality and Contagion in Balzac’s Père Goriot

Travis Wilds
Issue 144
In his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously cites the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot as emblematic of modern realism. With...
Article

Yves Bonnefoy and the “Genius” of Language

Alexander Dickow
Issue 137
...that here and now, which he calls “Presence.” For Bonnefoy, poetry ought to open onto the epiphanic experience of Presence. Bonnefoy’s most famous work, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de...
Article

Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds

Will Bishop, Irving Goh
Issue 126
...tastes that they would not admit in their philosophical writings. In other words, touch opens up worlds—the world of oneself and the world of others, and even the hidden world...
Article

Fiery, Luminous, Scary

Erin Manning
Issue 126
...a demand: it asks the participant to relate, in this time of interaction, to the unfolding of the work. It asks the participant to be open to a certain unknowability,...
Article

Close Reading: A Preface

The Editors of SubStance
Issue 119
...of the confines of this perspective would be to open oneself to the project of a world literature, mentioned by Goethe in a conversation with Eckerman—that is, to understand the...
Article

Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary

Dominique Jullien
Issue 118
...they are not considered fit to be a serious basis for a philosophical discussion or scholarly elaboration, though they could open the way for one. In fact, one could apply...
Article

Introduction: Tree

Nathalie Dupont, Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 166
...the contrary, in trees. Walking on branches would have been an effective way of foraging in open-canopy forests, as well as of advancing otherwise—taking the “arboreal route”—through rocky terrain (Drummond-Clark...
Article

The Tree at the End of the World

Jennifer Gutman
Issue 166
...bowl of two gently sloping hills, its wide, generous branches fan out across a shifting canvas of open sky. In addition to its striking composition, the lone giant seemed to...
Article

Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future

Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
...on the side of an economically viable 21st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact...
Article

Jacques Derrida: Biography in Action

Jan Baetens
Issue 128
...biography recently published in France (and forthcoming in English translation at Polity Press) can be seen as an example of how to confront many of the difficulties presented by attempts...
Article

Olivier Rolin: Habitation in the Empiritext

Allan Stoekl
Issue 157
This essay is a discussion of two works by contemporary French writer Olivier Rolin: Le Météorologue (2014) and Bakou, derniers jours (2010), both examples of empiritext, a contemporary genre of...
Article

Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission

Eric Méchoulan, Angela Carr
Issue 138
...art or a specific medium. Consider the example that cinema provides: “its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity....
Article

Storylines

Jared Gardner
Issue 124
...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...
Article

The Body of Light and the Body without Organs

William Behum
Issue 121
Among the most problematic of the main concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is the Body without Organs (BwO.) This paper undertakes to examine the BwO in the light of...
Article

Breathren

Katherine Ibbett
Issue 160
...the Protestant minority, under increasing and violent pressure from the Catholic state, met his example with a last gasp of their own. The term “souffle” is everywhere in the martyrologies...
Article

Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene

Emily McAvan
Issue 164
In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam –waste washed-up or discarded in water –as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken...
Article

Bernard Réquichot, Writing Tree

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 166
...consciously on this ‘illusory writing’ and noticed that when it tended to combine rhythmically with itself, a second illusion was born: the image of something vague, often biological and naturalistic....
Article

The Livid Tree

Sandy Alexandre
Issue 166
...consulted for this fact in popular culture, they are, in fact, embodiments of social knowledge trained on the vast archive of our human antics; see, for example, the omniscient ur-tree...
Article

Journal Supplement: Roger Caillois Mineral Collection

Paul A. Harris
Issue 146
Selections from Caillois’s renowned mineral collection are paired with passages from his early book The Writings of Stones. This gallery provides a rich backdrop for reading the excerpts from Caillois’s...
Article

Appreciating Appreciation

Charles F. Altieri
Issue 131
...and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but...