Article
Anne-Gaëlle Saliot
Issue 155
...with a political romanticism, and at times even with a “revolutionary romanticism” determined by a shared dialogue with German Romanticism and “a fragmentary demand” allied with the strength of protest...
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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
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
Joe Larios
Issue 148
In this paper, Levinas’s concept of fraternity is shown to rely upon an exclusion of beings deemed “faceless” and open for appropriation. By limiting ethics to humans, Levinas established nonhumans...
Article
Simone Drichel
Issue 132
...being helpless? Or have we taken a wrong turn already, in the opening paragraph, before we have even had a chance to get under way in our consideration of vulnerability?...
Article
Simone Drichel
Issue 132
Why open this essay—which seeks to address the question of vulnerability via the vexed relationship between deconstruction and postcolonial studies—with what even Attridge himself acknowledges to be a “rather contrived...
Article
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
Rok Benčin
Issue 144
...in Raoul Ruiz’s film adaptation, Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999), photographs are used by the director to set the world of the novel into motion. Does the opening scene, which...
Article
T. Hugh Crawford
Issue 144
...not usually regarded as a philosopher overly concerned with embodiment, I have found Alfred North Whitehead’s work offers a set of concepts that opens up the domain of thinking as...
Article
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
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
Lynda Ng
Issue 136
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a novel intent on blasting open the classical unities of time and place. On publication in 2004, its unusual structure made it a talking-point for...
Article
Jocelyn Holland
Issue 135
...sea. It is the moment when Archimedes the mathematician launches a half-built ship with the aid of one of his inventions. Further details and further interpretations are open to debate....
Article
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
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
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
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
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
Jonathan Basile
Issue 166
...their own pedigree with this tree. By questioning its roots, we open ourselves to other suspicions of the legacies—Abrahamic and ontotheological—that we may unknowingly or compulsively repeat or inherit today....
Article
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
Jean-François Hamel, Bernard Schutze
Issue 155
This article aims to highlight the politics of emotions that govern Maurice Blanchot’s insurrectional writings. Starting from the example of Simone Weil, who contrasted the “joy” of the general strike...
Article
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
Frederick Luis Aldama
Issue 129
...mental capacity to ascribe a function to objects (a chair is to sit, etc.) and an essence to living creatures (the posited unchanging, ungraspable spirit or soul, for example). Zunshine’s...
Article
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
Niels Wilde
Issue 158
...Anthropos? The latter examines the ethical challenges we face in the wake of deep timespans and fragmented agencies. This article presents the upshots of this ongoing debate and suggests an...
Article
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
Joshua Schuster
Issue 157
...and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with a reflection on the trope of contact between humans,...
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
Martin Savransky
Issue 145
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...
Article
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
Roxanna Curto
Issue 135
This volume examines the notion of “creolization,” from its origins as a “historical process specific to particular colonial sites”(viii) to its later use as a more general theme, applicable to...
Article
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
Issue 134
...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...
Article
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
Nilo F. Couret
Issue 123
...Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanism, Peter J. Bloom examines the myriad uses to which the documentary image was put during the interwar period, arguing that the representation of a pre-civilized...
Article
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
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Issue 117
A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”—a text I will examine later—the perfect operation of...
Article
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
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
Teresa Hiergeist
Issue 165
...bodega as example, it considers bourgeois nightmare scenarios of a complot of uncivilized, menacing masses, as well as anarchist and socialist visions of a classless society created by direct action....
Article
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
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
Sonja Boon
Issue 132
Using Hélène Cixous’s three-legged dog, a recurring trope in her book The Day I Wasn’t There, I will consider what Cixous’s philosophy might offer to the articulation of a politics...
Article
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
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...
Article
Yves Citton
Issue 130
...articles and books are made to be read (by a maximum of people), whereas we should accept the fact that they are mostly made to be written—independently of who does...
Article
Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Mark Hayward, Arne De Boever
Issue 129
In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher...
Article
Roland Boer
Issue 129
...of Job (2009), a detailed philosophical exegesis of the “marvelous” biblical book of Job.Two features of Negri’s analysis stand out: the oppositions of kairós and ákairos, and measure and immeasure....
Article
Warren Motte
Issue 149
In the early pages of this study, Jean-Jacques Thomas confesses that it was not his intention to write a book on Perec. Rather, he was interested in the manner in...
Article
Melanie Sehgal
Issue 145
...“the invention of modern science” described by Stengers in her seminal book with just this title. Understood in this historical sense as the philosophical discipline founded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
The following interview was conducted by email from September 2014 to January 2015. I am grateful to David Mitchell for extending himself during a busy book tour marking the publication...