Article
Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary
...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...
Search results for 'Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary'
Article
The Joy of Uprising and the Fear of the State: On Blanchot’s Insurrectional Writings (1968–1969)
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
Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future
...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...
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Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (review)
...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...
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Jacques Derrida: Biography in Action
...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...
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Anthropocene Horcruxes: Toward a Theory of Distributed Identities
...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...
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Olivier Rolin: Habitation in the Empiritext
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
Critique of Alien Reason: Toward a Critical Interplanetary Humanities
...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,...
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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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Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission
...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....
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The Creolization of Theory ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (review)
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...
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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...
Article
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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French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (review)
...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...
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The Body of Light and the Body without Organs
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...
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The “Poor Thing”: The Cosmopolitan in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things
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
Breathren
...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...
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Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene
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...
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Vulnerability, Longing, and Stigma in Hélène Cixous’s: The Day I Wasn’t There
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...
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Journal Supplement: Roger Caillois Mineral Collection
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...
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Appreciating Appreciation
...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...
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Rethinking “Impact”: Between the Attention Economy and The Readerless Republic of Letters
...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...
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Individuation and Knowledge: The “refutation of idealism” in Simondon’s Heritage in France
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...
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The Immeasurably Creative Politics of Job: Antonio Negri and the Bible
...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....
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Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas (review)
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...
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Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophical Fabulations: The Importance of a ‘New Aesthetic Paradigm’
...“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...
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David Mitchell in the Laboratory of Time: An Interview with the Author
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...
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Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual
...my review essay of Hallward’s book I argued that he was correct to bring attention to the neglected spiritual aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy, but that his negative valuation of this...
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The Anecdote: Introduction
...be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be...
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From Antidote to Anecdote: Montaigne on Dissemblance
...be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be...
Article
Jean Genet: Politics and Performance (review)
...full-length studies of Genet’s theater published in English since 1990 (I wrote one of them, while Brian Kennelly’s book on Genet’s posthumously published plays is the other), and there have...
Issue
Substance 33/34
Issue
Substance 82
Article
Wandering the Magnetosphere
Navigation notes: These emergent drawings–excerpts from a visual essay–take up the complex network of impacts across physical forces entangled with bio-geo-political time. A key element for this work is a...
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Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique by Nathan Brown (review)
Nathan Brown’s Rationalist Empiricism is, above all, a book about philosophical method. It is also a highly significant study of the conceptual architecture of Marxism, developed by way of a...
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Heights They Should Never Have Scaled: Our (Weird) Planet
...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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At Play
Article
“As Nameless as a Flower”: The Exhaustions and Excesses of Outliving in Ganja & Hess
...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
Varieties of Nothing
...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
SubStance 143
Article
Clon’d, or a Note on Propagation
...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,...
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The Monster Analogy: Why Fictional Characters are Frankenstein’s Monsters
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:...
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Preview: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin
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...
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Hope and Indignation in Fortress Europe: Immigration and Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary French Cinema
...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...
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Claire Denis and the World Cinema of Refusal
...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...
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Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art
...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...
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Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action
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...
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Art and Value: An Essay in Three Voices
...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,...
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Aesthetic Matters: Literature and the Politics of Disorientation
...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...