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Phobic Postcards: Preview
If the greatest philosopher in the world finds himself upon a plank wider than actually necessary, but hanging over a precipice, his imagination will prevail, though his reason convince him...
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The Linguistic Return: Deconstruction as Textual Messianism
...began as “a protest against” it: “The irony … of the story is that often, especially in the United States, because I wrote ‘il n’y a pas de hors-text,’ because...
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Staging Blanchot
...a letter I received from Blanchot about my project, recall the testimonies I collected from contemporaries and friends, and discuss the editorial resistance the biography encountered. At the time, I...
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Politics and Ontology of the Image: Godard’s Debt to Blanchot
...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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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...
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Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies (review)
Herman Lebovics’s latest collection of essays, sketchy in its argumentation, frequently off-topic, and rife with errors, is a disappointing treatment of a promising subject. The book’s objective is “to trace...
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The Monolingualism of the Human
...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...
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David Mitchell’s Fractal Imagination: The Bone Clocks
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, the latest iteration of his fractal imagination, follows a central character’s life through six decades in six sections that simultaneously succeed as stand-alone stories. Protagonist...
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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...
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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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The Role of Multimodal Imagery in Life Writing
...as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine...
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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...
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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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Machinations of the Senses
...functioning like the accelerator of a motorbike, ridden by an adolescent, screaming through the housing projects in the middle of the night… Examples of gestures to analyze, each with a...
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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...
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The End of Prediction? AI Technologies in a No-Analog World
...oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency...
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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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Subversive Threat or Utopian Revolution? Negotiating Spanish Peasant Uprisings around 1900 through Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s La bodega (1905)
...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....
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Bernard Réquichot, Writing Tree
...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....
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The Livid Tree
...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...
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“A Divided Self and a Doubled World”: On Stanley Cavell’s Perfectionism
This essay attempts to present a new interpretation of American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s perfectionism. Against most readings, it argues that Cavell’s work is fundamentally “transcendental” in logic, seeking to posit...
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Introduction
...made significant changes. This issue marks our fourth issue of publishing with Johns Hopkins University Press in a transition that recognizes our new publisher as a leader among university presses....
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Literature Matters Today
...Newsletter of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is called Wilderness Matters, punning on the word as a noun and as a verb. We might say, analogously, “Literature...
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The Question of the Woman-Machine: Gender, Thermodynamics, and Hysteria in the Nineteenth Century
...woman-machine? This essay traces the origin and development what could be called the hysterical woman-machine that was born in the mid-nineteenth century when the new materialist science produced thermodynamic and...
Article
Impact, or The Business of the University
...the sort provoked by the Thatcher initiative and its eventual codification in the form of the newest version of the REF. It has been developing in a more insidious and...
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Surrealist Ghostliness by Katharine Conley, and: Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dali and the Aesthetics of the Small by Roger Rothman (review)
...production of obscure texts, surrealism was revisited as a dynamic art movement and gained a position in the narratives of modernist art. Parallel blockbuster exhibitions in London, Paris, and New...
Issue
SubStance 127
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Authentic Landscapes at Large: Dutch Globalization and Environmental Imagination
...May and I am sitting in the train to Alkmaar, a town forty miles north of Amsterdam, reading the newspaper and occasionally glancing at the familiar landscapes. The green polder-pasture...
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A Home for the Ghosts: On the Diorama as Inhabited Landscape
...living and the dead in present-day Cambodia; visual amnesia in the form of unmarked killing fields and forgotten landscapes; and new practices of reading the inhabited terrains of the Anthropocene....
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Tellurian Nietzsche and the (Un)inhabitable Eternal Return
...“Nietzschean ecology” would force us to fatefully dance with the radical reckoning that the only time we can inhabit is the moment, collapsing means and ends for a new eco-ethics....
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Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas (review)
...life in America; and his own artistic vision was in some ways closer to New York avant-garde aesthetics than to those encountered in mainstream Parisian culture. Thomas argues that Perec...
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Introduction: Rock Records
...occult lithography. As the initial issue in a new digital/intermedial series of SubStance aimed at interweaving creative and critical work, Rock Records also features digital versions of essays with photo-rich...
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Viewing Stones:
...these traditions and are creating new ways of displaying stones. Petraphiles, whether ancient or contemporary, are often drawn to express their appreciation of favored stones in writing. The Petraphiles represented...
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Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation
...about philosophy. When I left chemistry, I knew that in chemistry there were “good questions,” concerned with advancing knowledge, and any other question would not be considered serious. And to...
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Animality and Contagion in Balzac’s Père Goriot
...their minute description of the boardinghouse, where much of the novel’s action takes place, these pages emphasize physical setting, Auerbach argues, in a way new to Western literature. Yet Balzac’s...
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Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives
Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some...
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At the Aphasiac’s Table: Archive Anxiety.docx
...a football player of the period, a half-finished jigsaw of a seventeenth-century Dutch interior, a toy skunk, a newly bound dissertation, a two-inch tall baobab tree lying on its side,...
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Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds
...also awaken, in the one whose shoulder is tapped or whose skin is brushed against, an aspect of the self that he or she never knew existed, an aspect that...
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Consider the Dragonfly: Cary Wolfe’s Posthumanism
...kind much at all in this otherwise erudite, wide-ranging, and impressive new book. But the cover art points toward the “two different senses of posthumanism” (xix) that are brought together...
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Electromagnetic Thought in Balzac, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Joseph Breuer
...between two forces of nature–electricity and magnetism–distinguished by their own physical laws. Thus the advent of electromagnetism and its subsequent applications–most notably the dynamo–provided a new physical model for conceptualizing...
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The Revolutionary Unconscious: Deleuze and Masoch
...disease, distinguished it from cases with which it had until then been confused, by determining and grouping the symptoms in a new and decisive manner” (125). The clear implication of...
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Writing in Pain: Literature, History, and the Culture of Denial (review)
...salutary ethical effects, “the troubling perception has to penetrate our defenses[emphasis added], reactivating prior memory traces and laying down new ones” while drawing on both individual and collective recollections (5)....
Issue
SubStance 113
Article
Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery”
...seem that to renew reason philosophy would have to take account of dimensions of objects not reducible to objectivity. If the Enlightenment arbitrarily and disastrously reduced reason to formulas of...
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Self-Translation as Minorization Process: Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo
...writers of Beckett’s and Nabokov’s caliber. Like Beckett and Nabokov, contemporary translingual authors adopt a new language, often following geographical displacement either due to political, religious, or social restrictions and/or...