Article
Dominique Jullien
Issue 118
...smaller news items),obviously have significant overlap. One could propose that anecdotes are little stories about big people, while faits divers are stories about little people made big by publicity or...
Article
Marcel Hénaff, Jean-Louis Morhange
Issue 118
...a term and as a genre until the 17th century. The word literally designates what is new: a fact or detail that was unknown to the public and had not...
Article
Alison Ross
Issue 118
...on politics, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière holds that events able to disturb a prevailing distribution of order may be understood as instituting new conventions of meaning, and thus must...
Article
Timothy Morton
Issue 117
...avoid “new and improved” versions that end up doing much the same thing (systems theory, Spinozan pantheism, or Deleuze-and-Guattari type worlds of interlocking machines, and so on), just in a...
Article
Alexis Rider, Paul A. Harris
Issue 162
...in complex webs among bodies born of chiasmic crossings of Anthro-progeny and Geo-orogeny. Conceived as a companion almanac to Jemisin’s trilogy—though references to that work are intentionally oblique—the volume pursues...
Article
Bryan Norton
Issue 163
...mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis’s poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new...
Article
Florian Cord
Issue 164
...change in cultural sensibility. A new mode of theorizing and a novel structure of feeling have emerged: the reparative. Repair, at heart, can be characterized as a “broken world thinking”...
Article
Nathalie Dupont, Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 166
...and write, and cry? What stories would the tree tell us if we knew how to perceive its signs, decipher its alphabets, venture through its lines? If we only made...
Article
Antoine Traisnel
Issue 166
...Darwin’s tree of life; from the Neoplatonic Arbor Porphyriana to Chomsky’s syntax trees, which respectively subsume substances and language under arborescent structures; from the apple tree to which Newton reputedly...
Article
Vesna Kuiken
Issue 166
...Among the wildfires’ nonhuman victims was America’s oldest banyan tree—initially presumed dead when the fire torched one third of it, but a few months later seen sprouting new leaves. ...
Article
Karen Quandt
Issue 166
On 15 April 2019, when the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris erupted into flames, news outlets and social media responded with their own rapidly spreading fire of allusions to Victor Hugo’s...
Article
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François
Issue 166
...figure of Joséphin in Devi’s 2003 poetic novella, La vie de Joséphin le fou, with Aimé Césaire’s “Le cri,” and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Lionnet’s comparative analysis reveals...
Article
Gry Ulstein
Issue 156
...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...
Page
Page
For over 50 years, SubStance has published rigorous, creative contributions to contemporary critical debates from a range of theoretical perspectives. Consistent with our commitment to readers and authors to expect...
Page
...length is usually between 7,000 and 8,000 words. Please edit longer articles so the argument comes forward succinctly. Hybrid pieces length will be considered on an individual basis. Our review...
Article
Kevin Bell
Issue 155
...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
John Brenkman
Issue 155
...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
Reading After Blanchot
Article
Essi Varis
Issue 148
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:...
Article
Will Higbee
Issue 133
...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...
Article
Rosalind Galt
Issue 133
...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...
Article
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Issue 133
...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...
Article
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Issue 132
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...
Article
Patrick Colm Hogan
Issue 131
...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,...
Article
Paul Giles
Issue 131
...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...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 131
...in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present” (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the “developmental trajectories” of stories can...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
Contemporary companion robots are designed to be the least uncanny creatures or the most endearing ones. But, of course, it is a bit uncanny to specifically design un-uncanny creatures....
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
...of the public and the construction of a common ground. On the contrary, it seems that this allows the university to be appropriated by those with the means to do...
Issue
Impact Boom! The Commodification of the University
Article
Adelheid Voskuhl
Issue 147
...the relationship between mechanistic philosophy and mechanical artisanship correlate with our methodological and epistemic commitments, such as intellectual history, Marxist social history, or internalism and externalism, and also with our...
Article
Sydney Levy
Issue 147
What does it take to make a machine that you may love and that has the potential of loving you back? It is the necessary conceptual components, as opposed to...
Article
Mark Steven
Issue 147
...cinema has evolved. These two theses are explored concurrently as they advance through the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, evolving a visual language of what Badiou calls “minimal communism.”...
Article
Taylor Schey
Issue 130
But just what sort of Oedipus complex does Freud depict in Totem and Taboo? His entire account of the murder and the history it unfolds concerns the actions of a...
Article
Henriette Heidbrink
Issue 130
...rely on well-known narrative schemata, and on the other hand they comprise something that is actually impossible: alternative futures. One central thesis raised by spokespersons of the forking-path-debate claims that,...
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 129
...a methodological point of view, they share the same scrupulous concern with the text and the same conceptual richness that allows them to combine, with exemplary rigor, philology and philosophy....
Article
Peter Consenstein
Issue 129
...[1995]), as well as a seven-volume (and “six-branch”) “récit autobiographique,” which David Bellos has compared to the work of Marcel Proust.1 The three books Roubaud published in 2008 and 2009,...
Article
Andrew Ritchey
Issue 128
...us more about what is being classified” (24)? Perhaps the time has come to ask whether the distinction between a Left Bank group and the Nouvelle Vague still “tells us...
Article
Michael Jay Lewis
Issue 128
...that what prevents the logical use of fictional narrative as a model for actual behavior is not a discrepancy but rather a similarity between the two signifying fields: the common...
Article
Vincent B. Leitch
Issue 128
...interest, scholarly and popular receptions. This work is not an intellectual history, nor is it a hagiography, nor an exemplary life. Instead, it combines biography of Derrida’s personal life, professional...
Article
Ursula K. Heise
Issue 127
...them public. The slogan “Think globally, act locally,” coined by René Dubos in 1970, similarly summed up environmentalists’ commitment to a vision of planetary connectedness, as did Kenneth Boulding and...
Article
Vanessa Doriott Anderson
Issue 127
...Magazine littéraire dossier devoted to Modiano, Maryline Heck, the dossier’s editor, announced the author’s “entry into the pantheon of French academia” while adding that “it seems the time has come...
Article
Ellen Spolsky
Issue 159
...her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying...
Article
Lisa Zunshine
Issue 159
...1976), available at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The author shows that later versions of Patterns of Childhood have more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist’s relationship...
Article
Casey Schoenberger
Issue 159
...this paper uses the notion of “biological handicap,” proposed by Amotz Zahavi. As a peacock’s cumbersome tail feathers reduce its individual chances of survival but communicate valuable information to potential...
Article
Chris Crews
Issue 159
...Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities...
Article
Églantine Colon
Issue 158
...any other “post-exotic” text (I will come back to this label shortly). One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of...
Article
Ben Streeter, Antoine Volodine
Issue 158
...was a can of beer or of Coke. Empty, light, the tin cylinder followed its noisy course then stopped, no doubt because it had come up against heavier, grimier trash....
Article
Saswat S. Das
Issue 158
Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence attempts a creative mapping of the forces of nonviolence. With leading thinkers of the world coming up with creative cartographies of violence, Butler’s mapping...
Article
Kamil Lipiński
Issue 158
In Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography, Paolo Magagnoli has undertaken the complex task of linking different aesthetic contexts through a study of experimental documentary audiovisual projects, treating...