Article

Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns

Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Issue 122
...those of a modern comedy. Beckett—whose theater, when “completed” correctly, is truly hilarious—was well aware of this. (75) Now of course the comedy Badiou has in mind here is not...
Article

A Breath of Fresh Air: Or, Why the Body is Not Embodied

Tim Ingold
Issue 160
...complementarity, pitching western naturalists into a world of bodies and indigenous animists into a world of vapors–both demi-worlds which, if only they could be combined, would make a perfect whole–I...
Article

The Postlingual Turn

yasser elhariry, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Issue 154
...the words we are producing on this page right here. It is, second, an axiom about the technologies of religion, media, communication, performance, translation, and circulation that distribute and also...
Article

Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science

Amy Cook
Issue 110
...player king weep for Hecuba. Nothing is the thing that makes up the king. Nothing comes up thirty times in Hamlet.2 The presence of nothing in the text calls attention...
Article

Literature and Evolution

Paul Hernadi
Issue 94/95
...no definition of it commands wide-spread acceptance. 5 One thing seems to me very clear, however: Despite the etymological derivation of “literature” from littera, the Latin word for “letter,” it...
Article

Report on Lydie Salvayre’s Subversive Classicism

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 104
“Tout le monde abomine les explications de texte, c’est bien connu. Il n’y a que les professeurs de français pour ne pas le comprendre et commenter pesamment ce qui ne...
Article

Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language

Josette Feral, Ronald P. Bermingham
Issue 98/99
...kinds of spectacle—dance, performance art, or multi-media art. It is to bring the nature of theater itself into focus against a background of individual theatrical practices, theories of stage-play, and...
Article

Theatricality from the Performative Perspective

Virginie Magnat
Issue 98/99
...and research grounded in the French philosopher’s conception of theater contribute to further widen the chasm between theory and practice, for Diderot’s view implies disregarding the process-oriented nature of performance...
Article

The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality

Janelle G. Reinelt
Issue 98/99
...struggles,” enables a challenge to the limits of these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to rethink and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation....
Article

Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality

Timothy Murray
Issue 98/99
...Consider the paradoxical situation of theatricality as it moves into the twenty-first century. Enhanced by the dazzling images of computer wizardry and the magical resonance of digitized sound, the public...
Article

Tarkos Births a Vowel

yasser elhariry
Issue 154
...conditions and possibilities of its own rebirth. I take Tarkos’s first recorded video performance as a point of departure for contextualizing the landscape of contemporary French poetry, then define the...
Article

Language After Heidegger by Krzysztof Ziarek (review)

José Felipe Alvergue
Issue 140
...of these works, which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, builds a useful bridge between Heidegger’s philosophy on language and the performance of language itself. This distinction, which Ziarek...
Article

Abstraction in Comics

Jan Baetens
Issue 124
The study of narrative in comics (which I will use as a general term covering both mainstream comics and more highbrow graphic novels) has often been a mere copy of...
Article

Two Narracts

Antoine Volodine, Ben Streeter
Issue 160
...l’horreur de la nuit continuait. Il courait au hasard, comme s’il était poursuivi ou comme s’il avait commis un crime. Les repères manquaient, rien n’était visible, et il comptait sur...
Article

Philosophers’ Walks by Bruce Baugh (review)

Tim Ingold
Issue 163
...be shy or socially awkward at the best of times–hanker for solitude, but they also crave the company of fellow literati. Hence their compulsive shuttling, back and forth, between town...
Article

Be Strong, Breathe

Évelyne Trouillot
Issue 160
...wind. Where am I? Come on! You can do it. Be strong. Come on, breathe! All my life I wanted to breathe, and now that they are urging me to,...
Article

Learning to Breathe | FiveFragments Against Racism

B. Venkat Mani
Issue 160
...Barrackpore, Northern India. My name was Mangal Pandey, you called me a Sepoy. You hanged me for standing up against my subjugation by your British East India Company. Against your...
Article

Introduction: Comics and The Anarchist Imagination

Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Ole Birk Laursen
Issue 143
This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on comics and the anarchist imagination. The curators of the 2014 British Library exhibition, “Comics Unmasked: Art and...
Article

Comics, Form, and Anarchy

Frederik Byrn Køhlert
Issue 143
At least since their modern inception in the late nineteenth century, comics have been deeply entwined with anti-authoritarian politics and resistance. As the various contributors to this special issue point...
Article

Conspiring (Sympnea and Dyspnea)

Peter Szendy
Issue 160
...as simple as it is haunting, is inescapable: if breathing is never complete or completed (jamais définitive, writes Coccia in French), if it has to return again and again, isn’t...
Article

The Freedom to Breathe

Jan Söffner
Issue 160
...mere comparison: People who are suppressed and metaphorically lack the air to breathe would then simply compare their lives to the suffocation of George Floyd; the similarity between their suppression...
Article

Breathing: Proustian Therapy

Christopher Prendergast
Issue 160
...is distilled into comedy, all terrifying thoughts temporarily banished as Proust the satirist comes out to play. His young narrator suffers periodic breathing “crises,” but for the most part these...
Article

Comment ne pas trembler?: Derrida’s Earthquake

Laurence Simmons
Issue 132
Jacques Derrida began a lecture entitled “Comment ne pas trembler,” that he delivered on 17 July 2004 at the Fondazione Europea del Disegno in Meina on the shores of Lago...
Article

French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (review)

Andrew Sobanet
Issue 119
In a thought-provoking and well-researched new book, Richard Golsan explores the politics of complicity in two heterogeneous groups of French writers. Focusing on the 1940s and the 1990s, Golsan analyzes...
Article

Chance, Progress and Complexity in Biological Evolution

Remy Lestienne
Issue 91
...hard time living without it. This is why the reminder of what evolution owes to chance, coming from certain contemporary biologists and paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, is salutory. The...
Article

Pierre Alferi: Compressing and Disconnecting

Agnès Disson, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 123
“L’Hypothèse du compact” is the title of a text by the poet Jacques Roubaud that appeared in the first issue of the Revue de Littérature Générale in 1995, edited at...
Article

Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream)

Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 140
It seems that brain, thought and computer have become intertwined and now share a common fate. An important part of neuroscience not only requires a computational paradigm but also relies...