Article
Introduction: Reading After Blanchot
...So how, if at all, does Blanchot speak to the present? Responses to this question are quickly complicated by the rich and varied reception of his work. A lifelong friend...
Search results for 'Introduction: Reading After Blanchot'
Article
Life Writing, Identity, and the Classroom: Perspectives from Social and Educational Psychology
The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized...
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La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)
Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to...
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La conversation transatlantique: Les échanges franco-américains en poésie depuis 1968 by Abigail Lang (review)
...and studying French and/or American poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century was keenly aware of the fruitfulness of the exchanges between French and American poets. This book archives,...
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Less Than One Language: Typographic Multilingualism and Post-Anglophone Fiction
What comes after the language model of literary history? This essay considers that question by turning to works of contemporary fiction that operate at the edges of our most dominant...
Article
Introduction
...departing significantly from the state-centered and reformist policies of the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano, PCI). The theoretical investigations of the workerists were rooted in an intense practical engagement...
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Politics and Philosophy in the Red Years: Badiou, Sartre, Althusser and the Problematic of Suture
This essay approaches Alain Badiou’s theoretical production during the period of militant fury commenced by May ‘68 in terms of his conflicted relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Badiou’s...
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Image and Intuition in Beckett’s Film
Working from a detailed diary Beckett wrote of his thoughts on painting while travelling through Germany and visiting art galleries before World War II, and directed by comments made by...
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“The Authenticity of Exile” between Blanchot and Levinas
In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations...
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Everything: Totality and Self-Representation, from Past to Present
This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive recording of a life. As long ago as 1762, Diderot wrote in a letter to his love, Sophie Volland: How...
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Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (review)
Pity the academic book reviewer! Inflation in the language of review is akin to what has happened to letters of recommendation: as a colleague recently observed, hiring and promotion committees...
Article
Introduction: Film and / as Ethics
...that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be...
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The Syndrome of the Thermometer: Two Machines for Reading Thoughts
...more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He...
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Roland Barthes: A Beginner’s Guide (review)
...is still commented, seminars are still devoted to his work and, in Paris, the Beaubourg Cultural Center recently organized a six-month long exhibit devoted to his life, his times and...
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Uprooting Violence:Transgenerational Legacies and Entangled Memories in Ananda Devi’s L’arbre fouet
...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...
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Introduction: Translation Matters
...in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody...
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Delay, Estrangement, Loss: The Meanings of Translation in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985)
The common denominator of any translation is delay: this delay is a matter of time and space, a temporal displacement (which is one of the ways of defining “translation”), a...
Article
Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten
...Time Heidegger offers a way of coming to understand the human as temporally fixed as both futural and as a site of an aporetic historicality: in other words Being comes...
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The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
It should come as no surprise that the Wachowskis elected to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 tour de force Cloud Atlas into a film. Like Mitchell’s works, the Wachowskis’ 1999 film...
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Introduction: Fabled Thought: On Jacques Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign
Jacques Derrida’s lectures on La bête et le souverain, given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2001-2003, comprise a remarkable set of reflections on sovereignty and...
Article
Zoopolitics
...heart, beckoning toward the establishment and institution of a border between the two, but rather one that comes to blur, to rework and accordingly to complexify the limits between them....
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The Differences Between Ranciere’s Mesentente (Political Disagreement) and Lyotard’s Differend
...chose to teach and engage in activism at Vincennes, the recruitment was, according to F. Chatelet, politico-philosophical. Each non-Communist Marxist group sent their representatives: the Althusser-Maoists from the Ecole Normale...
Article
Matter and Light in Bergson’s Creative Evolution
...“living unity” of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of Creative Evolution to be the comprehension of the material universe...
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Visual Poetry, Poetic Visions and the Visionary Poetics of Pierre Alferi
The days of poetry seem to be coming to an end. Many theorists have been predicting the fall of the verbal regime and many theoretical volumes hailing the new visual...
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Pierre Alferi’s “Allofiction”: A Poetics of the Controlled Skid
...possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc. (Robbe-Grille, 1963) are quietly coming to the fore again. This...
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Godard, Rohmer, and Ranciere’s Phrase-Image
...and unfettered border-crossings between genres, between high and low art, art and non-art, art and commodity. These border-crossings are not evidence that differences have been reduced to sameness, but are...
Article
Painting’s Figural Territory: An Impossible Refrain
...“supersensible” or thing-in-itself. In a section of his Third Critique, Kant grappled with taste as a judgment that is subjective yet relies on a sensus communis. This gives rise to...
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How to Live with Roland Barthes
...will in time attain completion. Barthes values the proleptic, or dilatory gesture over the completed whole; the statement “Plus tard…,” moreover, works in secret as a denunciation of the “monstre...
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How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille
...1915, is a fascinating discussion about our attitudes towards death, which comprise both a “cultural-conventional attitude” that Freud so pertinently, almost wickedly, criticizes, and the attitude common to the unconscious...
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Remembering Derrida
...him in the Rivista di Estetica (1966 no. 3), in an article entitled “Grammatology and Aesthetics.” De la Grammatologie would come out the following year, but I had read and...
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Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11: An Interview with René Girard
...Girard: I think that your statement is right. And I would like to begin by making a few comments on that very point. It seemed impossible at the time, but...
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Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche by Lucas Fain (review)
...these goals through a comprehensive reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Socratism” intercalated with Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic intervention focused on the universality of untranslatable “enigmatic messages” that shape the (un)conscious of each...
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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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About
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...
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Submissions
...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...
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“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,...
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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...
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SubStance 143
Article
Jacques Ranciere’s Freudian Cause
...competence to speak from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory”? (L’inconscient esthétique, 9). Jacques Rancière, thus solicited in January 2000, responds by inventing a new formula of the unconscious....
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Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Illégal: How to Narrate Silence and Horror
...the urgency of such a challenge: the refugee (Nyers; Shemak; Bohmer; Chetail). In European urban centers–regardless of whether we speak as refugees, to refugees, or about refugees–complex transnational dialogues emerge....
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Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity (review)
...of the most salient developments in twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. If Baudelaire is fertile ground for the development of theory, however, theory rarely contains the complex and contradictory force...
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The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations
...June 5, 1756, the day Charles Viner died, and the way of knowing that enables the entire architectonics of modernity is what we have come to recognize as the law....
Article
Sade Before the Law
...complains during more than 28 years of incarceration that he is an (almost) virtuous victim of immoral persecutors, and the Sade of libertine novels, who vaunts immorality and praises torturers....
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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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Vulnerability of “Virtual” Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence
...complexly overdetermined by a variety of adult exigencies, desires, and crises which, once exposed to scrutiny, may become less self-evident—even questionable. As a virtue, innocence is not cultivated through self-discipline,...
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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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Lecture Course on Chapter Three of Bergson’s Creative Evolution
...genetic philosophy. He thus comes to grips with something essential in philosophy. In effect: a) philosophy has, prior to him, laid claim to be genetic; b) cosmology—in ancient metaphysics—is portrayed...
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Wooden Dice Without Numbers
...movement then becomes fingers gesturing downwards, in a sort of ecstatic frenzy, before resuming the rolling. The camera closes in on him. Meanwhile, the older man comes into the frame...
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Encounters with Impact
One of the recurring themes in discussions among mathematicians, whether in informal lunch hour talks or in more formal committees, is what might be called “simplistic impact-bashing.” We are more...