Article

Love in the Time of Capital

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

1, 2, 3, 4 Futures—Ludic Forms in Narrative Films

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

A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth

Claire Colebrook
Issue 127
...in any ethical theory, then this virtual universalism would always struggle alongside moral valorizations of specified communities. How do we, from the particular world we inhabit, begin to think of...
Article

Lire Patrick Modiano, and: Lectures de Modiano (review)

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

La carte et le territoire (review)

Louis Betty
Issue 127
La carte et le territoire, winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt and Michel Houellebecq’s first novel since La possibilité d’une île in 2005, may be the author’s most compelling work...
Article

How Memories Become Literature

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

The Smell of Inner Beauty in Ancient China

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

Introduction: The French Novel Now

Warren Motte
Issue 111
...and static, mutating into something quite different even as we struggle to come to terms with it, yet continually demanding that we account for it once and for all. In...
Article

The Inappropriable: On Oikology, Care, and Writing Life

Kélina Gotman
Issue 154
...thought, that come with parenting in an economy in crisis. Obliquely rearticulating the ‘work/life balance’ dyad to better think performative productivity in terms of oikological investments, the article performs another...
Article

Shakespeare’s Spam Poethics

Christine Hoffmann
Issue 154
This essay argues that amidst the superfluous clutter of spam is a credible ethos combining the poetic consolation of the early modern sonneteer with the indulgent excesses of a capitalist...
Article

Milah : A Counter-Obituary for Jacques Derrida

Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt
Issue 106
...These secrets revolve around circumcision, but “circumcision” with the peculiarly Derridean spin that combines “cutting” with “cutting to,” with special reference to language as contingent on scission. And Derrida has...
Article

Narrative Bodies and Nonhuman Transformations

Marco Caracciolo, Shannon Lambert
Issue 150
In this essay, we identify and discuss three motifs that enable literary narrative to perform a shift from a phenomenological, common-sense understanding of the body to the far more challenging...
Article

Sestina: Walter Benjamin at Port Bou

Christopher Norris
Issue 150
...saw myself placed. There is not enough time to write all the letters I would have liked to write. —purportedly Walter Benjamin’s last communication, a postcard dated September 25, 1940)...
Article

Derrida’s Nonpower—From Writing to Zoopower

Robert Briggs
Issue 149
...are often taken as foregrounding a compassionate ethics in the face of the vulnerable (animal) other. This paper traces a genealogy of Derrida’s occasional remarks on power and passivity to...
Article

Closing Thoughts: Benjamin to Brecht

Christopher Norris
Issue 149
...Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice–politics. Only a thoughtless observer could deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern...
Article

Foucault with Marx by Jacques Bidet (review)

Alex Moskowitz
Issue 149
...in monologues where Foucault mobilizes categories of race and gender while Marx focuses on class analysis. While any comparative study runs the risk of descending into banality, Bidet’s refreshing attentiveness...
Article

Derrida: Notes Toward a Memoir

Jeffrey Mehlman
Issue 106
...of feeling” comes to mind). And for years, I had found myself subliminally noting deconstructive touches on the op. ed. page of one prominent newspaper or another, trying to imagine...
Article

Introduction: Memory, Media, Art

Marie-Pascale Huglo, Johanne Villeneuve
Issue 106
...in the area of writing, for example. The media are less a technique of communication than a singular way of appearing, a device (un appareil, in the words of Jean-Louis...
Article

Le Fils and the Limits of Philosophical Ethics

Damian Cox
Issue 141
...a kind of achievement: the Wittgensteinian achievement of elucidating the inner connections between aspects of a thing, but also a representation that captures some of its richness, complexity and ambiguity....
Article

Spatial Memory: Variations on Classical Themes

David F. Bell
Issue 140
...encounter with Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster in the entrance foyer ensued, during which salient details of the Muppet’s appearance were described down to the smell of his constant companion, a...