Article

Teleiopoetic World

Peggy Kamuf
Issue 134
...it come, the unexpected world, where all will have come and gone, again, an utterly changed world, not the same and yet still abiding, still awaiting, still bearing what is...
Article

Haïti Can’t Breathe

Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, David F. Bell
Issue 160
...turmoil that threatened the company’s commercial interests, among other things. If you will excuse these numerous dates, in 1957, François Duvalier came to power. Less than two years later, with...
Article

The Commotion of Souls

Lisa Zunshine
Issue 140
...last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week....
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...
Article

Touch in the Abstract

Aden Evens
Issue 126
...the computer, as active input falls to the fingertips. At the computer, you express yourself, communicate your desires, by executing a gesture chosen from among a very few possibilities: you...
Article

The Waste-Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith

Christopher Schmidt
Issue 116
For those who follow closely the contemporary American poetry scene, perhaps no recent figure has made a greater intervention in received ideas of poetic excellence than Kenneth Goldsmith. This self-described...
Article

From Where Do We Draw Breath? Air’s Absence and Blackness

Delali Kumavie
Issue 160
...June 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/191079. Véronneau, S. J. H., et al. “Survival at High Altitudes: Wheel-Well Passengers.” United States Federal Aviation Administration Civil Aeromedical Institute, Office of Aviation Medicine, October 1996, www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/1990s/media/am96-25.pdf...
Article

The Story of the Raven and the Robot*

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
The aim of this paper is to study the relationship of companion robots to the uncanny, using popular depictions of these robots. I start by presenting a few companion robots...
Article

Inspiration/Expiration (Completion)

Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 160
This text was co-written with an artificial intelligence (AI). This so-called author wrote a sentence, then the software continued, and so on, each influencing the other, completing each other. Another...
Article

Breathing with Mountains

Paul A. Harris
Issue 160
...Compositions Pierre Jardin’s geologic aspirations began with a Composition of Place, a meditative technique deployed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Loyola stipulates that “for contemplation or meditation...
Article

Deleuze and World Cinemas by David Martin-Jones (review)

Gerald Sim
Issue 148
...industry. Among the works that comprise this body of writing, the offerings from Martin-Jones have been reliably lucid and instructive. His readership likely extends beyond committed scholars who are looking...
Article

Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences

Pascal Lefèvre
Issue 124
...what follows I shall focus on some narrative opportunities and constraints in the medium of comics, as compared to those of other narrative media such as printed texts and cinema....
Article

The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology

Paul Prudence
Issue 146
...always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of memory and knowledge.” Caillois’s own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates,...
Article

Stoned Thinking: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

Paul A. Harris
Issue 146
PETRIVERSE. Noun. 1). A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden. 2). Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers,...
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SubStance Journal

Out Now SubStance 164 Volume 53—No.2—2024 See Contents A place for creative thinking We invite theoretical interventions in a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields that stretch the norms of...
Article

Math Anxiety: Making Room to Breathe

Valerie Allen, Todd Stambaugh
Issue 160
...positively rewarded as opportunities for learning; students compose questions instead of answers; students solve problems together rather than perform solo (Boaler). Return now to that opening scenario to watch it...
Article

Breathing

Luk Van den Dries
Issue 160
...tight collaboration with Jan Fabre and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozič). The book sheds new light on...
Article

Homeostasis and Extinction: Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation”

Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Issue 160
...human subject, retain it as a referent. The Capitalocene corresponds to the Anthropocene with the added complexity of anticapitalist critique; the Plantationocene corresponds to the Anthropocene with the added complexity...
Article

A Vulnerable World: Heidegger on Humans and Finitude

Krzysztof Ziarek
Issue 132
The notion of vulnerability comes from the Late Latin vulnerabilis, derived from vulnerare “to wound,” which comes from vulner-, vulnus “wound.” As the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests, it is probably akin...
Article

“In the Beginning”… an Intermedial Babel

Karin Littau
Issue 138
...reel they show towers at various stages of (de)composition. The images come from other gigantic installations Kiefer created, including the architectural landscape of concrete towers molded from shipping containers at...
Article

Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001),...
Article

Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice

Chris Danta
Issue 117
...and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to “be forgotten like all her brothers” (1979: 145). Kafka completed...
Article

In/habitable

Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 157
...underpinning many of the spaces and experiences that Perec inventories. For these are sites of the management of species-life, sites that implement or express a modern logic of rationalization known...
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...