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....
Search results for 'Zoopolitics'
Article
Intact
“What characterizes the comical is the infinite satisfaction, the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself to be above one’s own contradiction, rather than seeing in it a cruel...
Article
Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us
...one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging from each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from...
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Beckett after Beckett (review)
Few modern writers command a literary stamp as distinct as Samuel Beckett’s, yet the starkness that characterizes the Beckettian imaginary (particularly in the theater), however familiar, leaves intentions elusive, messages...
Article
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...possible to tell a story, even to recount oneself, and “outdated notions” of personhood, chronology, mankind, narrative, psychology, history, etc.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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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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
Nature and its Discontents
...produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they...
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Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption
Current headlines demonstrate that our widespread search for abundance has become a source of general concern. The press now abounds in debates about waste management, patterns of consumption and production,...
Article
Introduction: Breathe
...attention to the nouveau roman, structuralist narratology, and poetics. But its deepest commitment, and the one by which we, generation 2.5 of its editors, remain loyally bound, was to thought’s...
Article
Breathing Emily Dickinson: Inspiration/Expiration
...hour behind the fleeting breath G. Share; experience; partake of; have in common When it comes, the Landscape listens — Shadows — hold their breath — H. Inhale deeply; rest...
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Language After Heidegger by Krzysztof Ziarek (review)
...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...
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Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time by John H. Muse (review)
John H. Muse’s Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time examines the production of short plays across the history of Western theatre practice, from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary performance. Categorizing...
Article
Tarkos Births a Vowel
...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...
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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...
Article
“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...
Issue
SubStance 143
Article
Clon’d, or a Note on Propagation
...philological analysis of the word “clone,” I then turn to the conceptual parallels between vegetative reproduction and linguistic reproduction. Through a comparison between the clone and the double, I argue,...
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The Monster Analogy: Why Fictional Characters are Frankenstein’s Monsters
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:...
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The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form by Audrey Wasser (review)
...commenting on itself, and representing itself by means of its own figures is already to take the work to be coherent and self-sufficient” (9). Wasser’s main intervention, then, is to...
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Preview: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin
SubStance@Work, a peer-reviewed imprint of SubStance, Inc., is a series comprised of born-digital works that integrate non-linear structure and multimedia content in innovative theoretical explorations. New works are previewed in...
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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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Hope and Indignation in Fortress Europe: Immigration and Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary French Cinema
...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...
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Claire Denis and the World Cinema of Refusal
...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...
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Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda
...really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments...
Article
Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art
...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...
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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,...
Article
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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Aesthetic Matters: Literature and the Politics of Disorientation
...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...
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The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English ed. by David Herman (review)
...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...
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Journal Supplement: The Story of the Raven and the Robot
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
Introduction: “Impacting” Higher Education?
...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
SubStance 130
Article
The Android and the Machine: Materialism, Mechanicism, and Industrialism in the Early and Late Modern Ages
...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...
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Elove: What Does Fiction Know?
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...
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Cybertrance Devices: Countercultures of the Cybernetic Man-Machine
...examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices....
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Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time
...secret anti-commune to escape a regime bent on destroying the American economy through its utilitarian, bureaucratic, and welfare-based directives, all of which are designed to serve a coterie of muddleheaded,...
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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...
Article
Love in the Time of Capital
...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.”...
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Ritual Remembrance: Freud’s Primal Theory of Collective Memory
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...
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1, 2, 3, 4 Futures—Ludic Forms in Narrative Films
...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,...
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À belles mains. Livre surréaliste-Livre d’artiste. Mélusine ed. by Andrea Oberhuber (review)
This issue of Mélusine pursues the research initiated in 1982 on the surrealist book, without giving the last word on such a complex subject. Demonstrating erudition worthy of La Revue...
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Mutants We All: Jean-Louis Schefer and our Cinematic Civilization
...cognitive film analysis and metaphysical film-philosophy, shedding light on the connection between the complex details of our specific viewing experiences and the general abstraction of our social use of image-culture....