Article

Painting’s Figural Territory: An Impossible Refrain

Christopher Gontar
Issue 121
...“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

Patrick ffrench
Issue 120
...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

Varieties of Nothing

John Brenkman
Issue 155
...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...
Article

The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations

Peter De Bolla
Issue 109
...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

Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 109
...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....
Article

Going Parallel

Brian Rotman
Issue 91
...DNA? Has evolution selected starlings that naturally flock? Apparently, none of the above. The effect–less complex in origin and perhaps more profound in implication than any of these–is the result...
Article

Wooden Dice Without Numbers

Perwana Nazif
Issue 166
...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...
Article

Encounters with Impact

Wendelin Werner, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
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

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

An Aesthetic of the “Grand Style”: Guy Debord

Mario Perniola, Olga Vasile
Issue 90
...in the various arts, works keep being produced that correspond to the features of contained power, classical rigor and unbounded certainty; unfortunately they come to the attention of experts and...
Article

Introduction

Pierpaolo Antonello, Olga Vasile
Issue 90
...turning Debord and SI into a spectacular commodity.2 This volume adds new voices to the work of analysis, reconstruction, and rethinking of a particularly significant period in the cultural and...
Article

Rules for the Incommensurable

Christian Marazzi, Giuseppina Mecchia
Issue 112
...in its full gravity and complexity. The recession of the early 1990s simply tore away the “veil of ignorance” that allowed us to postpone addressing the new socio-economic paradigm politically....
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

Jacques Jouet, Metro Poet

Marc Lapprand
Issue 96
...genre in its two complementary aspects: its mode of enunciation, which in effect “kills” the draft version, and the response it imposes upon the reader, making it almost impossible to...
Article

Filters: Life as in a Film

Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Gwenola Wagon
Issue 169
...of the lockdown in France during the first year of the pandemic, is composed of found footage and videoconference recordings. The two authors—or rather, the three figures involved in this...
Article

Introduction: On the Edges of Jacques Ranciere

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 103
...remote position. Coming from an Althusserian position, after years of archival work on nineteenth-century workers’ writings, Jacques Rancière began to wander between social history and the poetics of historiography, between...
Article

De-Facing Derrida

Gregg Lambert
Issue 106
...loud display; to hold in confidence and completely away from the “public” the moments (however brief and, no doubt, inconsequential) I may have shared with one who is now departed...
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

Cultures du Surrealisme (review)

Katharine Conley
Issue 96
...of theater and photography to review surrealism’s multicultural aspects, showing how they are “fondamentaux pour une compréhension de l’altérité dans le surréalisme” (179). Antle studies how those surrealists who worked...
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...