Article
Michael Vaughan
Issue 114
...Bergson it is impossible, without an adequate conception of time, to properly pose questions of free will or evolution, and in books such as Time and free Will (1889), Matter...
Article
Christopher Norris
Issue 163
...human creativity in general. My essay looks at earlier episodes in the history of thought, from Descartes on, that I take to have prefigured this latest debate around ‘the human’...
Article
David F. Bell
Issue 160
...the poor quality of the powder offered to him by the clerk. This comical exchange brings us back to the gesture of sniffing at the center of Freud’s cocaine experiments:...
Article
André Habib
Issue 110
...1920s. When silent cinema lost its commercial vocation, it was taken in charge by newly created institutions in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York (all between 1934-1936), thereby displacing cinema...
Article
Frédérique Berthet
Issue 160
...exhaling and inhaling is learned for life—je t’aime comme je respire, elle parle comme elle respire, il ment comme il respire55Translator’s note: these three expressions use breathing in ways that...
Article
Richard House
Issue 92
...unify research programs in the sciences have put this standard of plurality to the test. The various enterprises in biology, economics, computer science, and other disciplines often grouped together under...
Article
Jonathan Basile
Issue 149
New Materialism and Speculative Realism have obtained their avant-garde status by creating a simple division between their work and a past they characterize as constructivism or correlationism. While this satisfies...
Article
Roman Widder
Issue 165
...example, this article analyzes the transitions and mutual projections between fiction, urban culture, and peasant protest, the structures of which are significant for the literary representation of agrarian protest far...
Article
Denis M. Provencher
Issue 112
In his new book, Lawrence Schehr examines the portrayals of “overtly gay male characters having social and often sexual relations with one another” (1) in French narratives from the first...
Article
Elisabeth Weber
Issue 160
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful...
Article
Jeeshan Gazi
Issue 139
...the purpose of this article is to examine what Kracauer actually means when he writes, “My book differs from most writings in the field in that it is a material...
Article
David Herman
Issue 86
...sources (from The New York Times Book Review to The Nation) attest to the power of Eagleton’s story about literary theory and to the skill and persuasiveness with which he...
Article
Luke Munn
Issue 165
Who Wrote This? is Naomi Baron’s latest book exploring the emergence of AI language models and their potential implications for writing. A linguist, educator, and emeritus professor at American University,...
Article
Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, David F. Bell
Issue 160
...Haiti was not accepted into the concert of nations. The country, founded by hordes of previously enslaved Blacks and by freed Mulattos, was a bad example, a model not to...
Article
Juliane Werner
Issue 165
...that inhabit its spaces. This article addresses the latest configuration of this phenomenon, examining a selection of twenty-first century novels (among them Isabelle Sorente’s 180 jours, Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Gwenola Wagon
Issue 160
To view Virusland, please visit: .com/547675919. Password: virusland. To view the entire Virusland 2020 project, visit www.virusland.org. Science fiction in found footage. This is not the future. You could buy...
Article
Lipeng Liu
Issue 170
...demonstrate that Marx’s critique of political economy remains an indispensable tool for examining today’s capitalist structures. Berardi’s work can complement this perspective, contributing to a more comprehensive analysis of contemporary...
Article
Jordan Stump
Issue 111
...latest Michel Houellebecq novel was being touted as the book of the season, and even as the one (gloomy) bright spot in what promised to be a drab literary rentrée....
Article
Denis M. Provencher
Issue 116
In his latest book, Jean-Pierre Boulé provides a fresh look at Sartre by conducting a reading of the author’s life and work that focuses on the construction of selfhood and...
Article
Ralph Schoolcraft III
Issue 119
Herman Lebovics’s latest collection of essays, sketchy in its argumentation, frequently off-topic, and rife with errors, is a disappointing treatment of a promising subject. The book’s objective is “to trace...
Article
Diana Mistreanu
Issue 159
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...
Article
Sydney Levy
Issue 160
...see how pervasive it is, from what we say of the “lifespan” of an institution to the trite “Live TV,” just to name a couple of examples that immediately come...
Article
Allen S. Weiss
Issue 85
...tells of the many musicians faced with the freedom his notation and directions provide: “Where I give them a little freedom, they take more, and so on, until the piece...
Article
Ruth Kinna
Issue 113
The rise of a global anti-capitalist protest movement is widely regarded as a sign of anarchism’s revival. For some, the protest movement’s complex diversity points to inherently anarchistic principles of...
Article
Luk Van den Dries
Issue 160
This text, “Breathing,” was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre’s Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan...
Article
Laura Elena Savu Walker
Issue 162
...and its power to build an ever-expanding world community of practioners who are forming what has come to be known as a “theory commons” (ix). As the collection’s editors point...
Article
Louis Betty
Issue 127
...caused in previous years has established the author as one of the world’s leading literary enfants terribles. This latest novel is, however, something of a departure from the past: virtually...
Article
Warren Motte
Issue 100
...however: allow me to substitute “obsess” for “fascinate,” and “ache” for “want.” Here, then, are my short answers: I am obsessed by perfect books. I ache to read perfect books....
Article
John Cayley
Issue 160
View the current version of this digital work. To view Cayley’s notebook with digital code, visit observablehq.com/@shadoof/breathe. breathe is a brief, prose-poetic essay in explicitly paragrammatic language art. The ‘supply...
Article
Didier Maleuvre
Issue 90
...of cultural identity—the latest product of our era’s passion for sorting people into as many robustly meaningful categories as possible. This pollster mentality is what, in literature studies, has led...
Article
Dominique Jullien
Issue 111
...work aired recently (December 2003). On the scholarly side, the first international colloquium on Echenoz’s fiction was organized by the Université de St-Etienne in 2004. His latest novel, Ravel, a...
Article
John Carvalho
Issue 118
...latest works, Undoing Gender (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). With attention to the ethics of responsibility, Butler closes the latter with a discussion of the formation of...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, the latest iteration of his fractal imagination, follows a central character’s life through six decades in six sections that simultaneously succeed as stand-alone stories. Protagonist...
Article
Mikkel Krause Frantzen
Issue 151
...and the latest news: Europe’s taxpayers have been swindled of €55 billion, as revealed by the so-called #CumExFiles. So the old question bears repeating: What is to be done? Or,...
Article
Isabelle Stengers
Issue 145
...Gilles Deleuze’s proposition about how to characterize the work of a philosopher. I am most grateful to Martin Savransky and those who accepted his invitation because, in order to obtain...
Article
Lydie Salvayre, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 104
Since we have in common, Monsieur, the fact of having been persecuted—you by the great Louis, the false scientists and the Jesuits, me by my wife, who never found satisfaction...
Article
Gunter Gebauer, Jennifer Marston William
Issue 93
...obtained at a high price: intellectual construction ignores everything that constitutes society–social practice, power, actions of social agents, their habitus, their position, strategies, and the internal complexities of society itself....
Article
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
Katharine Conley
Issue 86
...her impressive new book, in terms of each movement’s vision. Her perceptions, based on surrealist models include René Char, Dorothea Tanning, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Claude Cahun, Robert Desnos, Antonin...
Article
Ruth Larson
Issue 102
...with investigating labor problems in Côte d’Ivoire, where various forms of forced labor “recrutement” for private enterprise continued unofficially. In public enterprise and the military, forced labor was still legal,...
Article
Ole Birk Laursen
Issue 143
Focusing on visual and textual representations of squatting and women’s resistances against apartheid in the comic book series Crossroads (2014-2016), this article examines how graphic history may enable a more...
Article
Kevin Kopelson
Issue 87
...write them symptomatically. For example, by opening Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) with Proust (“Who would ever have detected that the...
Article
Michael A. Chaney
Issue 143
...to observe only the memes posted by Black and Red Anarchist on Facebook. Similar messages may be found in anti-racist (and to some extent anti-state) comics by African American artists....
Article
Kir Kuiken
Issue 148
It is rare these days to read a book as ambitious as Irving Goh’s The Reject. Taking up the question that Jean-Luc Nancy posed in 1988—”Who comes after the subject?”—Goh’s...
Article
Tom Conley
Issue 103
...a Comedie, or Enterlude.” The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) posts two definitions. One, a “chose feinte, & inventée pour instruire, ou pour divertir,” leads to “le sujet, l’argument d’un...
Article
Carrie La Seur
Issue 87
...as a non-philosopher, although the Sorbonne examiners who made her second to Jean-Paul Sartre called her “the true philosopher” of the two. French encyclopedias call her Sartre’s disciple, and feminists...
Article
Razvan Amironesei
Issue 148
I will begin with the end. Marcel Hénaff’s sudden death in June 2018 opened a space of silence and surely did not prepare me to speak or write publicly about...
Article
Églantine Colon
Issue 158
...issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering...
Article
Razvan Amironesei, Louis-Étienne Pigeon
Issue 142
...and orients the relation between sensation, politics and the body. In addition, the above example will constitute a thought experiment that will allow us to test our hypothesis that links...
Article
Nathalie Rachlin, Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 133
...Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage!), a 32-page pamphlet authored by 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel, a former hero of the French Resistance, a concentration camp survivor and career diplomat. Hessel’s booklet, issued by...