Article
Future Finale
...® (Paris), and with my American Lawyer, Maria Josephina Baxter-Lasko at Flies and Van Heulen for © (Atlanta), I am pleased to inform you that I have been authorized, for...
Search results for 'Future Finale'
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Introduction: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution
...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...
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On the Nose
...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:...
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Poetry, Philosophy, and Smart AI
...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’...
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“Everything is Breath”: Critical Plant Studies’ Metaphysics of Mixture
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...
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Redeeming Kracauer’s Theory of Film: An Examination of the Importance of Material Aesthetics
...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...
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The Public Sphere as a Common Good: The Militant Farmer Karsthans (1521) and the Dialogue Pamphlet as Media Genre
...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...
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The Encyclopedia Complex: Contemporary Narratives of Information
...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...
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Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate
...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...
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French Gay Modernism (review)
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...
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Life/Force: Novelty and New Materialism in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter
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...
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Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi Baron (review)
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,...
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Haïti Can’t Breathe
...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...
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Perfect Books
...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....
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Narrating Threads of Transgression: Intensive Animal Agriculture in Contemporary Literature
...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...
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Breathing
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...
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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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Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Unfinished
...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....
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Sartre, Self-Formation and Masculinities (review)
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...
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Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies (review)
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...
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La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)
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...
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breathe
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...
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“Survive”
...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...
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Fields of Vision: Kropotkin and Revolutionary Change
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...
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L’ile deserte et autres textes (review)
...translations available at http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/EffetD/Effet-TOC.html). The volume contains texts that correspond to approximately five genres or sub-genres of Deleuze’s writings and activity: colloquia presentations, book reviews, introductions to books by other...
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Deleuze and World Cinemas by David Martin-Jones (review)
...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...
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Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons ed. by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru and Andrei Terian (review)
...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...
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La carte et le territoire (review)
...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...
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Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (review)
...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...
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Echenoz’s Modern-Day Mystics
...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...
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Subtle Bodies and the Other Jouissance
...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...
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David Mitchell’s Fractal Imagination: The Bone Clocks
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...
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Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope
...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,...
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Postlude
...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...
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Refutation
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...
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Habitus, Intentionality, and Social Rules: A Controversy between Searle and Bourdieu
...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....
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Postcolonial Anarchographics: Re-drawing History in the Trantraal Brothers’ Crossroads
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...
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The Reject: Community, Politics and Religion After the Subject by Irving Goh (review)
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...
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Michel Leiris: Race, Poetry, Politics: Rereading the Mission Lucas
...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,...
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Anarchic Strains in the Comics of Ronald Wimberly and Keith Knight
...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....
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A Fable of Film: Ranciere’s Anthony Mann
...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...
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Violence dans la raison? Conflit et cruauté by Marcel Hénaff (review)
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...
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The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality ed. by Mark Grimshaw (review)
...constant flux into reality through its negotiations with the actual.1 This conception of the virtual represents something of a leitmotif for the forty-four essays collected in The Oxford Hand*]}*book of...
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Siren Enchantments, or, Reading Sound in Medieval Books
This paper reflects on the complexity of reading medieval voiced texts, where “reading with one’s ears” puts literary criticism on a convergence course with the history of the book. The...
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What Is A Woman?: And Other Essays (review)
...continues many of the preoccupations of these earlier works. Moi herself goes to some lengths to situate her new book in relation to the previous two. While her 1994 book-length...
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Politics and Commonality of Sensation from a Reading of Merleau-Ponty
...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...
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Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All
...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...
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Introduction: From Engagé to Indigné: French Cinema and the Crises of Globalization
...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...
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The Linguistic Return: Deconstruction as Textual Messianism
...began as “a protest against” it: “The irony … of the story is that often, especially in the United States, because I wrote ‘il n’y a pas de hors-text,’ because...
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A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema
...to differences in degree and that the former are rediscovered only “above the turn” in the examination of the conditions of experience by intuition: To open us up to the...