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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Sarah Kay
Issue 152
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...
Article
Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Issue 122
...those of a modern comedy. Beckett—whose theater, when “completed” correctly, is truly hilarious—was well aware of this. (75) Now of course the comedy Badiou has in mind here is not...
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
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
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
Susannah Ellis
Issue 145
...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...
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
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
Craig Fischer, Suzanne Keen
Issue 124
In this era of the graphic novel, we are used to seeing comic books—that is, comic magazines—migrate to the bookshelf in the form of bound collections. Yet do these collections...
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
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
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
Eric Méchoulan
Issue 160
...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...
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
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
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
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
Alison James
Issue 125
In numerous entries on his website Le Tiers livre (tierslivre.net), the French writer François Bon insists on the momentous nature of the transformations taking place in the contemporary literary world...
Article
Steven Miller
Issue 120
Jennifer Bajorek’s Counterfeit Capital is a superb and unexpected hybrid entity: a book that manages to make time for intricate readings of Baudelaire’s poetry even as it remains preoccupied, from...
Article
Andrew Sobanet
Issue 119
In a thought-provoking and well-researched new book, Richard Golsan explores the politics of complicity in two heterogeneous groups of French writers. Focusing on the 1940s and the 1990s, Golsan analyzes...
Article
Julie-Françoise Tolliver
Issue 166
...and farmer Scott Chaskey’s 2023 book Soil and Spirit opens with an uncanny link between Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. He writes, “In...
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...
Article
Jan Baetens
Issue 124
The study of narrative in comics (which I will use as a general term covering both mainstream comics and more highbrow graphic novels) has often been a mere copy of...
Article
Iwona Janicka
Issue 164
...psychology, cognitive science, art history, and literature. In the representation framework, reality is split into two camps, the representer and the represented: the world and words; mute matter and speaking...
Article
Anthony Reynolds
Issue 133
...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...
Article
John Champagne
Issue 134
...critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it” (2-3). Wiegman’s book is an attempt to do so. The remainder of the book is divided into chapters...
Article
Michael Sheringham
Issue 123
This article focuses on Alferi’s second book of poetry, Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif, published in 1992. It is a companion piece to my article, “Pierre Alferi and the...
Article
Peter Consenstein
Issue 129
...[1995]), as well as a seven-volume (and “six-branch”) “récit autobiographique,” which David Bellos has compared to the work of Marcel Proust.1 The three books Roubaud published in 2008 and 2009,...
Article
Mathew Abbott
Issue 130
...hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of “intertextuality,” it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop...
Article
Mark Bonta
Issue 121
Though it has been claimed that Deleuze sought to delink his thought from all religion (Bryden), a close examination of his major writings, as well as his collaborative work with...
Article
Samantha MacBride
Issue 116
...need computers—and mine works!” Many have brought the documentation and original boxes with them. I explain that the labor involved in testing, repairing, and redistributing each item would outweigh its...
Article
Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Ole Birk Laursen
Issue 143
...of Ernest Riebe and Ern Hanson in the IWW’s Industrial Worker in the early twentieth century, comics and cartoons have been prominent fixtures in anarchist publications, while comic books themselves...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 140
...I never dared to enter the shop (I must be a little scared, I suppose) but I never miss looking into the window. Everything is a bit dusty. There are...
Article
Kenneth Surin
Issue 161
This most welcome book gets off on the right foot by eschewing such problematic terms as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” in studying the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and...
Article
S.F. Kislev
Issue 151
At what “resolution” does Hegel’s dialectic operate? Does it dictate the transition between arguments in a chapter, or the transition between chapters in a book, or the transition between books...
Article
Luce Irigaray
Issue 160
...That is not to say that I have merely adopted these cultures as mine, the matter is more complex. For example, we have developed, in the West, a subjectivity that...
Article
Donna Haraway
Issue 145
...and risky practices. Indeed, as in the subtitle of her book, Stengers seeks for and elucidates “une libre et sauvage création de concepts” (a free and wild creation of concepts)....
Article
John Mowitt
Issue 152
...the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the...
Article
Adilifu Nama
Issue 160
...of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever...
Article
Stuart Kendall
Issue 116
...individual freedom, and communal life in the future? Toward this end, Stoekl explores several related strands of Bataille’s thought on energy, religion, ethics, and community in light of contemporary culture....