Article

Comics, Form, and Anarchy

Frederik Byrn Køhlert
Issue 143
At least since their modern inception in the late nineteenth century, comics have been deeply entwined with anti-authoritarian politics and resistance. As the various contributors to this special issue point...
Article

On the Nose

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

“Survive”

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

Breathing

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

Life Writing and Cognition

Lisa Zunshine
Issue 159
...plot of overcoming—which is to say, avoiding or reframing failure—life-writing’s relationship with failure is more complicated than this description suggests. First, unlike self-help books, life-writing narratives do not necessarily offer...
Article

Comment ne pas trembler?: Derrida’s Earthquake

Laurence Simmons
Issue 132
Jacques Derrida began a lecture entitled “Comment ne pas trembler,” that he delivered on 17 July 2004 at the Fondazione Europea del Disegno in Meina on the shores of Lago...
Article

Ancient Land Breathing

Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 160
...Fools are looking for oxygen cylinders. Just breathe the free oxygen. Why are you complaining about shortage of oxygen and beds and crematoriums?” (BBC). No, breath is no objective matter....
Article

Inspiration/Expiration (Completion)

Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 160
This text was co-written with an artificial intelligence (AI). This so-called author wrote a sentence, then the software continued, and so on, each influencing the other, completing each other. Another...
Article

Teleiopoetic World

Peggy Kamuf
Issue 134
...it come, the unexpected world, where all will have come and gone, again, an utterly changed world, not the same and yet still abiding, still awaiting, still bearing what is...
Article

The Commotion of Souls

Lisa Zunshine
Issue 140
...last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week....
Article

Pierre Alferi: Compressing and Disconnecting

Agnès Disson, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 123
“L’Hypothèse du compact” is the title of a text by the poet Jacques Roubaud that appeared in the first issue of the Revue de Littérature Générale in 1995, edited at...
Article

Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream)

Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 140
It seems that brain, thought and computer have become intertwined and now share a common fate. An important part of neuroscience not only requires a computational paradigm but also relies...
Article

Touch in the Abstract

Aden Evens
Issue 126
...the computer, as active input falls to the fingertips. At the computer, you express yourself, communicate your desires, by executing a gesture chosen from among a very few possibilities: you...
Article

André Breton’s and Eugène Atget’s Valentines

Andrea Loselle
Issue 118
...entertainment but also from the exercise of unauthorized free speech. As untrustworthy as they are insidious when spread as gossip, anecdotes lack authority yet exemplify free speech, which circulates in...
Article

La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)

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

Beyond the Book: François Bon and the Digital Transition

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

“Of Politics, Aesthetics, and Guilty Subjects”

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

The Story of the Raven and the Robot*

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
The aim of this paper is to study the relationship of companion robots to the uncanny, using popular depictions of these robots. I start by presenting a few companion robots...
Article

Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences

Pascal Lefèvre
Issue 124
...what follows I shall focus on some narrative opportunities and constraints in the medium of comics, as compared to those of other narrative media such as printed texts and cinema....
Article

Introduction: Breathe

The Editors of SubStance
Issue 160
...injustice and anti-Black violence normalized by the state; the ongoing loss of lives and livelihoods to a virus infecting human lung cells; a zoonosis itself the latest consequence of relentless...
Article

Poetry, Philosophy, and Smart AI

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

Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All

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

Coughin’/Coffin Air

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

The Color of Noise

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

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

The Mother of Us All?

Kevin Kopelson
Issue 133
...mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its continued refusal to come out are addressed?” asks Sedgwick. “And isn’t some scene like that,” she asks as well, “behind the...