Article

Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice

Chris Danta
Issue 117
...and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to “be forgotten like all her brothers” (1979: 145). Kafka completed...
Article

Against Pessimism, or, the Education of Hope

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

David Mitchell’s Fractal Imagination: The Bone Clocks

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

Subtle Bodies and the Other Jouissance

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

Breathing Emily Dickinson: Inspiration/Expiration

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

Pitiable or Political Animals?

Julian Murphet
Issue 117
...at least, Derrida tells us; a pity whose fateful power it is, on the far side of modernity, to permit the two terms “animal” and “human” to enter once again...
Article

Solitude, Violation, Alterity: Rulfo’s Wastelands

Jason Kemp Winfree
Issue 119
...here now, is radically unfinished, an open site of possibility, a situatedness that is at once, already and always, toward the future. Existence, according to Heidegger, has the character of...
Article

Machinations of the Senses

Daniel Deshays, David F. Bell
Issue 152
...functioning like the accelerator of a motorbike, ridden by an adolescent, screaming through the housing projects in the middle of the night… Examples of gestures to analyze, each with a...
Article

ChatGPT: a psychomachia

Christopher Norris
Issue 163
...be, capable of writing ‘authentic’ poetry, and a poet who resists that claim on various grounds, personal and philosophical. The opening, strict-form sonnet proposes that the issue be tested by...
Article

Foucault’s Ethical Ars Erotica

Lynne Huffer
Issue 120
...full English translation of Foucault’s first major book, History of Madness, Anglophone readers now have the opportunity to retrace the ethical thread that runs through Foucault’s work from start to...
Article

Touch Today: From Subject to Reject

Irving Goh
Issue 126
...can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is...
Article

The Role of Multimodal Imagery in Life Writing

Laura Otis
Issue 159
...as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine...
Article

The End of Prediction? AI Technologies in a No-Analog World

Luke Munn
Issue 161
...oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency...
Article

Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time

Anthony Mellors
Issue 130
...what she sees as a wasteland of lumpen, non-productive whingers. Yet her epic free-market fantasy centers on a utopia populated by refuseniks—industrialists, bankers, academics, engineers, artists—who have fled to a...
Article

In/habitable

Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 157
...to produce, as the condition and obverse of all in the world that is beautiful and comfortable (i.e., giving one a sense of security, identity, freedom, opportunity, growth, meaning), another...
Article

Derrida and Durkheim on Suffering

Melanie White
Issue 134
...law, rights, justice, freedom and morality. For Émile Durkheim, founder of the French sociological tradition, the question of society is one such great question.1 Indeed, it was the question for...
Article

Fiche de fragment: Reading Blanchot with Char

Tom Conley
Issue 155
In L’Entretien infini (1969), in two essays on René Char, Blanchot engages what he calls a parole de fragment, an open-ended and ever-approximate form of writing that disorients, displaces, and...
Article

At the Aphasiac’s Table: Archive Anxiety.docx

Anthony Purdy
Issue 135
...reproachfully like jetsam on a beach: pens, pencils, piles of books and papers, a terracotta bowl containing paper clips, a small crescent-moon tin from the 1950s with the image of...
Article

“Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise?”

Gerald Bruns
Issue 120
...also because any effort of conjunction threatens to limit the autonomy that opens the practice of poetry to its multifarious futures. (On my desk, as I write this, is a...
Article

Spatial Memory: Variations on Classical Themes

David F. Bell
Issue 140
In March 2012, Joshua Foer presented a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk to a mesmerized audience. As he began, Foer asked the audience members to close their eyes, and he...
Article

Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction

Joshua Delpech-Ramey, Paul A. Harris
Issue 121
Religious discourse now permeates the theoretical humanities. At least since Jacques Derrida’s insistence upon complex connections between deconstruction and negative theology, there has been an onslaught of writing connecting the...
Article

Philosophy as Translation

Barbara Agnese, Claire-Anne Gormally
Issue 137
...last century, embodies a polyphonic, complex cognitive enterprise which includes both original uses of language and sophisticated patterns of moral reflection. Modern literature thus represents a new model of paradigmatic...
Article

Intermediality: Axis of Relevance

Rémy Besson
Issue 138
...approach to the real and its representations. Thereby, the social and cultural environment has been relocated to the center of analyses pertaining to literature, film, theater, the visual arts, and...
Article

The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology

Paul Prudence
Issue 146
...always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of memory and knowledge.” Caillois’s own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates,...
Article

The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On

Peter Poiana
Issue 119
...narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title...
Article

Preface: Fidelity to the Unruly

Zahi Zalloua
Issue 120
The late twentieth century witnessed unprecedented attention to ethics in literary studies. The notion of an “Ethical Turn” was in fact coined to attest to this burgeoning academic interest. Unfortunately...
Article

On Breath

Kate Soper
Issue 160
...Manuel Garcia, and William Shakespeare), and metaphysical (Hildegard of Bingen’s “Book of Divine Works”). Spoken text by Hildegard of Bingen, Galen, Manuel García, Lilli Lehmann, Pseudo Aristotle, William Shakespeare (the...
Article

Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B

Vincent Bruyere
Issue 157
...IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well...