Article
Talking Before the Dead
...of humor is thus distinguished in the first place from irony (…). Humor is an art of immanence” (Stengers, L’Invention 79). In her book La Vierge et le Neutrino [The...
Search results for 'Talking Before the Dead'
Article
Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits (review)
...of the authors mentioned in the course of the discussion. The book maps out a complex and varied intertextual field in which the diverse rewritings harness different potentialities of their...
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Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts by Daniel Albright (review)
I undertook this review to celebrate Daniel Albright’s contributions to the theory of interrelations among the arts, and had nearly completed it before learning that he had died early in...
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Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us
Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each...
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Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature
...of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the “unborn”—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of...
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A Vulnerable World: Heidegger on Humans and Finitude
The notion of vulnerability comes from the Late Latin vulnerabilis, derived from vulnerare “to wound,” which comes from vulner-, vulnus “wound.” As the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests, it is probably akin...
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Tendency and Intuition in Simondon’s “Genesis of Technicity”
...book, but more concentratedly in Part III, “The Genesis of Technicity.” Simondon often uses the term to describe the process of a bifurcation of phases; for example, the magical phase...
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Comment ne pas trembler?: Derrida’s Earthquake
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...
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Inuit Songs and Resonating Lyres: Harmony and Resonance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community
In The Inoperative Community Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that his conception of speech as the cornerstone of community can be likened to the image of two Inuit women engaging in traditional...
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Vulnerability of “Virtual” Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence
...complexly overdetermined by a variety of adult exigencies, desires, and crises which, once exposed to scrutiny, may become less self-evident—even questionable. As a virtue, innocence is not cultivated through self-discipline,...
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Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time
...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
...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...
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Authenticity and Distantiation from Oneself: An Ethico-Political Problem
Scholars have often taken Foucault by his words and insisted that his philosophy is completely at odds and opposed to Sartre’s—and Beauvoir’s—existentialism. However, it is my contention that Foucault’s own...
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Derrida and Durkheim on Suffering
...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...
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Saints, Scandals, and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini
...philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a good example. In the years 1932 to 1933, she was connected to the dissident, Trotsky-leaning Communist Boris Souvarine and his Cercle communiste...
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Arbitrary Limbs
...fantasy, and lead to derangement, or madness. To own such a view would lead to worse, I suspect. However, my fancier friend argued it was not deranged to demand common...
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Authentic Landscapes at Large: Dutch Globalization and Environmental Imagination
...tulip fields made it into a coffee-table book of the most renowned contemporary architect of the Netherlands, Rem Koolhaas. The book is a mosaic of architectural associations and quotations. Under...
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Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)
The title of Outsider Theory is artfully contrived. By the end of the book, it figures as a near tautology, for Jonathan Eburne here contributes to the study of knowledge...
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On Breath
...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...
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The Hegelian Art of the Table of Contents: On the logic, and tradition, of Hegel’s organizational practices
During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth...
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Intermediality: Axis of Relevance
...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...
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Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction
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...
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Philosophy as Translation
...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...
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Spatial Memory: Variations on Classical Themes
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...
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Introduction: Dismantling the Man-Machine*
...around machines with a common function. There were historians of science and technology, scholars in literature, art, media studies, gender studies, philosophers of science, and the list remained open. The...
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To Draw or Not to Draw: Alberto Breccia and the Ethos of Reading
It is not often that reading—let alone the reading of comics—is identified as a “need,” a function of basic physical “survival”: In Argentina, we were forced, as a question of...
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“In the Beginning”… an Intermedial Babel
...reel they show towers at various stages of (de)composition. The images come from other gigantic installations Kiefer created, including the architectural landscape of concrete towers molded from shipping containers at...
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Silent Discourse: The Language of Signs and “Becoming-Woman”
...human thought, complemented by calculus ratiocinator and reflecting ratio embedded in Nature. The corollary is that, ultimately, the correspondence between primitive signs and the complex ideas for which they stand...
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Coming Too Late: Freud, Belatedness, and Existential Trauma
...our parents coming together. —Justin Martyr, First Apology In discussing the impact of traumatic experience on the workings of memory, Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart challenge...
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Vomiting on New Friends: Charlie Hebdo and the Legacy of Anarchic Black Humor in French Comics
...jokes displays a continuation of the anarchic spirit that CH has developed since it was founded in 1969 as an outlet for far left, countercultural bande dessinée [comics] and critique....
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“A Surprising Comparison”: Althusser’s Interpretation of Epicurus and Heidegger
In his later writings, Althusser brings to light a repressed materialistic current in Western philosophy, ranging from Epicurus to Heidegger and Derrida. In this article, I argue that the comparison...
Article
The Commotion of Souls
...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....
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Pierre Alferi: Compressing and Disconnecting
“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...
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Deep Dream (The Network’s Dream)
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...
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Touch in the Abstract
...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...
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Teleiopoetic World
...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...
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The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology
...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,...
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Unethical Morality in “Documenting” Terrorism: Terror at the Mall, Nowhere to Run, Wolves of Westgate
...survivor testimonies and interviews. The documentary also embeds alarming images from Mohammed Ajmal Kasab’s interrogation, the sole captured terrorist, as he describes his background, training, and the motivation behind his...
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Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Illégal: How to Narrate Silence and Horror
...the urgency of such a challenge: the refugee (Nyers; Shemak; Bohmer; Chetail). In European urban centers–regardless of whether we speak as refugees, to refugees, or about refugees–complex transnational dialogues emerge....
Article
The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On
...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...
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Preface: Fidelity to the Unruly
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...
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Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives
In Nick Abadzis’s Laika (2007), a graphic narrative based on historical events surrounding the use of dogs as “test pilots” in the early days of the Soviet space program, the...
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Creepy Christianity and September 11
I begin with a quotation about the United States in 2004: [H]airy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat...
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From Breadfruit to Oranges: Haitian Tales of Belonging
...Me” campaign, part of the National Tree Planting Initiative, whereby parents or guardians of children born after 2019 were invited to national nurseries to collect a free fruit seedling (“Forestry”)....
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A Far-Future Paleontology: The Baffling Case of Brunaspis enigmatica
...for many paleontologists been a blessedly human-free zone, detached from the busy realities of our everyday lives. The science of paleontology, though, is simply one obscure part of a burgeoning...
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Unruly Microcosms in Contemporary Eco-Fiction
...Earth through analogy, allegory and metaphor. Within and against this scale-free reading, I argue that the microcosm has become a fracturing trope that troubles relations between scales. Drawing on fiction...
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“Gravid with the ancient future”: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big Historyshoop
...and the Future of Humanity (2010), this generic gesture shows up in the “Big History Project,” a free online course for secondary schools, whose final unit is entitled “The Future”...
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On Monotony: Repetition, Invention and Poetics in Christensen and Stevens
...an excessive duration. Monotony never wavers, never falters, never surprises. Monotony cannot seduce; there is no attraction of fleeting adventure or freedom in monotony, which is absolute prolongation without hesitation...
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Spatial Stream of Consciousness
This article examines Olivier Rolin’s use of stream of consciousness narration in L’invention du monde (1993). It draws upon philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio to propose that the novel—with...
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Nicholas Winding Refn’s Abject Male: Inhibiting Spectator-Identification in Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011)
...spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva’s theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject’s complex relationship to Refn’s œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema....