Article
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...
Search results for 'Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us'
Article
Dune(s)
...attraction of the cognitive maelstrom he, hesitantly or trustfully, enters at his own risk. Every word or stroke on canvas or chord or instant shutter of the camera or unending...
Article
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...
Article
Introduction: The Editors of SubStance
...contemporary cultural issues; an outside, finally, where contemporary theory may venture into hybrid and innovative writing. Exploring hybrid writing with theoretical impact is at the center of our current preoccupations....
Article
Bare Life on Molten Rock
...living things like us to enter into an intimate relationship with the lithic – to become enmeshed with rock – is to become rock. It is to meet with sudden,...
Article
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...
Article
Introduction
...impact is at the center of our current preoccupations.”1 Since that time, the journal has made significant changes. This issue marks our fourth issue of publishing with Johns Hopkins University...
Article
The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin
...is first of all to consider a substance…as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted…. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood” (Deleuze,...
Article
(Auto)immunity, Racism, and Crisis: From the Biopolitical to the Allopolitical
...the Trump administration’s policy of immigration deterrence. Through an understanding of this policy as one of autoimmune racism, I argue, it is possible to open the political to the radical...
Article
Translatio and Remediation: Aby Warburg, Image Migration and Photographic Reproduction
...schism between the natural sciences and the humanities—a position whose horizon intersects Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, Max Weber’s comparative sociology of religion, and the perspectives opened by American...
Article
“A row of screaming Russian dolls”: Escaping the Panopticon in David Mitchell’s number9dream
In 1786, Jeremy Bentham began a series of letters detailing a controversial prison structure. Printed in 1791, the preface opened with a hefty promise: “Morals reformed – health preserved –...
Article
The Tree at the End of the World
...bowl of two gently sloping hills, its wide, generous branches fan out across a shifting canvas of open sky. In addition to its striking composition, the lone giant seemed to...
Article
Separation, Difference, and Time in Godard’s Ici et ailleurs
Is it possible to conceive a language of absolute difference? Or, is absolute difference always complicated by the identity-function of language? These questions have occupied French philosophy at least since...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Author
Todd A. Comer
Article
Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (review)
...the destruction and carnage from September 11. Central to her discussion is Art Spiegelman’s comic book account of events entitled In the Shadow of No Towers, which she compares to...
Article
Dead Tree, Living Figure; or, the Contemporary Prometheus
We cannot see the forest for the trees. It is no mistake that one of the most common English expressions featuring trees is about myopia. So invested in seeing trees...
Article
Politics and Ontology of the Image: Godard’s Debt to Blanchot
...with a political romanticism, and at times even with a “revolutionary romanticism” determined by a shared dialogue with German Romanticism and “a fragmentary demand” allied with the strength of protest...
Article
Staging Blanchot
...a letter I received from Blanchot about my project, recall the testimonies I collected from contemporaries and friends, and discuss the editorial resistance the biography encountered. At the time, I...
Article
Phobic Postcards: Preview
If the greatest philosopher in the world finds himself upon a plank wider than actually necessary, but hanging over a precipice, his imagination will prevail, though his reason convince him...
Article
Safety in Objects: Discourses of Violence and Value—The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0
...that this tradition has placed in performance art to rectify subject/object inequalities for female subjects. I will then turn to two feminist “performances”— Mary Richardson’s 1914 protest slashing of the...
Article
An Uncommon Reader
...the ways we try to make sense of our lives. At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what...
Article
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,...
Article
The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism by Delphine Bénézet (review)
...first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1954), Varda’s innovative approach to filmmaking has been a testament to the limitless possibilities of the moving image. In fact, Bénézet implies that film...
Article
The Monolingualism of the Human
...to this retreat” (162). To whom does this print belong? Is it proof that his greatest fear is soon to materialize—namely, that he will be savagely devoured by a group...
Issue
SubStance 165
Article
Bergson and Darwin: From an Immanentist to an Emergentist Approach to Evolution
...selection, which is, in his terms, a “hypothesis” that can explain some large and independent “classes of facts” (AP I, 9). Hence, he seems to present a “well tested theory.”...
Article
The Pardon of the Disaster
...we not, Mehlman implies, put Blanchot to the same test? Blanchot wrote the articles under consideration not as a nineteen-year-old, but as an adult in his 30s, and for this...
Article
Enough of This So-Called Minimalist Poetry
In one of its greatest paradoxes, French minimalist literature exists only in the plural. However, by no means do the different types of minimalism enjoy the same level of prestige....
Article
The Afterlife of Art and Objects: Alain Cavalier’s Therese
...the director’s desk. These objects and photographs, which together comprise the working environment of the screenwriter, stand metonymically for the process of composing a film, as they allude to the...
Article
Levinas and the Problem of Predation: From Fraternity to Kinship
In this paper, Levinas’s concept of fraternity is shown to rely upon an exclusion of beings deemed “faceless” and open for appropriation. By limiting ethics to humans, Levinas established nonhumans...
Article
Introduction: Reframing Vulnerability: “so obviously the problem…”?
...being helpless? Or have we taken a wrong turn already, in the opening paragraph, before we have even had a chance to get under way in our consideration of vulnerability?...
Article
Towards a “radical acceptance of vulnerability”: Postcolonialism and Deconstruction
Why open this essay—which seeks to address the question of vulnerability via the vexed relationship between deconstruction and postcolonial studies—with what even Attridge himself acknowledges to be a “rather contrived...
Article
The New Digital Flesh of Fantastic Bodies
...digital is opening up different perspectives as the body has been acquiring an authentic digital skin in recent fantastic cinema. Cartoonization of the body, plasticity, endoscopic journeys into bodies and...
Article
Proustian Developments: The World and Object of Photography
...in Raoul Ruiz’s film adaptation, Marcel Proust’s Time Regained (1999), photographs are used by the director to set the world of the novel into motion. Does the opening scene, which...
Article
In the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland: Walking with Whitehead
...not usually regarded as a philosopher overly concerned with embodiment, I have found Alfred North Whitehead’s work offers a set of concepts that opens up the domain of thinking as...
Article
Animality and Contagion in Balzac’s Père Goriot
In his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously cites the opening pages of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot as emblematic of modern realism. With...
Article
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...
Article
Yves Bonnefoy and the “Genius” of Language
...that here and now, which he calls “Presence.” For Bonnefoy, poetry ought to open onto the epiphanic experience of Presence. Bonnefoy’s most famous work, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de...
Article
Cannibalism, Colonialism and Apocalypse in Mitchell’s Global Future
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a novel intent on blasting open the classical unities of time and place. On publication in 2004, its unusual structure made it a talking-point for...
Article
Sailing Ships and Firm Ground: Archimedean Points and Platforms
...sea. It is the moment when Archimedes the mathematician launches a half-built ship with the aid of one of his inventions. Further details and further interpretations are open to debate....
Article
Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds
...tastes that they would not admit in their philosophical writings. In other words, touch opens up worlds—the world of oneself and the world of others, and even the hidden world...
Article
Fiery, Luminous, Scary
...a demand: it asks the participant to relate, in this time of interaction, to the unfolding of the work. It asks the participant to be open to a certain unknowability,...
Article
The Theater of History: Carnivàle, Deleuze, and the Possibility of New Beginnings
Time and history have come to play a particularly important role in the understanding of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. While his conception of time—built among other things on the...
Article
Close Reading: A Preface
...of the confines of this perspective would be to open oneself to the project of a world literature, mentioned by Goethe in a conversation with Eckerman—that is, to understand the...
Article
Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary
...they are not considered fit to be a serious basis for a philosophical discussion or scholarly elaboration, though they could open the way for one. In fact, one could apply...
Article
Journal Supplement: breathe
View the article breathe for an explanation of this piece....
Article
Introduction: Tree
...the contrary, in trees. Walking on branches would have been an effective way of foraging in open-canopy forests, as well as of advancing otherwise—taking the “arboreal route”—through rocky terrain (Drummond-Clark...
Article
Will This Too Have Been a Tree? Biblical and Biological Trees of Life-Science
...their own pedigree with this tree. By questioning its roots, we open ourselves to other suspicions of the legacies—Abrahamic and ontotheological—that we may unknowingly or compulsively repeat or inherit today....