Article
Ends and the Means to Avoid Them: Skepticism and the fin de siècle
...warns about how we start with soft drugs, but soon move up to the hard stuff. In the case of skepticism that would surely mean coming to a bad end....
Search results for 'Ends and the Means to Avoid Them: Skepticism and the fin de siècle'
Article
Derrida: la Vie et l’Oeuvre
...that Circonfession works so hard to bring into the realm of thought. What I retain from this stunning book (hardly a book, in fact—more a series of annotations at the...
Article
Remembering Derrida
...His influence on my thinking grew significantly during the 1970s and ’80s, as is evident in my books Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World, (New York: Humanity Books 2001), Sex Appeal...
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Disenchanting Les Bons Temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun Music and Dance (review)
...own commercial motivations. A compelling chapter on the haeccity and quiddity—the “thisness”or “thatness”—of the musical performances determines how, for participants, sensation, movement, and affect conspire to produce “events” in the...
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The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos by Laura U. Marks (review)
...task for herself to create “a book of practical philosophy about living in a folded cosmos” (5), and that playfulness keeps her book much more accessible than it could otherwise...
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Authorial Shadows in Marcel Benabou
...Lautréamont and the Surrealists and all of this century’s authors, artists and composers who have made recycling an important component of their practice. The past—literary and personal, historical and memorial—severely...
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To Hate Shepherds: Letter to an American Friend about a Jules Verne Story (or Why Technological Objects Sometimes Complicate Our Lives)
Are there any shepherds left in America? I suppose you have replaced them with computers or robots. It’s less expensive and cleaner. Jules Verne would have liked to live in...
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The Politics of Literature
...or embodiments imply that you are taken into account as subjects sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise, discussing things located in a common world and...
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Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory
Few of us have actually donned a HMD (head-mounted display) and DGs (data-gloves), and entered a computer-generated, three-dimensional landscape in which all of our wishes can be fulfilled: wishes such...
Article
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...
Article
Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed
...of Godwin, who was an inspiration to Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others, just as Proudhon is the inspiration for Courbet’s painting. From this group comes a large...
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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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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,...
Article
After Derrida
...carrying De la grammatologie under my arm at the time. In his Comédie (1997), Bernard-Henri Lévy recounts a similar scene, which in his case took place a year earlier. For...
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Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address
...as social actors: as it becomes increasingly mediated by the communication networks of the new media, interpellation comes to materialize a “self that is no longer a subject since it...
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The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (review)
...of a desire, lack, or defect toward an end-point of fulfillment, completion, or perfection. To give merely the most famous examples, Arthur, the once and future king, is in some...
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Subway Poems
What is a Subway Poem? From time to time, I write subway poems. This poem being an example. Do you want to know what a subway poem consists of? Let’s...
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Major and Minor: Crossed Perspectives
...historic and linguistic reasons, finds itself among “minority” and marginalized cultures. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari use it as an example in their demonstration. 2 However, despite the pertinence of this...
Article
Necromantic Media
This article develops the concept of “necromantic media” using the works of Chris Chesher, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilbert Simondon. Examining the productive dynamics of LLMs (large language models),...
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Black Rain: The Apocalyptic Aesthetic and the Spectator’s Ethical Challenge in (Israeli) Theater
The present article will examine this constant tension between the dangerously seductive power of the apocalyptic aesthetic, on the one hand, and the inherently ethical intent of apocalyptic art, on...
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Cybertrance Devices: Countercultures of the Cybernetic Man-Machine
...examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices....
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The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21st-Century French Literature and Film by Sachs, Leon (review)
Leon Sachs’s The Pedagogical Imagination: the Republican Legacy in 21st-Century French Literature and Film sets out to examine the “parallels in the discourses of modern pedagogy and modern literary and...
Article
The Lily of the Valley, or Love as Breathing in the Scent
...woman’s scent, which re-enchants his morose universe, dazzles him with its brilliance and eclipses vision by taking possession of its attributes. It is only afterward that he begins to examine...
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Cultural Necromancy: Digital Resurrection and Hegemonic Incorporation
...the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance....
Article
The Silent Revolution
...the nature of literature. The empirical approach, for example, accepts the self-evidence of the historical conventions that establish a well-circumscribed catalogue of literary works. This positivistic attitude is countered by...
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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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Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes
...to transform itself into its own opposite, not only into the open barbarism of fascism but also into the totalitarian subjection of the masses effected by the new seductions of...
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Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky
Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: MIT 1997. Pp. 237. Two large and complex questions, Where does commitment come and What is its nature? are raised...
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Reading Corpses: Interpretive Violence
WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVE at the house of the widow Lerouge in the first pages of Emile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge, they are confronted with a grisly sight. The widow Lerouge’s...
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Hot Terror: Quatrevingt-Treize
In La Machine a Terreur, Laurent Dispot discovers a singular origin for the Terror in the French Revolution: thermodynamics. He describes the founding process that imparts energy to the Jacobin...
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Literature of Violence or Literature on Violence? The French Enlightenment on Trial
JUST AS THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM has permeated most theoretical debates today concerned with aesthetic, cultural, and political experience, so too has the notion of enlightenment. More to the point,...
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Introduction: Reading Violence
VIOLENCE RIPS THROUGH OUR EXISTENCES, singular and plural, social, individual, and collective. It marks every turn of our lives and every historical occasion. Peace, yearned for in everyday existence, is...
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Flaubert’s “Quidquid Volueris”: The Colonial Father and the Poetics of Hysteria
WRITTEN IN OCTOBER 1837 WHEN FLAUBERT WAS NOT YET SEVENTEEN, “Quidquid volueris” articulates a peculiarly modern version of the grotesque. During a visit to South America, a French anthropologist, Paul...
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Aphrodite’s Children: Hopeless Love, Historiography, and Benjamin’s Dialectical Image
THERE IS A MOMENT in Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, in the poem “A une passante,” when the bustling crowd of a Parisian street gives way before the poet and he...
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Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant, Betsy Wing
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of MIchigan Press, 1997. Pp. 226. As a Martinican cultural theorist, Edouard Glissant has long argued for the exmplarity...
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Introduction: Literary History
From the point of view of history (historical inquiry and “method”), the work of literature is both paradox and problem. As Roland Barthes put it, “la litterature est a la...
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Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for “Antiquarian” History
YES INDEED. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN, and is perhaps now more so than ever. For the most part our approach has been compulsively inclusive; nothing human or inhuman is alien...
Article
Multiple Personalities and Pastiches: Proust père et fils
IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME SINCE PSYCHIATRY, followed by the mass media, rediscovered a syndrome that kept specialists in various dis- ciplines, including philosophy, in suspense even at the turn...
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Decontextualizing Context
“Decontextualizing Context”: even if my title sounds like a deconstructionist slogan, what I really want to consider is the relation between text and context, and the question of the autonomy...
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Literary History without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World
“Literature” began, as Auden might have put it, in 1823, along with “Art” and the other shibboleths of Romantic aesthetics. The rise of “Literature” as a category is paralleled by...
Article
Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary by Leslie Hill
...turns his shoulder he will lose all he sought to retain; and yet, upon coming to the light of day, he is damned, struck mad by a blinding sun. Further,...
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L’écriture décentrée. La langue de l’Autre dans le roman contemporain by Michel Laronde
...productions littéraires en français de l’outre-Hexagone est immense. Mais tout aussi immenses sont les problèmes épistémologiques que soulève cette “communauté imaginée” dont les frontières—au moins celles de la Francophonie du...
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Introduction: Demythologizing the Occupation
Demythologizing the Occupation In Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), a work often considered one of the founding texts of the hydra-headed discipline of “Cultural Studies,” Roland Barthes observed that myth-making invariably...
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L’Eternel retour: Reflection of the Occupation’s Crisis in French Masculinity?
...and emotions. If some were critical of the incorporation of elements reflecting Cocteau’s poetic universe,1 they nevertheless applauded the film’s imaginative combination of modern setting and universal theme, its stylized...
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Sleeping with the Enemy: Jean Genet’s Erotic Reconfiguration of the Occupation
...about the Liberation of Paris, by which time he had distanced himself from Surrealism. The poem in question is called “Comprenne qui voudra” (“Understand Who Will”) and is preceded by...
Article
Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy France
...where an entire human community lives “in thrall to the Olym- pic ideal” (WIMemory iii).2 Following interpretive leads the author himself provided on the novel’s back cover, these critics have...
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Femmes rebelles. Naissance d’un nouveau roman africain au féminin by Odile Cazenave
...Calixthe Beyala). La liste des 21 romans par 13 auteurs femmes qui servent de corpus de base à cette étude apparaît à la page 22. Pour comprendre l’identité du “nouveau...
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Poeticized Language: The Foundations of Contemporary French Poetry (review)
...obscure, French poetry. Their book represents an extraordinary case in which a combination of old and new materials far exceeds the mere sum of its constitutive parts. Indeed, with the...
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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...