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...
Search results for 'The Monolingualism of the Human'
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
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
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...
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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...
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Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda
...really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments...
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Writing our Lives to Live Them: The Cognitive Forms of a Narrative Medicine
Life-writing combines, collates, or colludes many lives into one text. No work of fiction, biography, poetry, drama, memoir, journaling, blogging, or autobiography—all of them life-writing—does not do this, either blatantly...
Article
Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B
...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...
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4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet by Karin Kukkonen (review)
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition) is the defining feature of second-generation cognitive science, which replaces a computer-like cognitive processing model with one that highlights the interactive dynamism...
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Race, Class, and the Limits of the Analogical Imagination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African America
...history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the...
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Gaia Politics, Critique, and the “Planetary Imaginary”
In this article, I examine Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers’s recent writings on Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope....
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Closing Thoughts: Benjamin to Brecht
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;...
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Titanic Times: Epimetheus and Prometheus between Différance and Deferred Action
...said, ‘you shall examine’” (320d). So Epimetheus distributed to each animal qualities according to a principle of equilibrium and compensation, each becoming either swift or strong, skilled or large, and...
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The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal
In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily...
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Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)
...or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas....
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“An art of both caring and locking up”: Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoological Garden
...case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate,...
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Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned
...pace that allows not only for frequent mention of things to be discussed (for example, that the reason of the strongest is always the best), but also for looping back...
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Drone Penalty
...a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and...
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Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry
...lost harmony between humans and nature” (229). Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions humanistic, technological...
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The Story of the Raven and the Robot*
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...
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“Going, coming back, turning around”: Arrival(s) at the Trees as Attunement to Ecological Change
...in this neighborhood,1 untethered from it now even in the most remote narrative sense for more than ten years, and yet I have come to see the trees more than...
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Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences
...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....
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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?...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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....
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
Global Terror, Global Vengeance?
...September 11 do not allow us to consider this page as having been turned. Rather, the attacks open a parallel or divergent path of “terror” alongside the classical nuclear threat....
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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...
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France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (review)
In the opening pages of Mireille Rosello’s France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters, the reader will find an answer to the question its title begs: “What is a ‘performative encounter?’”...
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“From Whose Face”: Virginia Woolf and the Impossible Task of Criticism
...thereby opened not only to such familiar inter-War figures as the literary critics of Cambridge (F. R. Leavis et al.) but also to such obscure or even fictional figures as...
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The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (review)
...be mistaken in assuming that it is solely canonical impulse that has led Angela Dalle Vacche to open her collection of essays with a discussion of Benjamin’s classic text. Dalle...
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Article
The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English ed. by David Herman (review)
...in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present” (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the “developmental trajectories” of stories can...
Article
Love in the Time of Capital
This essay begins with Alain Badiou’s book, In Praise of Love, and ends with Jean-Luc Godard’s film of the same title. Between these narrative poles and drawing on a web...
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À belles mains. Livre surréaliste-Livre d’artiste. Mélusine ed. by Andrea Oberhuber (review)
This issue of Mélusine pursues the research initiated in 1982 on the surrealist book, without giving the last word on such a complex subject. Demonstrating erudition worthy of La Revue...
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Journeys through the Offset World: Global Travel Narratives and Environmental Crisis
...them public. The slogan “Think globally, act locally,” coined by René Dubos in 1970, similarly summed up environmentalists’ commitment to a vision of planetary connectedness, as did Kenneth Boulding and...