Article
Roland Racevkis
Issue 98/99
...book. As is often the case with compendia of this type, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole is a highly valuable contribution...
Article
Michel Lacroix
Issue 97
...it fascinating? How do French critics and historians resist its fascination? While there has been a plethora of articles, books and theses written about it in the United States in...
Article
David H. Fleming
Issue 141
...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...
Article
David Herman
Issue 124
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...
Article
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
Gregg Lambert
Issue 106
...and his work, Derrida always called our attention to the innumerable possibilities of defacement, as well as to the limits of memory figured in “testamentary signs, traces, hypograms, hypomnemata, signatures...
Article
David Carroll
Issue 106
...is a quotation. To which I will add only one comment: “Me neither.” But in spite of this incapacity, I will nevertheless still try to tell a few stories and...
Article
David Herman
Issue 103
...Who else was in attendance at the meeting, how were they affected by these events, and what sort of testimony would they (and the two main disputants themselves) give about...
Article
Lisabeth During
Issue 141
...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...
Page
...make important contributions to fields of interest of the journal. All submitted articles are subject to peer review by our editors. For Book reviews and requests, please contact our Book...
Article
Lisa Zunshine
Issue 159
...plot of overcoming—which is to say, avoiding or reframing failure—life-writing’s relationship with failure is more complicated than this description suggests. First, unlike self-help books, life-writing narratives do not necessarily offer...
Article
Irene J. Klaver
Issue 127
...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...
Article
John Wilkinson
Issue 156
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...
Article
Vinciane Despret
Issue 145
...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...
Article
Alison James
Issue 119
...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...
Article
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
S.F. Kislev
Issue 163
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...
Article
Michael Berube
Issue 110
Literary Culture in a World Transformed is a heartfelt, well-meaning, and profoundly confused book. Though William Paulson wants desperately to define a mission for the humanities and to preserve literary...
Article
Van Kelly
Issue 102
...his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L’écriture ou la vie (1994), tells how in spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably René Char’s first influential book of...
Article
Geoffrey R. Hope
Issue 101
It is good to see this book again, the same text as in the Garland edition of 1994, graced with a preface by Rosemary Lloyd, in which the crisis of...
Article
Julie Candler Hayes
Issue 94/95
Hénaff, Marcel. Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body. Trans. Xavier Callahan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. It is somewhat strange to be reviewing a book more than twenty...
Article
Andrea Goulet
Issue 107
...books; in his film, the book’s narrator Sainclair becomes a bespectacled photographer whose optical prosthetics identify him as “he who sees” (Podalydès, 352). But while the story’s cinematic rebirth may...
Article
Chris Hall
Issue 150
...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
Philippe Despoix
Issue 137
...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
Jennifer Gutman
Issue 166
...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
John E. Drabinski
Issue 115
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
Marcel Hénaff, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 100
The two questions that SubStance asks us are beautiful in that they link knowledge to a desire for discovery. But by their very openness, these questions are immense. Faced with...
Article
Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Gwenola Wagon
Issue 169
This work stages an open discussion between artist Gwenola Wagon, philosopher Pierre Cassou-Noguès, and Marie, the character who represents them both in their film Virusland 2020. The film, a diary...
Article
Paul A. Harris
At Play
...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
David F. Bell, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Paul A. Harris, Eric Méchoulan
Issue 148
...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
Mark B. N. Hansen
Issue 129
...theorize the “agency” of the environment that comes to the fore as we humans enter, as we do increasingly today, into alliances with sophisticated, computational technologies.1 In concert with researchers...
Article
Ranjan Ghosh
Issue 127
...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
Nigel Clark
Issue 146
...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
The Editors of SubStance
Issue 139
...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
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
Luce Irigaray
Issue 126
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...
Article
Jean-Jacques Thomas
Issue 123
...issues: 1995 and 1996. Nevertheless, it put Alferi’s name in the public domain, and this early publishing enterprise remains emblematic of his status in the jungle world of French contemporary...
Article
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
Sophie Mayer
Issue 119
...argue that they occur specifically when poetry enters into the political, grounded in a belief that this is an arena where poetry belongs and where it can motivate change, because...
Issue
Close Reading
Article
Michel Pierssens
Issue 160
...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
Olive Demar
Issue 163
Drawing on Marxist and psychoanalytic frameworks, I collect notes and reflections about the experience of contingent work in the Writing Center at Amherst College, a private liberal arts college in...
Article
Michael Berman
Issue 166
...commonsensical notions of what time and nature are in a way that attests to the powers of Buddhism and of trees. You see, Honmyōkai Shōnin has been sitting since 1683,...
Article
Carmen Derkson
Issue 113
...often still studied with a disregard for new perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality. If educators are often reluctant to enter into debate of issues that are commonplace in critical...
Article
Philip Watts
Issue 112
...important volume. Their study Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture focuses on the popular entertainment, the mass media, the novels and films, in a word, the art forms...
Article
Clark D. Lunberry
Issue 110
...fit specific programs, or to accommodate the pleas of musicians, but the composition in all its intended dimension had not been heard. Like a well-concealed object, the complete string quartet’s...
Article
Jane Bradley Winston
Issue 106
...in these ongoing debates is to dismantle the oppositions structuring Orientalist representations, including those of métropole and colony, center and margins. Her political goal is to change the current predicament....
Article
Eric Méchoulan
Issue 104
“Tout le monde abomine les explications de texte, c’est bien connu. Il n’y a que les professeurs de français pour ne pas le comprendre et commenter pesamment ce qui ne...
Article
Martine Antle
Issue 104
...on Gender Studies at the Georges Pompidou Center (June 23-27, 1997). Ironically, the majority of scholars who published their articles in the conference proceedings (Les études gays et lesbiennes) were...
Article
Dayna Oscherwitz
Issue 104
...extreme right-wing anti-immigrant Front National highlighted to what degree questions of immigration and integration have taken center-stage in France. Typically, academic inquiries into the role of immigration and integration have...