Article
Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted
...to distance it, simply by having summoned it before me. Having looked at it in the light of day, I will free myself, superstitiously, from its shadow. There is an...
Search results for 'Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted'
Article
Christian Oster: From Courtly Love to Modern Malaise
...remarkably unconcerned with pathos (mania). It is a love tempered by stoicism; this love does not amount to indifference, but seeks freedom from passion, which, etymologically, incorporates “anguish” and “suffering.”...
Article
Character and Event
...the other standing in for subjective particularity and the gesture of free will – are ceaselessly reabsorbed into one another in the phenomenology of reading, as what had at first...
Article
Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson
...thing-in-itself.4 As for Bergson, it is following Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (TFW, 1889) that he suggests that we can have access to...
Article
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”)....
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...
Article
“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”...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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
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...
Article
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...
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé by James Leo Cahill (review)
One of the reasons to study the past has always been that it casts our connection to the present in relief. At its best, a careful examination of history offers...
Article
The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde
...and those of a man he calls that “loathsome Leninist Breton” (MacCabe, 82). The comment is an aside—it appears in brackets and in a book devoted to the late 1960s...
Article
La Vengeance dans la litterature d’Ancien Regime (review)
...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
French Fascism: An American Obsession?
...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
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...
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
De-Facing Derrida
...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
Jacques Derrida or the Gift of Writing — When Something Happens
...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
Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (review)
...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
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...
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
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
Discovering what I was not Seeking: A Brief Narrative
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
Filters: Life as in a Film
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
Neurological Preference: LeVay’s Study of Sexual Orientation
...study at the biological level, and this discovery opens the door to studies of neurotransmitters or receptors that might be involved in regulating this aspect of personality. Further interpretation of...
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
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
Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media
...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
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
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
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
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
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...
Article
Pierre Alferi: A Bountiful Surface of Blues
...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
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...