Article

Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (review)

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...
Article

Report on Lydie Salvayre’s Subversive Classicism

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

Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us

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

Dune(s)

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

Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction

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

Pierre Alferi: A Bountiful Surface of Blues

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

Intermediality: Axis of Relevance

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

Introduction: The Editors of SubStance

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

Bare Life on Molten Rock

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

Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature

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

Introduction

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

The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

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

The Tree at the End of the World

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

Discovering what I was not Seeking: A Brief Narrative

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

Filters: Life as in a Film

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

Staging Blanchot

Christophe Bident, Sylvia Gorelick
Issue 155
...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

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
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

An Uncommon Reader

Christopher Norris
Issue 153
...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

Paul Prudence
Issue 146
...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 Monolingualism of the Human

Christopher Peterson
Issue 134
...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...
Article

The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On

Peter Poiana
Issue 119
...narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title...
Article

Excavations: On Glissant’s Trees

Branka Arsić
Issue 166
...inheres is heavy, its movement is not fast, and the forms are stable; because there is water in all matter, all matter comes alive and, in living, “says” something; hence...
Article

The Pardon of the Disaster

Sara Emilie Guyer
Issue 109
...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

Jan Baetens, Scott Kushner
Issue 107
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

Downsizing

Michel Pierssens
Issue 100
...anthropologists, from linguists to physicists, fully immersing myself in the dizzying discourses emanating from the brightest geniuses of the age. I expected to be able to connect whatever language and...
Article

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (review)

Henry McDonald
Issue 100
There is a kind of madness, said Plato in the Phaedrus, that confers the gift of prophecy and that is “the source of the greatest blessings” for humanity. Twenty-two hundred...
Article

Interrogation: A Post-Exotic Device

Lionel Ruffel, Laura Balladur
Issue 101
Reading an interrogation, and to a greater extent analyzing it, puts one in a complex and ambiguous position. At any moment the researcher experiences the interrogation and thus may be...
Article

Comment ne pas trembler?: Derrida’s Earthquake

Laurence Simmons
Issue 132
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...