Article
Mark B. N. Hansen
Issue 104
...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
Noah D. Guynn
Issue 98/99
...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
Jacques Jouet, Ian Monk
Issue 96
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
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
...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
Antonio Negri, Max Henninger
Issue 112
...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
David F. Bell
Issue 140
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
Barbara Agnese, Claire-Anne Gormally
Issue 137
...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
Stamos Metzidakis
Issue 101
...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
Yuk Hui
Issue 167
...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
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf
Issue 168
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
David Cunningham
Issue 107
...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
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...
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
Elizabeth A. Wilson
Issue 91
...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
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...
Article
Marie-Pascale Huglo, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 101
...technological (democracy via the web, Esperanto on the Internet), scientific (equality via cloning, perfection via the genome) recreational (vacation villages, urban entertainment centers, raves), artistic (total art, art transformed into...