Article
Rok Benčin
Issue 144
...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...
Article
T. Hugh Crawford
Issue 144
...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...
Article
Travis Wilds
Issue 144
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
Alexander Dickow
Issue 137
...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...
Article
Lynda Ng
Issue 136
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...
Article
Jocelyn Holland
Issue 135
...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
Will Bishop, Irving Goh
Issue 126
...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...
Article
Erin Manning
Issue 126
...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,...
Article
The Editors of SubStance
Issue 119
...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...
Article
Dominique Jullien
Issue 118
...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
John Cayley
Issue 160
View the article breathe for an explanation of this piece....
Article
Nathalie Dupont, Thangam Ravindranathan
Issue 166
...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
Jonathan Basile
Issue 166
...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
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
Marcel Hénaff, Roxanne Lapidus, Robert Doran
Issue 115
...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....
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...
Page
For over 50 years, SubStance has published rigorous, creative contributions to contemporary critical debates from a range of theoretical perspectives. Consistent with our commitment to readers and authors to expect...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 131
...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
Mark Steven
Issue 147
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...
Article
Judd D. Hubert
Issue 130
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...
Article
Ursula K. Heise
Issue 127
...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...
Article
Chris Crews
Issue 159
...Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities...
Article
Kamil Lipiński
Issue 158
In Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography, Paolo Magagnoli has undertaken the complex task of linking different aesthetic contexts through a study of experimental documentary audiovisual projects, treating...
Article
Daveeda Goldberg
Issue 150
“Is X good for the Jews?” This is the formula Bruno Chaouat borrows for the title of his recent book. It’s a cliché of a question, one that suggests notes...
Article
Matthew B. Smith
Issue 150
...many respects the book’s central figure, who is treated in two consecutive chapters. As can be seen in her choice of poets, Gavin’s approach is transnational and multilingual. This allows...
Article
Patricia Pisters
Issue 146
On my desk, next to my laptop, a small piece of lapis lazuli. My eye is captured by the intense blue from its most important component, the mineral lazurite. The...
Article
Jason Rhys Parry
Issue 144
In Book II of the ancient architectural treatise, De architectura, Vitruvius gives a mythical account of the conjoined origins of architecture and language: “[I]n ancient times,” he writes, “men were...
Article
Allan Antliff
Issue 143
...of graphic artist Kevin Pyle, an American-born artist with a substantive body of illustrated books and comics addressing a myriad of issues. I am interested in how Pyle undermines and...
Article
Mathew Abbott
Issue 141
Near the end of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the book’s eponymous protagonist recalls visiting the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Marie.1 The zoo is in bad...
Article
Matthew Mullins
Issue 138
...disrupting and almost asserting themselves as components of the title. The effect is a fitting first impression for an eminently readable book that throws philosophy off balance and then tries...
Article
Carla Calargé
Issue 135
Valérie Orlando’s last work, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, is not a simple study of Moroccan films produced and distributed between 1999 and 2010. The book is...
Article
Paul A. Harris
Issue 146
PETRIVERSE. Noun. 1). A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden. 2). Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers,...
Article
Jesse Cohn
Issue 143
...social norms,” thereby “help[ing] us to think about and envision a better world” (Worden, “Politics of Comics” 69-70). Critical treatment of the works of American comics creator Chris Ware (b....
Article
Gaurav Majumdar
Issue 120
...combinations and collisions, it performs verbal combinations, mutations, and collisions. That is to say, its very form evokes qualities and arguments that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions....
Article
Jean-François Hamel, Bernard Schutze
Issue 155
This article aims to highlight the politics of emotions that govern Maurice Blanchot’s insurrectional writings. Starting from the example of Simone Weil, who contrasted the “joy” of the general strike...
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
...on the side of an economically viable 21st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact...
Article
Frederick Luis Aldama
Issue 129
...mental capacity to ascribe a function to objects (a chair is to sit, etc.) and an essence to living creatures (the posited unchanging, ungraspable spirit or soul, for example). Zunshine’s...
Article
Jan Baetens
Issue 128
...biography recently published in France (and forthcoming in English translation at Polity Press) can be seen as an example of how to confront many of the difficulties presented by attempts...
Article
Niels Wilde
Issue 158
...Anthropos? The latter examines the ethical challenges we face in the wake of deep timespans and fragmented agencies. This article presents the upshots of this ongoing debate and suggests an...
Article
Allan Stoekl
Issue 157
This essay is a discussion of two works by contemporary French writer Olivier Rolin: Le Météorologue (2014) and Bakou, derniers jours (2010), both examples of empiritext, a contemporary genre of...
Article
Joshua Schuster
Issue 157
...and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with a reflection on the trope of contact between humans,...
Article
Erica O'Neill
Issue 149
John H. Muse’s Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time examines the production of short plays across the history of Western theatre practice, from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary performance. Categorizing...
Article
Martin Savransky
Issue 145
In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion...
Article
Eric Méchoulan, Angela Carr
Issue 138
...art or a specific medium. Consider the example that cinema provides: “its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity....
Article
Roxanna Curto
Issue 135
This volume examines the notion of “creolization,” from its origins as a “historical process specific to particular colonial sites”(viii) to its later use as a more general theme, applicable to...
Article
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
Issue 134
...significantly impact the research questions posed by some disciplines. Political philosophy is one example of this. Although recently we have seen the emergence of new work in this area from...
Article
Jared Gardner
Issue 124
...narrative, for example, one could have imagined narrative theory beating a hasty retreat. After all, as Metz reminds us, film is not a language system; it has no easy equivalent...
Article
Nilo F. Couret
Issue 123
...Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanism, Peter J. Bloom examines the myriad uses to which the documentary image was put during the interwar period, arguing that the representation of a pre-civilized...
Article
William Behum
Issue 121
Among the most problematic of the main concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is the Body without Organs (BwO.) This paper undertakes to examine the BwO in the light of...
Article
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Issue 117
A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”—a text I will examine later—the perfect operation of...