Article
Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (review)
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...
Search results for 'Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (review)'
Article
The Yellow Spot: Ocular Pathology and Empirical Method in Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystere de la chambre jaune
...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
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...
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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...
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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...
Article
Aggregators: RSS (Radically Subversive Syndication) Poetics
...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
Substance 37/38
Article
Dune(s)
...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...
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Notes from an Inquiry into Contingent Work
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...
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Eating Trees, Becoming Buddhas:Trees and the Possibility of History
...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
Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (review)
...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...
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Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (review)
...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
Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II and Triadic Memories
...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
Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (review)
...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
Report on Lydie Salvayre’s Subversive Classicism
“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
Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (review)
...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
Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (review)
...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
The Post-Exotic Connection: Passage to Utopia
...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...
Article
Driven to Write
...la vie. Seuls ces récits, lus parfois dans les transes, le situent devant le destin. Nous devons donc chercher passionnément ce que peuvent être des récits—comment orienter l’effort par lequel...
Article
Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language
...aesthetics. It is to attempt to find parameters shared by all theatrical enterprises from time immemorial. Although such a project may appear overly ambitious, its pertinence requires an attempt to...
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
“A row of screaming Russian dolls”: Escaping the Panopticon in David Mitchell’s number9dream
In 1786, Jeremy Bentham began a series of letters detailing a controversial prison structure. Printed in 1791, the preface opened with a hefty promise: “Morals reformed – health preserved –...
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
Politics and Ontology of the Image: Godard’s Debt to Blanchot
...with a political romanticism, and at times even with a “revolutionary romanticism” determined by a shared dialogue with German Romanticism and “a fragmentary demand” allied with the strength of protest...
Article
Staging Blanchot
...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
Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Illégal: How to Narrate Silence and Horror
...the urgency of such a challenge: the refugee (Nyers; Shemak; Bohmer; Chetail). In European urban centers–regardless of whether we speak as refugees, to refugees, or about refugees–complex transnational dialogues emerge....
Article
Phobic Postcards: Preview
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
Safety in Objects: Discourses of Violence and Value—The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0
...that this tradition has placed in performance art to rectify subject/object inequalities for female subjects. I will then turn to two feminist “performances”— Mary Richardson’s 1914 protest slashing of the...
Article
An Uncommon Reader
...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
...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 Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism by Delphine Bénézet (review)
...first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1954), Varda’s innovative approach to filmmaking has been a testament to the limitless possibilities of the moving image. In fact, Bénézet implies that film...
Article
The Monolingualism of the Human
...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
...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...
Issue
SubStance 165
Article
Excavations: On Glissant’s Trees
...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
Bergson and Darwin: From an Immanentist to an Emergentist Approach to Evolution
...selection, which is, in his terms, a “hypothesis” that can explain some large and independent “classes of facts” (AP I, 9). Hence, he seems to present a “well tested theory.”...
Article
Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration by Anna Watz (review)
...The volume’s greatest contribution lies in its “sustained analyses” (10) of literary works, which range from close readings to comprehensive bio-bibliographic reviews. Each of the eleven chapters avoids reifying gender...
Article
The Pardon of the Disaster
...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...