Article
Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned
...pace that allows not only for frequent mention of things to be discussed (for example, that the reason of the strongest is always the best), but also for looping back...
Search results for 'Sovereignty Conditioned and Unconditioned'
Article
Drone Penalty
...a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and...
Article
Bernard Réquichot, Writing Tree
...consciously on this ‘illusory writing’ and noticed that when it tended to combine rhythmically with itself, a second illusion was born: the image of something vague, often biological and naturalistic....
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Introduction: On the Edges of Jacques Ranciere
...approaches to various objects of analysis (from aesthetics and literature to politics and science): Alain Badiou, Vincent Descombes, François Jullien, Jean-Luc Nancy, for example. Among them, Jacques Rancière occupies a...
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Formules de la poesie: Etudes sur Ponge, Leiris, Char et Du Bouchet (review)
Philippe Met’s study begins with an important insight into twentieth-century poetry: namely, that many post-surrealist French poets did not compose works around images but instead around what Michel Leiris called...
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Jacques Jouet, Metro Poet
...(and Without) Constraints,” details about the genesis of this particular genre along with the so-called self-defining poem, which is itself a metro poem. I would like to examine this new...
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Interpreting Intouchables: Competing Transnationalisms in Contemporary French Cinema
...type of odd couple is common in French farce (as in Hollywood buddy comedies), the film’s strangely inscrutable title gives pause. Lacking an article in French, intouchables becomes a floating...
Article
The Story of the Raven and the Robot*
The aim of this paper is to study the relationship of companion robots to the uncanny, using popular depictions of these robots. I start by presenting a few companion robots...
Article
The Commotion of Souls
...last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week....
Article
Come Rain or Shine
Lui: So, Mr. Scholar-Critic, you say you’ve lost interest in the usual questions of your discipline? Bravo, I’m all for being undisciplined—but tell me then, what are the questions that...
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Commentary: The Le Pen Moment
...a guitar case containing a .22 rifle he had recently purchased. The day before, on the British neo-Nazi website Combat 18 (18 signifying AH, the first and eighth letters of...
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From Interests to Inter-esse: Jean-Luc Nancy on Deglobalization and Sovereignty
...hot issues are touched upon philosophically by Nancy’s thesis of “l’être-à-soi du peuple, son unité comme communauté ou comme corps social (…) comme inatteignable autant que nécessaire” (La démocratie à...
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Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised “Realities”
Any concept of theatricality should be based upon the structural essentials of the specific cultural production of theater, in its most comprehensive sense. Theater is a type of social communication...
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Love in the Time of Capital
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...
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À belles mains. Livre surréaliste-Livre d’artiste. Mélusine ed. by Andrea Oberhuber (review)
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...
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Journeys through the Offset World: Global Travel Narratives and Environmental Crisis
...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...
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Is Theory Good for the Jews? French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism by Bruno Chaouat (review)
“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...
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News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin (review)
...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...
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Primal Weaving: Structure and Meaning in Language and Architecture
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...
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The Problem of Wild Minds: Knowing Animals in Grizzly Man and Ming of Harlem
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...
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Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing by Bogost, Ian (review)
...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...
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Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique by Nathan Brown (review)
Nathan Brown’s Rationalist Empiricism is, above all, a book about philosophical method. It is also a highly significant study of the conceptual architecture of Marxism, developed by way of a...
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The Sylvan Ghosts of Class Mobility
Polity Press, in its Key Concept series, favors natural elements for the covers of its books on social issues: lush rice fields for Will Atkinson’s Class; close-up leaves for Muriel...
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Derrida’s Hamlet
...play that occupies the first part of Spectres of Marx. What is Hamlet doing in a book about Marx and ghosts—both Marx’s ghosts (the famous spectre mentioned at the beginning...
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Defis du recit scenique: Formes et enjeux du mode narratif dans le theatre de Beckett et de Duras (review)
...théâtre-récit est une nette manifestation de cette suppression des frontières génériques” (8). Engelberts challenges this argument in his book, Défis du récit Scénique: Formes et enjeux du mode narrative dans...
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A Life-long Love Affair with Language
...World, have almost never ceased to fascinate me since. These are questions of language, of course. Language grasped in its amazing complexity. And first of all in its materiality: the...
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The Joy of Uprising and the Fear of the State: On Blanchot’s Insurrectional Writings (1968–1969)
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...
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Spatial Stream of Consciousness
This article examines Olivier Rolin’s use of stream of consciousness narration in L’invention du monde (1993). It draws upon philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio to propose that the novel—with...
Article
Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda
...really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments...
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Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future
...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...
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Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (review)
...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...
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Jacques Derrida: Biography in Action
...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...
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Nicholas Winding Refn’s Abject Male: Inhibiting Spectator-Identification in Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011)
...spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva’s theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject’s complex relationship to Refn’s œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema....
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Anthropocene Horcruxes: Toward a Theory of Distributed Identities
...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...
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Olivier Rolin: Habitation in the Empiritext
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
Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B
...IV proposes a complete replica integrated within an interactive museum environment. The replication project continues: Chauvet II in 2015; Cosquer II in 2022. How these replicas were built is well...
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Critique of Alien Reason: Toward a Critical Interplanetary Humanities
...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,...
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4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet by Karin Kukkonen (review)
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition) is the defining feature of second-generation cognitive science, which replaces a computer-like cognitive processing model with one that highlights the interactive dynamism...
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Race, Class, and the Limits of the Analogical Imagination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African America
...history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the...
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Gaia Politics, Critique, and the “Planetary Imaginary”
In this article, I examine Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers’s recent writings on Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope....
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Closing Thoughts: Benjamin to Brecht
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints;...
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Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time by John H. Muse (review)
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...
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Introduction: Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization of Philosophy
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...
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The Conventional and the Queer: Lily Bart, An Unlivable Ideal
In criticism of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, more attention has been paid in recent years to the unconventional side of Lily Bart. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, calls Lily...
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Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission
...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....
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Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)
...or film. His main examples, in path-breaking analyses of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, come from nineteenth-century British literature, but they should inspire studies in other areas....
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The Creolization of Theory ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (review)
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...
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The Will for Self-Preservation: Locke and Derrida on Dominion, Property and Animals
...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
Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry
...lost harmony between humans and nature” (229). Foreseeing that the rise and progress of industrial modernity might irreversibly erode both the landscape and local communities, Romantic literature questions humanistic, technological...
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Storylines
...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...