Article

The Sylvan Ghosts of Class Mobility

Morgane Cadieu
Issue 166
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...
Article

Derrida’s Hamlet

Christopher Prendergast
Issue 106
...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...
Article

A Life-long Love Affair with Language

Marcel Benabou, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 100
...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...
Article

Spatial Stream of Consciousness

Joshua Armstrong
Issue 148
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

Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future

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

Jacques Derrida: Biography in Action

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

Olivier Rolin: Habitation in the Empiritext

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

Lascaux IV, Chauvet II, Planet B

Vincent Bruyere
Issue 157
...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...
Article

Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission

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

Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer (review)

Laurence M. Porter
Issue 136
...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....
Article

Romantic Conservatism in Burke, Wordsworth, and Wendell Berry

Katey Castellano
Issue 125
...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...
Article

Storylines

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

The Body of Light and the Body without Organs

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

Breathren

Katherine Ibbett
Issue 160
...the Protestant minority, under increasing and violent pressure from the Catholic state, met his example with a last gasp of their own. The term “souffle” is everywhere in the martyrologies...
Article

Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene

Emily McAvan
Issue 164
In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam –waste washed-up or discarded in water –as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken...
Article

The Livid Tree

Sandy Alexandre
Issue 166
...consulted for this fact in popular culture, they are, in fact, embodiments of social knowledge trained on the vast archive of our human antics; see, for example, the omniscient ur-tree...
Article

Simondon, Cybernetics, Critical Disability

Grant Hussong
Issue 167
...individual as transduction. With the example of cybernetics, I argue that critical disability work elucidates implicit sociology’s machinations. In turn, Simondon’s individuation provides a helpful analytic for scholars today toggling...
Article

Qu’est-ce qu’un espace littéraire? (review)

Steven Winspur
Issue 114
...“literary space” for understanding the ways in which literature questions the foundations of social space, whether political or cultural. Several contributors also examine the ways in which writers engage their...
Article

Friedrich Kittler zur Einführung (review)

Larson Powell
Issue 111
...also, in his later work, of Heidegger. Kittler’s work not only combines the unearthing of forgotten historical and archival materials with interdisciplinary linkages from literature to music and the hard...
Article

Revenge and Poetic Justice in Classical France

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 109
...benefit of the criminals, both suffering and redemption. Human crimes had to be paid for in pain, as the example of Christ illustrated. In 1804, Nicolas Frochot, Governor of Paris,...