Article
Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas (review)
In the early pages of this study, Jean-Jacques Thomas confesses that it was not his intention to write a book on Perec. Rather, he was interested in the manner in...
Search results for 'Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas (review)'
Article
Deep Blue Geomediations: Following Lapis Lazuli in Three Ecological Assemblages
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...
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Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe by William Guynn, and: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth-Century by Timothy Snyder (review)
On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook...
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Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophical Fabulations: The Importance of a ‘New Aesthetic Paradigm’
...“the invention of modern science” described by Stengers in her seminal book with just this title. Understood in this historical sense as the philosophical discipline founded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten...
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Pedagogical Subversion: The “Un-American” Graphics of Kevin Pyle
...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...
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Radical History and the Politics of Art by Gabriel Rockhill (review)
Gabriel Rockhill’s ambitious book responds to an acute need to re-think the relationships between aesthetics and politics. Radical History and the Politics of Art is an innovative, interdisciplinary attempt at...
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Letters for the Blind
In the autumn of 1798, Immanuel Kant published what was (excluding lecture notes) his final work, The Conflict of the Faculties. The latter comprises three essays, which ostensibly address the...
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“In the Beginning”… an Intermedial Babel
...reel they show towers at various stages of (de)composition. The images come from other gigantic installations Kiefer created, including the architectural landscape of concrete towers molded from shipping containers at...
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David Mitchell in the Laboratory of Time: An Interview with the Author
The following interview was conducted by email from September 2014 to January 2015. I am grateful to David Mitchell for extending himself during a busy book tour marking the publication...
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Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society by Valérie K. Orlando (review)
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...
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Silent Discourse: The Language of Signs and “Becoming-Woman”
...human thought, complemented by calculus ratiocinator and reflecting ratio embedded in Nature. The corollary is that, ultimately, the correspondence between primitive signs and the complex ideas for which they stand...
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Believing in this World for the Making of Gods: Ecology of the Virtual and the Actual
...my review essay of Hallward’s book I argued that he was correct to bring attention to the neglected spiritual aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy, but that his negative valuation of this...
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The Anecdote: Introduction
...be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be...
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From Antidote to Anecdote: Montaigne on Dissemblance
...be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be...
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Jean Genet: Politics and Performance (review)
...full-length studies of Genet’s theater published in English since 1990 (I wrote one of them, while Brian Kennelly’s book on Genet’s posthumously published plays is the other), and there have...
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Substance 33/34
Issue
Substance 82
Article
Wandering the Magnetosphere
Navigation notes: These emergent drawings–excerpts from a visual essay–take up the complex network of impacts across physical forces entangled with bio-geo-political time. A key element for this work is a...
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The Tree of Non-Being: Where Abdelkader and Ibn Arabi Respond to Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux
...The reader may have understood that I am addressing these questions to a now-classic text: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux.2 This book contains a famous critique of the...
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Grieving with the Forest: La Fontaine’s La Forêt et le Bûcheron
...had become so dire that Superintendent of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert made forest management one of his earliest and most pressing priorities, commissioning a survey of France’s forests in 1661, followed...
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Chaîne et Chaîne: Representation as Corrosion in François Bon’s Daewoo
...Bon explored these issues in books such as Sortie d’usine and Décor ciment, he complicated the recursive investigations of works like Cherokee with an increasingly deep investment in a second...
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Gérard Gavarry’s Hops
Once in a great while a novel comes along that pleases and astonishes not only by virtue of the story it tells, but also by virtue of its form, and...
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French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis (review)
From the very title of his book, François Cusset sets the mood: it is about the American incarnation of late twentieth-century French thought, analyzed with a hint of irony and...
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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty
...apparent in his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the world-body of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work: “sensation has no [objective and subjective]...
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The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory (review)
Smyth’s beautifully written, many stranded theoretical book explores the problem of the incorrigible lability (instability; inconstancy; vulnerability to error or to sin) of meaning that he first addressed at length...
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Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (review)
The late Pierre Bourdieu made significant contributions to literary and cultural studies, especially with his concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field. Of his two dozen books (all but a...
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Goethe’s Backpack
...mind. His note-books impair his memory: his libraries overload his wit… —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” The peasants at the Italian border, who saw him coming one sunny day of 1679,...
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Introduction: The Art of War According to Lydie Salvayre
...of that “little special thing” that makes her signature. But verbal intensity is not all there is to say about this contemporary writer. As one reads through the books she...
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Revisiting A New History of French Literature
...in Comparative Literature. In any case, the “crisis” prompted by the discovery and dissemination of de Man’s wartime articles was really not central to the way the book was conceived....
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Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945 (review)
...were put by political and social groups. Burton’s book, immensely learned, encyclopedic in scope, charts the bloodletting that marked political changeovers in France. From the first killings of de Launay...
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French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During, and After Vichy (review)
...rather than spawning a knee-jerk negative reaction to its cultural output, actually inspired a semi-extension of it, an extension that would backfire on French artists, unable to compete with the...
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At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy
...this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that...
Article
Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur
When Silvio Berlusconi won the elections in 1994, the international press unleashed an avalanche of not particularly well-meaning commentary, while the left and the democrats expressed their own quite understandable...
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The Force of Noise, or Touching Music: The Tele-Haptics of Stockhausen’s “Helicopter String Quartet”
The American composer John Adams writes “One needs the stimulation of the tactile contact with the sound” (191). He illustrates this point with a kind of tautology, for he says...
Article
Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice
...and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to “be forgotten like all her brothers” (1979: 145). Kafka completed...
Article
Schizo-Economy
...strategies of the twentieth-century workers’ movement, to the horizons of democratic socialism or revolutionary communism? Nothing would be more inconclusive. The capitalism of mass networks that was fully implemented in...
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A Gathering in a Forest: The Unsettling Environment and Culinary Ethics of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe
A meal is often a gathering: a group of people coming together to share food. A meal is always a “gathering” in the sense that Bruno Latour uses the word...
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Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (review)
This wide-ranging study of the French classical era’s most eminent dramatists—Corneille, Molière, and Racine—proposes a complex critical re-evaluation of the texts of canonical plays that we may think we know...
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The Neuroscientist’s Memoir: Dramatic Irony and Disorders of Consciousness
This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent...
Article
Breathing with Denise Levertov
...who would at last be wise enough to remain discreet, and refrain from any untimely interference with the life of the Earth. Works Cited Levertov, Denise. “The Breathing.” AllPoetry.com, .com/The-Breathing...
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The TV-Box: Reconsidering a Lost Television Set, Santa Claus and the Ants
...periodization). To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to...
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Divinatory Chances
Two issues for Deleuze’s thought converge in its encounter with combinatorial divination: (1) the problem of a philosophical affirmation of the “whole of chance” or of “all chance in a...
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Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty
Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of...
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Introduction: Reading After Blanchot
...So how, if at all, does Blanchot speak to the present? Responses to this question are quickly complicated by the rich and varied reception of his work. A lifelong friend...
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Life Writing, Identity, and the Classroom: Perspectives from Social and Educational Psychology
The attractiveness of life writings stems from its promise of exceptional intimacy with a writer. Yet that intimacy can come at a cost, especially in relation to writers from marginalized...
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Less Than One Language: Typographic Multilingualism and Post-Anglophone Fiction
What comes after the language model of literary history? This essay considers that question by turning to works of contemporary fiction that operate at the edges of our most dominant...
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Introduction
...departing significantly from the state-centered and reformist policies of the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano, PCI). The theoretical investigations of the workerists were rooted in an intense practical engagement...
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Politics and Philosophy in the Red Years: Badiou, Sartre, Althusser and the Problematic of Suture
This essay approaches Alain Badiou’s theoretical production during the period of militant fury commenced by May ‘68 in terms of his conflicted relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Badiou’s...
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Introduction: Film and / as Ethics
...that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be...
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The Syndrome of the Thermometer: Two Machines for Reading Thoughts
...more likely, he just wants to make sure that he will be able to read the room temperature next time he comes. He is afraid to be too hot. He...