Article

The Color of Noise

John Mowitt
Issue 152
...the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the...
Article

The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology

Paul Prudence
Issue 146
...new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois’s stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions....
Article

The Mother of Us All?

Kevin Kopelson
Issue 133
...mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its continued refusal to come out are addressed?” asks Sedgwick. “And isn’t some scene like that,” she asks as well, “behind the...
Article

Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time

Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
To date, David Mitchell’s fiction comprises six adventurously heterogeneous novels. Three are “cosmopolitan”1 in scope and structure, composed of sections that skip freely around in time and space: Ghostwritten (2001),...
Article

Stoned Thinking: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

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

Spatial Memory: Variations on Classical Themes

David F. Bell
Issue 140
...encounter with Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster in the entrance foyer ensued, during which salient details of the Muppet’s appearance were described down to the smell of his constant companion, a...
Article

Introduction: Reading After Blanchot

Zakir Paul
Issue 155
...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...
Article

Breathing with Denise Levertov

Noëlle Batt
Issue 160
...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...
Article

On the Risk of Gaia for an Ecology of Practices

A.J. Nocek
Issue 145
...or concepts that easily encapsulates her work. Nevertheless, in recent years concepts such as “cosmopolitics” and the “ecology of practices” have gained a special currency in the context of humanities...
Article

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (review)

Paul A. Harris
Issue 140
...is intensely to inhabit that preposition with, to move from solitary individuations to ecosystems, environments, shared agencies, and companionate properties” (11-12). This conjoining of human and stone produces a “monstrous...
Article

ReGrounding:

Richard Turner
Issue 146
...object from an ordinary rock to a viewing stone that invites close examination and perhaps contemplation. In this essay, I will examine the act of “re-grounding” rocks that have been...
Article

Oranges, Anecdote and the Nature of Things

Helen Deutsch
Issue 118
On August 6, 1763, the man who would become the greatest master of anecdotal form in English, James Boswell, and the object of his adulation and future biographical subject, Samuel...
Article

Cybertrance Devices: Countercultures of the Cybernetic Man-Machine

Mathieu Triclot, Charles La Via
Issue 147
...examined: the immersive multimedia installations of psychedelic culture, the flicker and its physiological effects, biofeedback devices, and the digital translations, in the world of computing, of these first analogical devices....
Article

La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review)

Diana Mistreanu
Issue 159
Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to...
Article

Agency in the Cinematic Conspiracy Thriller

Temenuga Trifonova
Issue 129
...over the last several decades Hollywood has been “borrowing” the symptomatic language of doubling and multiple personality—characterized by trauma, memory loss, and blackouts—to create what appears to be a new...
Article

Pierre Alferi: A Bountiful Surface of Blues

Jean-Jacques Thomas
Issue 123
...members of the groups producing them. With the new millennium, the situation has eased somewhat. Alferi and Cadiot’s new journal was thus a breath of fresh air, in the sense...
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

“The Authenticity of Exile” between Blanchot and Levinas

Michael Krimper
Issue 144
In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations...
Article

Encounters with Impact

Wendelin Werner, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 130
One of the recurring themes in discussions among mathematicians, whether in informal lunch hour talks or in more formal committees, is what might be called “simplistic impact-bashing.” We are more...
Article

A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth

Claire Colebrook
Issue 127
Today’s questions of climate and climate ethics, with attendant concerns for the sustainability and viability of this life of ours on earth, present a new imaginary for political questions. It...
Article

A Vulnerable World: Heidegger on Humans and Finitude

Krzysztof Ziarek
Issue 132
The notion of vulnerability comes from the Late Latin vulnerabilis, derived from vulnerare “to wound,” which comes from vulner-, vulnus “wound.” As the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests, it is probably akin...
Article

“In the Beginning”… an Intermedial Babel

Karin Littau
Issue 138
...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...
Article

Kafka’s Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice

Chris Danta
Issue 117
...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

Téléphone arabe

Clément de Gaulejac, Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt
Issue 137
...one of my films.” – Raoul Ruiz Definition In French, the expression “téléphone arabe” has two meanings: 1) An oral communication and, furthermore, a rumor or unreliable information; 2) A...
Article

Phobic Postcards

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
At Play
...resolved to adopt Bachelard’s cure, and submit to a sort of an imaginary training. It is like re-accomplishing the labors of Hercules so as to master in imagination all kinds...
Article

Breathing Emily Dickinson: Inspiration/Expiration

Eric Méchoulan
Issue 160
...hour behind the fleeting breath G. Share; experience; partake of; have in common When it comes, the Landscape listens — Shadows — hold their breath — H. Inhale deeply; rest...
Article

Pitiable or Political Animals?

Julian Murphet
Issue 117
...preponderance today of a public pity for what is here posed only in the subjunctive. It is a pity about which a veritable war has been waged for two centuries...