Article

Inspiration/Expiration (Completion)

Grégory Chatonsky
Issue 160
This text was co-written with an artificial intelligence (AI). This so-called author wrote a sentence, then the software continued, and so on, each influencing the other, completing each other. Another...
Article

Derrida’s Hamlet

Christopher Prendergast
Issue 106
...of the Communist Manifesto) and the ghosts of Marx (broadly, what Derrida means by the “legacy” of Marx, as the constant returns of a kind of spectre in the midst...
Article

Abstraction in Comics

Jan Baetens
Issue 124
The study of narrative in comics (which I will use as a general term covering both mainstream comics and more highbrow graphic novels) has often been a mere copy of...
Article

The New Digital Flesh of Fantastic Bodies

Denis Mellier, Charles La Via
Issue 147
From the fantastic inscribed on bodies, frightening as well as suffering bodies, and cinematic technologies inventing new spectacular forms of these bodies, a history of the one based on the...
Article

Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature

Ranjan Ghosh
Issue 127
...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

Feeling Stone

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Issue 146
Stone hurts—and not simply because rocks so easily become missiles. The lithic offers a blunt challenge to our belief that humans matter. Homo sapiens are a species perhaps 200,000 years...
Article

The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations

Peter De Bolla
Issue 109
...mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of epistemological contest in a discursive daguerreotype whose silvered...
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

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

Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns

Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Issue 122
...those of a modern comedy. Beckett—whose theater, when “completed” correctly, is truly hilarious—was well aware of this. (75) Now of course the comedy Badiou has in mind here is not...
Article

Toward a Tree

Éric Trudel
Issue 166
...meant to be understood as an obstacle: “That is ‘rough poetry’: when one literally bumps against a tree” (Trouver ici 27).2 As if the promise of the preposition toward was...
Article

French Gay Modernism (review)

Denis M. Provencher
Issue 112
In his new book, Lawrence Schehr examines the portrayals of “overtly gay male characters having social and often sexual relations with one another” (1) in French narratives from the first...
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SubStance Journal

...traditional academic scholarship Featured Articles L’existence prépositionnelle by Irving Goh (review) by Michael G. Kelly Issue 168 Read Article Gamification and the Ambiguities of Digital Play in Contemporary Fiction by...
Article

The Anecdote: Introduction

Andrea Loselle
Issue 118
In our day a child preparing for a spelling bee might be prone to confuse an anecdote with an antidote. The two words have such a similar ring that the...
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

What the Pines Do Not Know

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 166
On July 12, 2022, a van caught fire on a small road, the “piste 214,” that winds through the pine forest towards the beach south of La Teste. After several...
Article

The Salvayre Method

Marie-Pascale Huglo, Roxanne Lapidus
Issue 111
In the cartography of the contemporary French novel, Lydie Salvayre’s oeuvre occupies a place apart—she affirms herself with a singular freedom of tone and a refusal of the serious. 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

Echenoz’s Modern-Day Mystics

Dominique Jullien
Issue 111
...him for his second novel, Cherokee, has begun to familiarize the public with his work, Jean Echenoz is still a new name in contemporary French fiction. No critical studies are...
Article

France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (review)

Carla Calargé, Rosemarie Scullion
Issue 113
...are able to invent a common, heretofore unspoken language. These exchanges produce a new subject position, a new language and a new type of engagement which, although not necessarily devoid...
Article

Global Terror, Global Vengeance?

Marcel Hénaff, Roxanne Lapidus, Robert Doran
Issue 115
It seems generally accepted that the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington mark the beginning of an era of a new kind of violence. We are...