Article

Speculative Romanticism

Greg Ellermann
Issue 136
...name, speculative realism encompasses an entire spectrum of philosophies “committed to upholding the autonomy of reality … against the depredations of anthropocentrism” (Brassier et al. 306). After a century of...
Article

Human Exceptionalism on the Line

Vicki Kirby
Issue 134
...thinker of origins, we should not be surprised by his forensic attention to what is particular about human genesis—those capacities whose unique achievement and comparative complexity are purportedly without precedent....
Article

Zoopolitics

Patrick Llored, Matthew Chrulew, Brett Buchanan
Issue 134
...heart, beckoning toward the establishment and institution of a border between the two, but rather one that comes to blur, to rework and accordingly to complexify the limits between them....
Article

Intact

Frédéric Neyrat
Issue 126
“What characterizes the comical is the infinite satisfaction, the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself to be above one’s own contradiction, rather than seeing in it a cruel...
Article

Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us

Luce Irigaray
Issue 126
...one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging from each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from...
Article

Beckett after Beckett (review)

Timothy Scheie
Issue 125
Few modern writers command a literary stamp as distinct as Samuel Beckett’s, yet the starkness that characterizes the Beckettian imaginary (particularly in the theater), however familiar, leaves intentions elusive, messages...
Article

Painting’s Figural Territory: An Impossible Refrain

Christopher Gontar
Issue 121
...“supersensible” or thing-in-itself. In a section of his Third Critique, Kant grappled with taste as a judgment that is subjective yet relies on a sensus communis. This gives rise to...
Article

How to Live with Roland Barthes

Patrick ffrench
Issue 120
...will in time attain completion. Barthes values the proleptic, or dilatory gesture over the completed whole; the statement “Plus tard…,” moreover, works in secret as a denunciation of the “monstre...
Article

How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille

Liran Razinsky
Issue 119
...1915, is a fascinating discussion about our attitudes towards death, which comprise both a “cultural-conventional attitude” that Freud so pertinently, almost wickedly, criticizes, and the attitude common to the unconscious...
Article

Nature and its Discontents

Slavoj Žižek
Issue 117
...produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they...
Article

Postlude

Isabelle Stengers
Issue 145
...Gilles Deleuze’s proposition about how to characterize the work of a philosopher. I am most grateful to Martin Savransky and those who accepted his invitation because, in order to obtain...
Article

Invocation: “FIFTY is Nifty”

I.M. Lithic
Issue 160
...isn’t mimicking ‘in’ things, isn’t gimmicking slick tricks. It isn’t sticky with insipid kitsch; it’s minting first citings, glinting with birth-writings. This imprint isn’t stifling, it isn’t middling. It isn’t...
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 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

Unruly Microcosms in Contemporary Eco-Fiction

Liliane Campos
Issue 162
...Earth through analogy, allegory and metaphor. Within and against this scale-free reading, I argue that the microcosm has become a fracturing trope that troubles relations between scales. Drawing on fiction...
Article

Foucault’s Ethical Ars Erotica

Lynne Huffer
Issue 120
...finish. In 1961, History of Madness begins to articulate an ethics that Foucault will describe in the 1980s as a practice of freedom in relation to others. Specifically, Madness presents...
Article

Solitude, Violation, Alterity: Rulfo’s Wastelands

Jason Kemp Winfree
Issue 119
In the most influential ontology of human being in the last century, Martin Heidegger emphasizes the temporal structure of Dasein as constituted out of the future. My existence, my being...
Article

ChatGPT: a psychomachia

Christopher Norris
Issue 163
...be, capable of writing ‘authentic’ poetry, and a poet who resists that claim on various grounds, personal and philosophical. The opening, strict-form sonnet proposes that the issue be tested by...
Article

An Uncommon Reader

Christopher Norris
Issue 153
...the ways we try to make sense of our lives. At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what...
Article

Phobic Postcards: Preview

Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Issue 147
If the greatest philosopher in the world finds himself upon a plank wider than actually necessary, but hanging over a precipice, his imagination will prevail, though his reason convince him...
Article

Staging Blanchot

Christophe Bident, Sylvia Gorelick
Issue 155
...a letter I received from Blanchot about my project, recall the testimonies I collected from contemporaries and friends, and discuss the editorial resistance the biography encountered. At the time, I...
Article

Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies (review)

Ralph Schoolcraft III
Issue 119
Herman Lebovics’s latest collection of essays, sketchy in its argumentation, frequently off-topic, and rife with errors, is a disappointing treatment of a promising subject. The book’s objective is “to trace...
Article

The Monolingualism of the Human

Christopher Peterson
Issue 134
...to this retreat” (162). To whom does this print belong? Is it proof that his greatest fear is soon to materialize—namely, that he will be savagely devoured by a group...
Article

David Mitchell’s Fractal Imagination: The Bone Clocks

Paul A. Harris
Issue 136
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, the latest iteration of his fractal imagination, follows a central character’s life through six decades in six sections that simultaneously succeed as stand-alone stories. Protagonist...
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

The Role of Multimodal Imagery in Life Writing

Laura Otis
Issue 159
...as vision and touch) that blend as in lived experience. In this study of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive, I will examine...
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

Machinations of the Senses

Daniel Deshays, David F. Bell
Issue 152
...functioning like the accelerator of a motorbike, ridden by an adolescent, screaming through the housing projects in the middle of the night… Examples of gestures to analyze, each with a...