Article
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
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Issue 117
A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”—a text I will examine later—the perfect operation of...
Article
Luke Munn
Issue 161
...oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency...
Article
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
Rex Butler
Issue 155
This essay attempts to present a new interpretation of American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s perfectionism. Against most readings, it argues that Cavell’s work is fundamentally “transcendental” in logic, seeking to posit...
Article
David F. Bell, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Paul A. Harris, Eric Méchoulan
Issue 148
...made significant changes. This issue marks our fourth issue of publishing with Johns Hopkins University Press in a transition that recognizes our new publisher as a leader among university presses....
Article
J. Hillis Miller
Issue 131
...Newsletter of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is called Wilderness Matters, punning on the word as a noun and as a verb. We might say, analogously, “Literature...
Article
Minsoo Kang
Issue 147
...woman-machine? This essay traces the origin and development what could be called the hysterical woman-machine that was born in the mid-nineteenth century when the new materialist science produced thermodynamic and...
Article
David F. Bell
Issue 130
...the sort provoked by the Thatcher initiative and its eventual codification in the form of the newest version of the REF. It has been developing in a more insidious and...
Article
Effie Rentzou
Issue 147
...production of obscure texts, surrealism was revisited as a dynamic art movement and gained a position in the narratives of modernist art. Parallel blockbuster exhibitions in London, Paris, and New...
Issue
Dismantling the Man-Machine
Article
Irene J. Klaver
Issue 127
...May and I am sitting in the train to Alkmaar, a town forty miles north of Amsterdam, reading the newspaper and occasionally glancing at the familiar landscapes. The green polder-pasture...
Article
Jennifer Cazenave
Issue 157
...living and the dead in present-day Cambodia; visual amnesia in the form of unmarked killing fields and forgotten landscapes; and new practices of reading the inhabited terrains of the Anthropocene....
Article
Claire Sagan
Issue 157
...“Nietzschean ecology” would force us to fatefully dance with the radical reckoning that the only time we can inhabit is the moment, collapsing means and ends for a new eco-ethics....
Article
Warren Motte
Issue 149
...life in America; and his own artistic vision was in some ways closer to New York avant-garde aesthetics than to those encountered in mainstream Parisian culture. Thomas argues that Perec...
Article
Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek
Issue 146
...occult lithography. As the initial issue in a new digital/intermedial series of SubStance aimed at interweaving creative and critical work, Rock Records also features digital versions of essays with photo-rich...
Article
Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner
Issue 146
...these traditions and are creating new ways of displaying stones. Petraphiles, whether ancient or contemporary, are often drawn to express their appreciation of favored stones in writing. The Petraphiles represented...
Article
Martin Savransky, Isabelle Stengers
Issue 145
...about philosophy. When I left chemistry, I knew that in chemistry there were “good questions,” concerned with advancing knowledge, and any other question would not be considered serious. And to...
Article
Travis Wilds
Issue 144
...their minute description of the boardinghouse, where much of the novel’s action takes place, these pages emphasize physical setting, Auerbach argues, in a way new to Western literature. Yet Balzac’s...
Article
Razvan Amironesei, Jon Bialecki
Issue 142
Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some...
Article
Anthony Purdy
Issue 135
...a football player of the period, a half-finished jigsaw of a seventeenth-century Dutch interior, a toy skunk, a newly bound dissertation, a two-inch tall baobab tree lying on its side,...
Article
Will Bishop, Irving Goh
Issue 126
...also awaken, in the one whose shoulder is tapped or whose skin is brushed against, an aspect of the self that he or she never knew existed, an aspect that...
Article
Michael Lundblad
Issue 126
...kind much at all in this otherwise erudite, wide-ranging, and impressive new book. But the cover art points toward the “two different senses of posthumanism” (xix) that are brought together...
Article
Kieran M. Murphy
Issue 125
...between two forces of nature–electricity and magnetism–distinguished by their own physical laws. Thus the advent of electromagnetism and its subsequent applications–most notably the dynamo–provided a new physical model for conceptualizing...
Article
Edward P. Kazarian
Issue 122
...disease, distinguished it from cases with which it had until then been confused, by determining and grouping the symptoms in a new and decisive manner” (125). The clear implication of...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 122
...salutary ethical effects, “the troubling perception has to penetrate our defenses[emphasis added], reactivating prior memory traces and laying down new ones” while drawing on both individual and collective recollections (5)....
Issue
Article
Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Issue 121
...seem that to renew reason philosophy would have to take account of dimensions of objects not reducible to objectivity. If the Enlightenment arbitrarily and disastrously reduced reason to formulas of...
Article
Ioanna Chatzidimitriou
Issue 119
...writers of Beckett’s and Nabokov’s caliber. Like Beckett and Nabokov, contemporary translingual authors adopt a new language, often following geographical displacement either due to political, religious, or social restrictions and/or...
Article
Dominique Jullien
Issue 118
...smaller news items),obviously have significant overlap. One could propose that anecdotes are little stories about big people, while faits divers are stories about little people made big by publicity or...
Article
Marcel Hénaff, Jean-Louis Morhange
Issue 118
...a term and as a genre until the 17th century. The word literally designates what is new: a fact or detail that was unknown to the public and had not...
Article
Alison Ross
Issue 118
...on politics, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière holds that events able to disturb a prevailing distribution of order may be understood as instituting new conventions of meaning, and thus must...
Article
Timothy Morton
Issue 117
...avoid “new and improved” versions that end up doing much the same thing (systems theory, Spinozan pantheism, or Deleuze-and-Guattari type worlds of interlocking machines, and so on), just in a...
Article
Alexis Rider, Paul A. Harris
Issue 162
...in complex webs among bodies born of chiasmic crossings of Anthro-progeny and Geo-orogeny. Conceived as a companion almanac to Jemisin’s trilogy—though references to that work are intentionally oblique—the volume pursues...
Article
Bryan Norton
Issue 163
...mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis’s poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new...
Article
Gry Ulstein
Issue 156
...reveal tensions in how we conceptualize the environment, the human, and the nonhuman. By comparing the narrative strategies in the walrus scene to similar strategies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach...
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For over 50 years, SubStance has published rigorous, creative contributions to contemporary critical debates from a range of theoretical perspectives. Consistent with our commitment to readers and authors to expect...
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...length is usually between 7,000 and 8,000 words. Please edit longer articles so the argument comes forward succinctly. Hybrid pieces length will be considered on an individual basis. Our review...
Article
Kevin Bell
Issue 155
...1973 film Ganja & Hess. Conceived by its corporate producers as a “blaxploitation/vampire” vehicle, it becomes instead Gunn’s unofficial Cannes triumph; it is, for one venerated critic, “the most complicated,...
Article
John Brenkman
Issue 155
...with Nietzsche in the antifoundationalist, postmodern philosophy of Gianni Vattimo, and with Pascal in the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, occasions pertinent comparisons to Blanchot as a reader of Pascal...
Issue
Reading After Blanchot
Article
Essi Varis
Issue 148
The Unwritten (2009–2015), a Vertigo comics series created by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, demonstrates through metafictional storytelling that all fictional characters share important features with Victor Frankenstein’s infamous creature:...
Article
Will Higbee
Issue 133
...French-born descendants of immigrants, whose presence within the nation demands a reconsideration of previously fixed notions of community, origins and national identity. Though certainly not limited to the perspective of...
Article
Rosalind Galt
Issue 133
...to Argentina, Iceland and Greece in the 2000s. Embedded as it almost always is within the global circuits of capitalist culture, cinema has a particularly complex relationship to globalization: these...
Article
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Issue 133
...concept of the “Figure” developed in the former, I will distill an initial concept of Mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. I will then compare...
Article
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Issue 132
At least since the 1970s, vulnerability has emerged as a significant area of research in international social sciences. Combining sociology, studies of climate change, politics, and cultural geography, these interdisciplinary...
Article
Patrick Colm Hogan
Issue 131
...Indeed, when it comes to teachers and students of literature, even that question is not quite accurate. Rather, there are three separate questions. First, should verbal art matter? Put differently,...
Article
Paul Giles
Issue 131
...issues. Even when not tarnished with the popular notion of aestheticism as betokening a Wildean hedonism, the field has frequently been reductively compartmentalized in relation to a self-indulgent subjectivism, where...
Article
Laurence M. Porter
Issue 131
...in English-Language Narrative Discourse from 700 A.D. to the present” (vii). Through comparison or contrast, many of its observations on character depiction and on the “developmental trajectories” of stories can...