This article proposes texture as the medium for worlding in Proust's In Search of Lost Time by developing Husserl's theory of aesthetic consciousness and Merleau-Ponty's onto-phenomenology of flesh. Proust's narrator constantly interposes unusual surfaces between perception and sensorial experiences, for instance on faces and landscapes, I contend, not simply as metaphors or metonymies to enhance the understanding of ideas, but rather as textural overlays — means of contact with a new reality. Following Mauro Carbone's ‘sensible idea’ in An Unprecedented Deformation (2011) and Anne Simon's explication of a rediscovered real in Proust ou un reél retrouvé (2018), I argue that a sensible, material, textural unfolding and furrowing is the Proustian ontological structure through which the narrator accesses an otherwise virtual, non-actual world. Hence texture is the medium both in the sense of that which is in the middle, and that which is a means to a way out to a wholly other reality. I will analyse the Opéra theatre box passage in The Guermantes Way with Husserl's theory of the image and Merleau-Ponty's flesh as a mottled, texturing mediacy to arrive at a Proustian onto-phenomenology.
While some pasts endure as monumental ruins, some were reduced to rubble and assumed to have left no useful remnants. This article examines Georges Didi-Huberman's recent writings to propose rubble as a critical figure for theorizing testimony after genocide. I argue that Didi-Huberman develops an epistemological toolkit for apprehending the witnessing of traditions disseminated as rubble, often dismissed as illegible or insignificant. Unlike ruins, monumentalized as the legible residues of powerful regimes, rubble emerges as minor, dispersed and unclassified — yet it persists to bear witness through its embeddedness in new habitats: ecological, archival and affective. Such testimony does not merely supplement the narratives of monumental ruins or curated memorials, but frequently unsettles or contradicts them. By foregrounding rubble as an affirmative agent of witnessing, the article rethinks the persistence of Jewish life in Europe and opens pathways for recognizing modes of testimony in histories otherwise presumed to have left no legible trace.
This article critically examines the progress of generative artificial intelligence (AI) based on large language models via the premise that recent advances have simultaneously been significant and lacking when applied to textual production and, in particular, translation. It examines the often contradictory notions of intelligence (as intellect or cognition) in debates between AI developers, the individual and collective relationship between language, body and thought, and the literary foreshadowing that points to an age in which machines abolish the need for writers and translators through the ability to pre-empt any possible text in any language. The article concludes by offering a delineation of the use of language centred mainly on communication versus the establishing of newness based on the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher in order to demonstrate the significant difference between the two, and how that reflects advances in AI in the former as well as its shortcomings in the latter.
This article analogizes the ‘hallucinations’ of large language model generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the phenomenological representation of monsters in cultural production. In the language of AI ‘hallucination’ we find a correlate with our phenomenal recognition of the monster as a kind of morphological failure. The essay suggests that monsters remain an undertheorized topic in critical theory and suggests that they provide a model for explicating the emerging technological, sociopolitical and cultural problems which are menacing contemporary academic discourse. If AI chatbots are marked by what Johnan Fredrikzon calls epistemological indifference then does their visual output constitute a kind of phenomenological indifference that reaches an apotheosis in the figure of the monster?
This article examines meaning in dance, through considering dance as particular within the broader question of sense-making in art. The discussion is framed through a lens rooted in Kant's aesthetics, in which aesthetic judgement is conceptually indeterminate: specifically, a system that is not governed by determinate concepts. The question of sense is further explored through Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy, which gives a contemporary understanding to the idea of indeterminacy. In particular, Nancy's ideas elaborate indeterminacy in the case of dance, arguing that the desire of dance is to escape the closure of meaning. Given that dance, as an art form, does not communicate definite sense, I examine what provokes a desire to understand these strange and unfamiliar movements from the perspective on a viewer or onlooker. Drawing on Augustine's and Agamben's discussions of sound, I argue that it is the dancer's desire to signify which suggests that the movements are not empty gestures to the viewer. Considering the interplay between ‘reading’ dance and ‘writing’ the body, I conclude by arguing that, in dance, movement functions as a letter rather than a signifier, thus requiring an alternative method of reading.
This article expands upon the ongoing rereading of grammatology towards worldly and embodied problems, in the direction of existentialism, a tradition long thought to be worlds apart from deconstruction. Through a closer look at the two studies in existential analysis Jean-Paul Sartre dedicated to Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert, we will reveal a sensibility to the radical potential of writing in transforming classical conceptions of meaning, authorship and subjectivity that echoes and in fact precedes Jacques Derrida's. The notion of the transfinite, explored by Jean Cavaillès, is proposed as a possible conceptual connector between the two, even if spectrally. This shared cultural and conceptual milieu may explain their recognition of the fertile tension between unstable meaning and the universal scope of any event of meaning-making. But the later Sartre is more explicit than Derrida in thematizing the objective of contamination of other consciousnesses that would be inherent to all acts of meaning-making. This bolder approach will confirm certain avenues for the moral challenges classically addressed to grammatology, on questions of agency, ideology and pragmatics.
In my work on Dutch and French colonial radio history and its intersection in South-East Asia, I examine how the crackle traces a history of failures. This framing of colonial radio history through the lens of failure stems from a refusal to repeat history on the terms given by colonial archival materials. I approach the crackle as a glitch, an active refusal to seamlessly perform the self-congratulatory discourse of colonial success broadcasted and recorded on shortwave radio. In my period of focus, around 1945, the above-mentioned colonial regimes continuously attempted and failed to eradicate crackles from shortwave radio broadcasts. I argue that this struggle against the crackle reveals the fantasy of closeness and immediacy that the radiophonic crackle disrupted. The crackle derailed the colonial discursive regime and exposed its internal incoherences. The crackle, incidentally, traces a history of resistance as it became the site of a symbolic and material struggle for decolonization.
This article aims to undertake a critical analysis of Giorgio Agamben's philosophical project considered as a whole. I argue that Agamben's philosophy displays a self-referential, ahistorical and abstract style, marked by a deep suspicion of institutions. Drawing on recent work by Roberto Esposito and others, I strengthen this interpretation and show how it helps reassess the philosophical stakes of Agamben's project. While looking at how Agamben's political philosophy overlooks historical specificity, relies on essentialist claims, dismisses institutional reform, and proposes contradictory and impractical emancipatory alternatives, I argue that its diagnostic power lies in its affirmationist, impolitical and destituent character.
This article discusses the distinction between rights and duties in relation to the reaffirmation of ‘duty’ as a condition of ‘rights’ in contemporary Republican politics in France. It displaces this conditionality by exploring the equivocations between duty and rights expressed in and through the influential ‘Manifesto of the 121’, published as a declaration of insubordination in the last phase of the Algerian War (1954–62). It draws out residual expressions of devoir, or duty, within this text and its drafts, revealing significant efforts to conceptualize the experience of obligation in the context of war. These efforts enable a reassessment of Étienne Balibar’s reading of the text. In contrast to an emphasis on individual sovereignty, consolidated by the positioning of the Manifesto in the ideological turn of the early 1980s, we focus on how collective enunciation works here, drawing on a contrast between what Balibar calls the ‘mots justes’ (‘right words’) of the Manifesto and James C. Scott’s account of ‘the hidden transcript’. What emerges is a conceptualization of mutual obligation that runs counter to the demand for duty issued by the state. This offers a means to recalibrate the way we hear often latent expressions of obligation and duty and their significance in contemporary insubordination.
This article begins by examining Jean-Luc Nancy's experiments with theatrical form across a number of experimental essays and performance texts composed in the 1970s and 1980s published in Expectation and Multiple Arts: Muses II, considering these alongside lesser-known, uncollected writing available elsewhere. Where the composition of these coincides with an overlooked period of practical involvement in the theatre, this article demonstrates how theatrical practices are carried over into the text of philosophy and reflects on what their philosophical affordance(s) might, there, be. Drawing texts oftentimes bracketed off as experiments in philosophical presentation into much closer relation with Nancy's philosophical corpus proper — and contesting this very distinction — this article shows how these rarely discussed texts theatricalize the operations of philosophical thought and, in turn, how philosophical thinking itself comes to rely on theatrical technologies and dramaturgical techniques for its conduct and actualization. Subsequently widening its scope, it shows how a philosophical theatricalism subsists in Nancy's later writing to make some broader speculations as to the theatrical and dramaturgical work of his thought.
This article explores the literary and visual representations of sea-level rise and coastal encroachment within the conceptual framework of the Meteorocene — an epoch defined by the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman agencies under anthropogenic climate change. Building upon the oceanic turn and engaging with emerging fields such as critical ocean studies, blue ecocriticism and hydrocriticism, the analysis examines texts that resonate with the cultural and existential dimensions of environmental disruption. Through a non-chronological approach that juxtaposes literary imagination with deep geological time, the study investigates the transformative potential of catachronistic reading, offering new interpretive strategies to engage with the temporal and ecological complexities of the Meteorocene. The article concludes by advocating for a new public humanities that bridges literary studies with natural sciences and Indigenous epistemologies to foster ethical engagements and communal imaginaries responsive to the ongoing climate crisis.
