Monthly Archives: October 2020

Eric Aldieri is a graduate student in Philosophy at DePaul University. He works primarily on poststructuralist thought and feminist theory, focusing on convalescence and relational ontology. Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology at The University of New South Wales, Sydney. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, body/technology division, […]

Tom Roach (bio)Bryant University A review of Tuhkanen, Mikko. The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani. State U of New York P, 2018. Early in Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire’s classic send-up of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysics (or perversions thereof), the windbag philosopher Doctor Pangloss explains the “sufficient reason” for his syphilitic condition. Responding to the naïve […]

David Maruzzella (bio)DePaul University A review of Herzogenrath, Bernd, editor. Film as Philosophy. Minnesota UP, 2017. As its title suggests, Film as Philosophy seeks to recast the relationship between philosophy and film. Against the once-dominant psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of film, the fifteen essays in this edited volume attempt to displace the traditional hierarchy implicit […]

Eric Aldieri (bio)DePaul University A review of Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia UP, 2017. The term queer theory is usually attributed to Teresa de Lauretis, who used it at a 1990 conference on gay and sexuality studies at UC Santa Cruz. Judith Butler, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, […]

Mauro Senatore (bio)Durham University Abstract This article tests the hypothesis that the history of life can be told only by assuming the ultra-transcendental conception of life as leaving a trace in the world. It draws together two moments in the work of Jacques Derrida that are chronologically distant and yet develop that hypothesis and its […]

Erin Obodiac (bio)University of California, Irvine Abstract In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida shows that a certain arche-writing of the trace is not only in play with any mode of language—spoken, written, or graphic—but is also a principle of “life”—whether human, non-human, cybernetic, or genetic. Catherine Malabou’s forays into new biologies of plasticity and epigenetics invite […]

Francesco Vitale (bio)University of Salerno Abstract In the unpublished seminar La vie la mort (Life-Death) (1975-76), Derrida reads The Logic of Life by the biologist François Jacob. The seminar is oriented to answer a question already advanced in Of Grammatology: what are the deconstructive effects—if any—provoked by grafting the theory of information onto biological research, […]

Vicki Kirby (bio)Astrid Schrader (bio) Eszter Timár (bio) Abstract The word biodeconstruction asks us to consider what is appropriate to deconstruction as a practice and to reflect on the relationship between the discourse of biology and that practice. Within literary, philosophical, and cultural debate, deconstruction appears as a recognisable mode or style of analysis. However, […]

Erin Obodiac (bio)DePaul University Of Biodeconstruction is an invitation to an ongoing event, one that “precedes” even Jacques Derrida’s announcement that “the trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other” (Of Grammatology 75), and one that speculates on the day deconstruction’s “own historico-metaphysical character […]

G Douglas BarrettG Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Salisbury University. He has enjoyed lives past and present as an artist, composer, writer, and tech worker. He has published in Mosaic, Tacet, and Contemporary Music Review and is the author of After Sound: Toward a Critical Music (Bloomsbury, 2016). The current article […]

David Parry (bio)Saint Joseph’s University As review of Jordan, Tim. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. Pluto Press, 2015. You can order the hardback of Tim Jordan’s Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society from Amazon.com for $60.19, or you can pay $21.98 for the paperback. That the two versions […]

Dorin Smith (bio)Brown A review of Weatherby, Leif. Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. Fordham UP, 2016. The place of critique has, perhaps, been in question for too long; not that it was wrong to critique critique but that the activity has exhausted itself. While publications on the topic mount and […]

Herman Rapaport (bio)Wake Forest University A review of Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Northwestern UP, 2017. Some ninety years ago, C.D. Broad argues in “Critical and Speculative Philosophy” that “the discursive form of cognition by means of general concepts” can never “be completely adequate to the concrete Reality which it […]

Peter Paik (bio)Yonsei University A review of Hicks, Heather. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Post-apocalyptic fiction has become arguably the defining genre of the contemporary period. A search on WorldCat reveals that Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) — which depicts the near-total extinction of the […]

Warren Montag (bio)Occidental College A review of Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Duke UP, 2017. James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is a work of great interest, and not simply for those seeking to apply Althusser’s theory of interpellation beyond its sphere of origin. For those of us who, more cautiously (perhaps too cautiously), […]

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (bio)University of Southern California A review of Bradatan, Costica. Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. Bloomsbury, 2015. What kind of book is Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers? Although in Costica Bradatan characterizes his book its opening pages as “an exercise in an as yet uncharted […]

G Douglas Barrett (bio)Salisbury University Abstract This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier’s neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor […]