This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and reality – one often inverting or uncannily ironising the other – relies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of space – especially the spherology developed in his Spheres (...) trilogy – and Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms. (shrink)

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, (...) underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness. (shrink)

In this article, I want to suggest a template for rereading accepted discourses of climate change management and sustainability, which, I argue, are ironically sustained by an immunitary paradigm. This paradigm is founded on a species-split—a have and have-not conception of the human in which the latter sustains the comforts of the former. Thus, I suggest, whenever we read discourses of sustainability we should acknowledge the ironic subtext that seeks to sustain an underclass to immunize an elite. This immunity is (...) a complex ontological operation: as Roberto Esposito points out in his significant work on the logic of immunity, in immune systems “the equilibrium of the whole is determined not by subtraction, but by... (shrink)

This essay will examine what it takes to be two foundational aspects of traditional metaphysics—the “concepts” of nothingness and nature—to offer a critical reading of how they enframe our understanding of “life.” It asserts that these two concepts are the limit point for metaphysical thought: the tangle that emerges when trying to overcome or reimagine them is an impasse encountered in pressing humanist concerns like ecological collapse, nihilism, alienation, and extinction. Readers of this journal may value a detailed, technical attempt (...) at such an untangling; this article will suggest that a heightened sense of technics can be productive of a new image of thought, one that might escape the anthropocentric basis of these concerns. 1 In doing so, the argument will insist on the flaw within certain metaphysical schematisms’ desire to appropriate, to form and hold sense into static and reproducible properties—a desire notably critiqued in Bernard Stiegler’s reading of technics. This flaw, it suggests, is constitutive of a sense of nature and nothingness based on property, one Stiegler notes is how we enframe being(s). It will then discuss Gilles Deleuze’s notable critiques of such “proper” enframing’s impossible limits and, following Deleuze, will turn to Marcel Proust’s writing as suggestive of a new image of thought—one that, focused on imagining (or enframing) nothingness through writing, inscribes an indelible remainder as that very imagination, suggesting that it is nothingness “it”self that will always remain. (shrink)

Writing remains. One could argue that it is precisely because of this uncanny and unpredictable survival that inscription holds an inextricable influence on culture. Deconstructive theory posits this as the ‘biodegradability’ of writing — that culture consumes writing's intended meaning, employing it as fuel for its own survival. In this article, I argue for Michel Houellebecq's awareness of this survival, suggesting that his texts stage their — and their author's — own biodegradability to interweave truth and fiction. Particularly, he utilizes (...) the ‘untranslatability’ of the proper name — its brief resistance to cultural biodegradability — to intercept and write into the future inscription is tied to. This draws attention to the vital paradox of proper names, and suggests that their untranslatability forces every reader to conjure different, contradicting and often ‘out-of-sync’ histories. Houellebecq's names, which necessitate an interminable coining, gesture to the inevitable translation of finitude. (shrink)