• Abel Ferrara, a man with grey hair and dressed in a light grey suit, stands with his arms crossed in front of a red circle.

Wonder was eclipsed by the Sublime in paintings such as The Great Day of His Wrath

Rediscovering the Wonder of Philosophy

Wonder is largely absent as a topic of concern to contemporary philosophers. Yet ancient philosophers saw it as the source of what was distinctive in their way of thinking. Plato and Aristotle thought that it was the stirrings of wonder…

James Benning's Environments

James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times

In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty minutes…

Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions

A special issue of journal, Paragraph, guest edited by Elissa Marder, creatively re-imagines Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking 1977 volume of Yale French Studies (Nos 55/56), Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, in which Felman opened up the question of…

Photograph of Jean-Luc Nancy

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…