• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

About William S. Burroughs

By Stanley Gontarski American outlier writer, William S. Burroughs, was a creative force, as a writer in his own right, and as a cultural theorist, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call “a society of control” or “a…

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Film Philosophy and the Body in Cinema

Film-philosophy has seen a resurgence of interest in phenomenology, particularly in its existentialist branch as exemplified by the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This is largely because much has been made of the turn to affect…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Gilles Deleuze

  Last month we celebrated the writing of Hélène Cixous, both as part of Women’s History Month and of OLR’s 40th Anniversary. This month, we are sticking with the ever-wonderful Cixous as we delve into Gilles Deleuze’s article, ‘Hélène Cixous…

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious

By Enda Duffy Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara Fredric Jameson may be the world’s most distinguished literary and cultural theorist living today. His influence since the 1980s on materialist, cultural and literary criticism, from the U.S. to China, has…

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Behind Red Doors – Signs, Process and the Political

In January 2016, a scandal broke out in the UK when the Times reported that asylum seekers’ homes could be identified by distinctive red doors, making them vulnerable to attacks. Coincidentally – but not where signs and the political are concerned – A Process Philosophy of Signs opens with an account of threatening identification on doors.

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Deleuze – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary

Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) is the contemporary philosopher to whom Badiou returns more than any other. His engagement with Deleuze is however neither homogeneous nor unequivocally critical, as it is often thought to be. In short, Deleuze figures in Badiou’s work as his preeminent philosophical disputant.

Bogus criticisms and animal becomings

By Ashley Woodward Peter Shaffer’s play Equus is perhaps best known to some today as ‘the one in which Harry Potter gets his kit off’ (as one of my students put it). Yet apart from the fact that it’s controversial…