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The article presents the discussion on Michel Foucault's lecture about ‘What is Critique? Topics include relation to what philosophy, science, politics, ethics, law, literature, etc., positively constitute; and last phrase with the shorter definition of the ‘critical attitude' as ‘the art of voluntary insubordination.

Emerging in the wake of the broad paradigm of semiotics in discourses in the human sciences in France in the 1960s, and from other developments and emergent tendencies in philosophy and critical theory, a cluster of works in French thought of the 1970s, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Roland Barthes, investigate the liminal spaces and dynamic relations between sense, sound, and noise. Depending on the angle adopted, these investigations bear upon the relations between articulated sound and noise; language and sound, the formed and the unformed, the coded and the non-coded, sound and music, sound and silence, and other formulations of acoustic liminality. This article brings to light how noise is an operative concept across this material; I argue for its pertinence to the question of the "mental state of noise" as elaborated by Steven Sands and John Ratey in their seminal piece "The Concept of Noise," and then critically assessed by Cécile Malaspina in The Epistemology of Noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Transversality' is a key term in the work of Félix Guattari. As a conceptual and pragmatic motor for the generation of heterogeneity, it extends throughout all of his work, including the writing he undertook with Deleuze. It promotes the rupture and redistribution of hierarchical structures, the mobilisation of operations of deterritorialisation across the social and cultural field, and it gains a 'chaosmic' dimension in the later writings. Its 'origins', however, are to be found in Guattari's early work at the Clinique de la Borde and in militant Marxist movements in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is an initial and necessarily provisional effort to embed the concept in a social and therapeutic pragmatics and thus counter a debateable tendency towards a dilution or diffusion of transversality in theoretical abstraction, where it risks becoming a synonym for a generalised sense of creative differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Fédida (1934-2002) was a psychoanalyst and philosopher, member of the Association psychanalytique de France and the International Psychoanalytic Association, a Professor of the University of Paris and founder of the Laboratory of Fundamental Psychopathology, the Centre de l'étude du vivant and the Institute for Contemporary Thought (all three in Paris). The dynamics of the critical and the clinical are particularly manifest in "Anxiety in the Eyes", where Fédida moves from acute attention to Freud's considerations on the "genitality" of the eye, so to speak, to a close reading of 'The "Uncanny"', and indeed of Hoffmann's "The Sandman" itself. With reference to Schelling's definition of I unheimlich i that Freud admires in his essay, we could say that regression is like a secret that Fédida wishes to bring to light, if not fully surmount ([15], pp. 241, 249). [Extracted from the article]

Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews discuss the affective dimensions of the practice and art of translation, and of translating Barthes in particular, in the light of the latter's translations from Fragments d'un discours amoureux, included in this issue. The problems posed by 'Agony', one of Barthes' 'fragments' indebted to Donald Winnicott's notion of the fear of a disaster that has already happened, is a salient preoccupation. This is the starting point for exchanges around the dynamics of translation, as a process in which love, loss, fascination, melancholy and rage flow in and out of the transitional space between the 'original' and its 'version'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of the fragments of the lover's discourse translated by Timothy Matthews in this volume Barthes considers the figure of Gradiva, from Jensen's tale, engaging thereby with Freud's essay on 'Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva'. Gradiva is a figure of a happy outcome, whereby Zoe Bertgang 'gently' eases Norbert Hanold out of the psychotic delusion of his amorous fascination. But these dynamics are not as straightforward as they seem; if, as Barthes suggests, the madness of love is all-encompassing, total, what are we to make of Zoe's devotion, since she splits herself, between Gradiva and Zoe. This paradoxical tension, between loving and being in love, generates further aporia and tension in the translations enacted across the texts of Barthes, Jensen and Freud. These 'research notes' on Gradiva enumerate multiple indices of the 'Gradiva dossier', opened by Barthes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guest editors of this issue of CounterText, Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews, introduce the volume Roland Barthes,Fragments of a Lover's Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again, offering context and rationale for the project, situating the individual contributions, and anticipating their tonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georges Bataille; with additional texts by Roger Caillois THE SACRED CONSPIRACY The internal papers of the secret society of Acephale and lectures to the College of Sociology Translated by Natasha [...]

Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit. By LESLIE HILL. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001. 277 pp. The subtitle of Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot designates the terrain which Leslie Hill's several [...]

The need to revisit thinking on everyday life or 'think differently' as is evident in the works of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault is discussed. It is presented that Barthes' thinking veered towards the utopian from everyday while Foucault moved towards antiquity and heretopia.

Jean-Louis Schefer's newly translated The Ordinary Man of Cinema (2016), originally published in 1980, proposes a singular account of the experience of cinema which departs from the principal tendencies of film theory. It has nevertheless had a profound if somewhat invisible influence in film philosophy and theory since its publication, notably in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This essay proposes a synthetic discussion of Schefer's work on film up to The Ordinary Man, arguing that Schefer's work, which draws on his earlier work on painting, construes film as radically non-representational, and as bringing into being, in the spectator, a virtual affectivity corresponding to the distorted and disproportionate bodies and aberrant movements that it presents. I argue that in its recurrent emphasis on the "inchoate" elements in film, and on the "inceptions" of movements that it provokes, Schefer's thought draws implicitly on the Bataillean notion of the informe (formlessness). This return to an impossibility of thought at the heart of thought is among the fundamental insights which Deleuze draws from Schefer in Cinema 2: The Time-image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton. By SUZANNE GUERLAC. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1997. 249 pp. After intellectual upheavals of a revolutionary nature, with the polemical claims to certain [...]

Peignot, Colette (Laure) The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure. Milo Sweedler. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009. 214 pp. $50.00. 'Colette Peignot (Laure), the pivotal [...]