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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]

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]

Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Règle du jeu incorporates several automata as indexes of the alienated status of the class it depicts, including the orchestrion that the main protagonist Robert de La Chesnaye unveils as the ultimate piece in his collection. This focus on machines is as much an expression of the film's eighteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic references as it is a revelation of an anachronistic relation to the machine as such, and to the form of movement it embodies. In a key scene the display of the orchestrion falters, revealing a deathly repetition that the moribund pseudo-aristocracy cannot accommodate. The opposition drawn by Lacan between automaton and tuche in his eleventh seminar, as well as Deleuze's intimation of the 'crack' in the filmic crystal that Renoir's cinema deploys, illuminate this moment as an event of pure repetition. In contrast, Jean Vigo's 1934 film L'Atalante depicts a human-machine relation that allows for forms of connection and innovation of a more organic nature. Across these representations of automatism and movement, the cinema of the 1930s explores patterns of alienation and of historicity, for which the theses of Walter Benjamin provide a powerful interpretative framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the book Intimacies, which features responses from psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, Leo Bersani explores the possibility of telling a different story about intimacy from that based on the premise of individual difference. This project draws on Bersani's previous writing on psychoanalysis, literature and film, which critically addresses the model of the ego as bound to its own aggressive assertiveness and to its own sexual shattering. The ethical thrust of Bersani's work, particularly recent work on the visual and on cinema co-authored with Ulysse Dutoit, is towards forms of movement in the world which would ‘non-sadistic', and would thus operate differently from the appropriative desire of the ego tied to its own intermittent annihilation. The aesthetic field, and that of film in particular, can, in Bersani's terms, draw the spectator away from their hermeneutic and thus appropriative desire, away from identification, and into their dissemination in a ‘variation of forms'. This article explores these concerns via a consideration of Antonioni's film The Passenger (1975), and of its key motif, in which one character takes on the identity of another. The ‘other' intimacy Bersani and Phillips pursue is addressed through attention to the existential drama of ‘being another', and through the visual style of Antonioni's film. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sartre's recollection, in Les Mots, of his first visit to the cinema is a multi-layered and ambivalent text through which Sartre proposes a number of interlocking arguments: concerning the contrast between the 'sacred' space of the theatre and the non-ceremonial space of the cinema, between the theatre as associated with paternal authority, and the cinema as associated with a clandestine bond with the mother. But the text also sets up a quasi-sociological account of the public Sartre encounters in the cinema itself as revealing to him the truth of the social bond, a truth he expresses with the term 'adherence', and which he says he only rediscovered in his experience of being a prisoner in the Stalag in 1940. Rather than the basis of a sociological account of the social bond, which would seem at odds with Sartre's social philosophy, I read this as the expression of a desire for physical proximity. The space of the cinema thus develops a fantasy, and this is in continuity with the role of the cinema in the evolution traced in Les Mots, in which it is described as instigating a withdrawal into imaginary life and an indulgence in daydreaming. Through reference to Christian Metz and to Roland Barthes, whose essay 'En sortant du cinéma' is proposed as a parallel and a response to Sartre, I suggest that the 'true bond' of adherence which Sartre encounters is an unconscious rather than an epistemological truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of utopia in philosopher Roland Barthes' writing. According to Barthes, a fantasy does not tell everything and can give rise to an affirmative repetition. He reconfigures utopia as domestic and the social space he constructs will be idiorrhythmic. In "Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing," Diana Knight claims that utopia in Barthes refers to the details of everyday life and to a certain mode of corporeal and spatial being.

In Cinema II Deleuze proposes, via early film theorists, that cinema can realise the potential inherent in art to act directly on the nervous system. Cinema had the ‘sublime’ capacity to shock thought into activity, and awaken the ‘spiritual automaton’ in us through vibrations and affects, rather than representations. Deleuze finds a variant of this argument in the writings of Artaud on cinema, in which film forces the realisation of an impotence at the heart of thought. Deleuze then proposes that the only response to this impotence is belief in the connection between man and the world, as expressed and realised in a corporeal cinema of gestures, the prime example of which, in his view, is the work of Philippe Garrel. I will address Garrel's film Le Révélateur in relation to these propositions, focussing also on how the film works primarily at the level of sensory and gestural dynamics, rather than narrative or representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the meaning and mythical function of the word "theory" in philosophy. The author argues that Terry Eagleton's "After Theory" recognizes the value of theorizing in the sense of intellectual commitment and the revitalization of nature known as postmodernism. In the book "The Future of Theory," Jean-Michael Rabaté offers helpful historical and intellectual conceptualizations of the emergence of theory.

Presents a contextual analysis of the film "La Jetée," by Chris Marker. Inscription of history within the film; Withdrawal of the images of the film from the illusion of motion; Information on the fictional projection of apocalyptic destruction.

Presents information on direct plasma cell proliferation analysis and monoclonal gammopathy according to a survey of patients between 1987 and 1991, at Lyon, France. Details of the procedure and the study; Results.

Discusses the historical relevance of the intellectual journal 'Tel Quel.' Engagement of journal with the history of its time; Synthesis of a variety of discourses; Dynamics of the theory of writing; Concept of terror; Eroticism and politics of the concepts of theory and terror.

Interviews the French author Marcelin Pleynet on the history of the publication 'Tel Quel.' Creation and direction of publication by writers; Principal concern with literary creation; Spirit of restoration that dominated France in the 1960's; Importance accorded to language; Role of the publication in French intellectual life.

Discusses the relations between the Surrealist movement and `Tel Quel,' the periodical, group and literary movement. Notion of avant-garde in culture; Surrealism's proposal of a reorganization of mental life through the recognition of the continent of unconscious and the imagination; Information on Tel Quel.

Introduces several articles regarding the intellectual journals 'Tel Quel' and 'L'Infini' which were originally contributed to a conference titled 'From Tel Quel to L'Infini: the avant garde and after' which was held in London, England, in March 1995. Reuniting of principal participants of the Tel Quel group; Experiential aspect of 'Tel Quel'; Reception of 'Tel Quel' in France, Great Britain and the U.S.