Sub-stance 

Abstract: Working from a detailed diary Beckett wrote of his thoughts on painting while travelling through Germany and visiting art galleries before World War II, and directed by comments made by Beckett himself, James Knowlson has convincingly displayed how Beckett used images from paintings that had had a forceful impression on him, reconfiguring them in developing his own striking images in later works (256-258).2 Might the same be claimed for Beckett's use of philosophy? In a 1933 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett identifies an interest in philosophical images even if divorced from the systems in which they are used: "Leibniz a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures." Beckett discusses the "image" a number of times in Disjecta (28, 90, 94, 123,130), and Gilles Deleuze sees the use of the image as key in coming to terms with Beckett's works.2 As is well known, Deleuze develops a reading of Henri Bergson, especially Matter and Memory, in developing his own concept of the image in the Cinema books,3 and as I will attempt to establish below, Beckett knew Bergson's work well and drew upon it in developing his own ideas about the image and its relationship to thought.

Abstract: The translation below is an excerpt from Maurizio Lazzarato's book Les revolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Les empecheurs de penser en ronde, 2004) [The Revolutions of Capitalism]. In this book, Lazzarato analyzes the transition from Fordist "disciplinary" to post-Fordist "control" societies, and from the struggles of the traditional labor movement to those of the contemporary social movements, by invoking a number of concepts from French post-structuralism. Lazzarato's analysis also builds on the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and in particular on Tarde's interpretation of Leibniz. The philosophical theories of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin provide another important reference point. Opening with reflections on a slogan associated with the protests against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle--"Another World is Possible" The Revolutions of Capitalism explores the concepts of the possible and the virtual in order to formulate a critique not just of contemporary capitalism's regime of exploitation, but also of traditional strategies of resistance. Capitalism's most recent transformations -and in particular its direct exploitation of intellectual and affective interaction, made possible by the new technologies associated with immaterial laborrequire new theories of the event, of subjectivity, and of the ways in which subjectivity is produced--theories that go beyond socialism's dialectic of the individual and the collective. The traditional Marxist concepts of class, labor, and exploitation need to be re-examined in light of the new configurations of power and resistance characteristic of contemporary capitalism. In the passages translated below, Lazzarato proposes an expansion of the Marxist concept of exploitation and a reconsideration of traditional notions of power, discovering concepts adequate to the reality of contemporary capitalism in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Abstract: According to Jacques Ranciere, we are in the midst of a seminal aesthetic regime. The paradigm of this new regime is hybridity. Everywhere we look, Ranciere explains, we witness continuous and unfettered border-crossings between genres, between high and low art, art and non-art, art and commodity. These border-crossings are not evidence that differences have been reduced to sameness, but are the sign of a capacity to maintain identities at the heart of pluralism. What appears paradoxical is not. Pluralism is manifest in aesthetics as well as in the larger cultural and political spheres. Jurgen Habermas writes, "la reconnaissance des diff6rences, la reconnaissance mutuelle de l'autre dans son alt6rit6 peut aussi devenir la marque d'une identit6 commune." And Tzvetan Todorov, writing in praise of a united Europe, states in Le Nouveau Disordre mondial,

Abstract: DECEPTION IS A VERY INTERESTING WORD. In French, one is d6Cu when one is disappointed, when what one was expecting doesn't happen, and on ddeoit (one disappoints) unintentionally. In English, to deceive someone is to trick them, often by seduction. The English has kept the original meaning, since the French derivation comes from the expression "d6cevoir les espoirs de quelqu'un" ("to disappoint someone's hopes"). This derivation thus goes from deliberate will to its effect; the deception no longer refers to the suggestions of a third deceiving person, but to a situation that must be taken note of.