This paper reads Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman as an exemplary expression of a posthuman moment in modernism. Drawing on comparisons with the art of Fernand Léger and James Joyce, it highlights several elements of the film’s aesthetic – its heavily stylized compositions, its striking use of set design and costumes to subvert the visual syntax of foreground and background, its eroticization of technology, its disassembly of the human figure – in order to demonstrate the continuity between a high-modernist discourse on machine-life and current issues in posthuman theory. Both modernism and posthumanism respond to an epochal event within modernity, a technological acceleration of reality that reshapes ontological grammars. Both contemplate reality as a middle ground of mechanical and vital processes. And both are committed to a Copernican decentering of the human eye from its place of privilege in received models of phenomenal experience.

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body, or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.

This article offers a rhetorical analysis of Deleuze’s concept of the past, understood not as a modification of the present but as a pre-predicative, non-subjective articulation of time. Focusing on the discussion of the three passive syntheses of time in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, it traces the continuity between past, passivity and passion across Deleuze’s body of work in an effort not only to remark on the conceptual resonances between them, but, more importantly, to examine the figural and formal choices that codify those resonances, and to some extent over-determine them – in particular, Deleuze’s recourse to allegory and tragic form. Though the past is constituted as a primordial component of time, it already exceeds itself in the passivity of that constitutive moment, of that originary gesture by which it is first committed to historical experience. The process is rendered in dramatic terms: Habitus and Mnemosyne (Habit and Memory; Present and Past) are first pitted against each other – respectively, as the origin of time and its ground. They are then overthrown by an unnamed third element ‘which subordinates the other two to itself’ and opens the whole to infinity. The article thematises the significance of the past within this allegorical drama, develops the character, and draws out the temporal structures encoded in Deleuze’s figurations.

 With its penchant for dissecting rehearsed attitudes and subverting expectations, Flann O’Brien’s writing displays an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction. Focusing on the satirical energies and anti-authoritarian temperament invested in his style, Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority interrogates the author’s clowning with linguistic, literary, legal, bureaucratic, political, economic, academic, religious and scientific powers in the sites of the popular, the modern and the traditional.Each chapter reflects on some aspect of his iconoclastic impulses; on the impertinent send-ups of pretension and orthodoxy to be found in his fiction, columns, and writing for stage and screen; on the very nature of his comedic inspiration.... Among the topics addressed are O’Brien’s satirical use of the pseudonym, the cliché and the Irish language; his irreverent repackaging of inherited myths, sacred texts and formative canons; and his refusal of literary and ideological closure.The emerging picture is of a complex literary project that is always, in some way, a writing against the weight of received wisdoms and inherited sureties. Preview 

Challenging the narrative that Flann O’Brien wrote two good novels and then retired to the inferior medium of journalism (as Myles na gCopaleen), Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies engages with overlooked shorter, theatrical, and non-fiction works and columns (’John Duffy’s Brother’, ’The Martyr’s Crown’, ’Two in One’) alongside At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht. The depth and consistency of O’Nolan’s comic inspiration that emerges from this scholarly engagement with his broader body of work underlines both the imperative and opportunity of reassessing O’Brien’s literary legacy.