Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy

by William S. Allen

Overview

Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity.

In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot’s early writings and how Adorno’s aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823269303
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Series:	Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	338
File size:	844 KB

About the Author

William S. Allen is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot and has published articles on Benjamin, Roussel, and Béla Tarr.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

1 Abstract and Concrete Modernity
The Language of the Everyday

Part I: Contre-Temps
2. Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel
The Formative Drive after Kant, — Benjamin's Historical Critique of the Novel, — Hegel and the Ambivalence of Prose
3. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation
Blanchot on the New Music — Adorno's Notion of Aesthetic Material

Part II: Negative Spaces
4. Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka
Transdescendence of the Writer, — Negating Transcendence,
5. An Image of Thought in Thomas l'Obscur
The Idea of Literature as Force of Repulsion — Recapitulation: Bataille and Klossowski,
6. Indifferent Reading in Aminadab
Mallarm and the Space of Writing — Material Vision, Imaginary Space,

Part III: Material Ambiguity
7. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork
Mimetic Identity and the Dialectics of Semblance — The Form of Linguisticality in Language,
8. The Possibility of Speculative Writing
Hegel, Blanchot, and the Work of Writing — Serial Hiatus Form in H lderlin, — Linguistic Works of Art,

Part IV: Grey Literature
9. Echo Location: Beckett's Comment c'est
10. The Negativity of Thinking through Language

Appendix: Thomas l'Obscur, Chapter One

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both Maurice Blanchot, a critic and a novelist, and T.W. Adorno, a critic and philosopher. Parallels between their works have often been suggested but were never read systematically together, as Allen does here so brilliantly. Allen allows us to understand why literature matters for us as well by showing how deeply Blanchot and Adorno have probed its riddles." — Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

From the Publisher

Allen's detailed analysis... succeeds not only in bringing some much needed clarity and understanding to Blanchot's notoriously difficult style of writing and thinking, but also allows Allen to frame the question of literary autonomy as a question of how and to what degree the materiality of language, in which and through which literature works, represents the promise or denial of freedom from alienation.

Modernism/Modernity

Allen makes us understand why literature matters today by showing how deeply Blanchot and Adorno have probed its most enduring riddles.

University of Pennsylvania - Jean-Michel Rabaté

Shrewdly mobilizing the tropes of negativity and autonomy that both Blanchot and Adorno develop in ways that differ from the more familiar models offered by Hegel and Heidegger (yet are inevitably indebted to them), Allen’s book convincingly demonstrates how the logic of negativity allows Blanchot and Adorno to circumvent a relationship to the negative that is merely nihilistic. In terms of its style, argumentative rigor, conceptual precision, narrative patience, scholarly circumspection, and overall achievement, the book is truly outstanding.

Brown University - Gerhard Richter