In dark or desperate times, the artwork is placed in a difficult position. Optimism seems naive, while pessimism is no better. During some of the most demanding years of the 20th century two distinctive bodies of work sought to respond to this problem: the writings of Maurice Blanchot and American film noir. Both were seeking not only to respond to the times but also to critically reflect them, but both were often criticised for their own darkness. Understanding how this darkness became the means of responding to the darkness of the times is the focus of Noir and Blanchot, which examines key films from the period (including Double Indemnity and Vertigo) alongside Blanchot's writings (particularly his 1948 narrative Death Sentence). What emerges from this investigation is the complex manner in which these works disrupt the experience of time and the event and in doing so expose an entirely different mode of material expression.

The philosophical significance of Maurice Blanchot's writings has rarely been in doubt. Specifying the nature and implications of his thinking has proved much less easy, particularly in reference to the key figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Examination reveals that Blanchot's thinking is persistently oriented towards a questioning of the terms of Hegel's thought, while nevertheless remaining within its themes, whichshows how rigorously he studied Hegel's works but also how radical his critique of them became. Equally, it allows for a crucial discussion of the differences between Blanchot's responses to Hegel and those of Jacques Derrida, with the implicit suggestion that in some ways Blanchot's critique of Hegel is more far-reaching than that developed by Derrida. William S. Allen demonstrates those aspects of Hegelian thought that permeate Blanchot's writings and, in turn, develops a detailed three-way analysis of Derrida, Hegel, and Blanchot. The key question around which this analysis develops is that of the relation between thought and language concerning the issue of the infinite and its legibility. Illegibility introduces a new and substantially philosophical account of Blanchot's importance, and also showshow his writings laid the ground for Derrida's workswhile developing their own uniquely challenging response to the problems of post-Hegelian thought.

In dark or desperate times, the artwork is placed in a difficult position. Optimism seems naive, while pessimism is no better. During some of the most demanding years of the 20th century two distinctive bodies of work sought to respond to this problem: the writings of Maurice Blanchot and American film noir. Both were seeking not only to respond to the times but also to critically reflect them, but both were often criticised for their own darkness. Understanding how this darkness became the means of responding to the darkness of the times is the focus of Noir and Blanchot, which examines key films from the period (including Double Indemnity and Vertigo) alongside Blanchot's writings (particularly his 1948 narrative Death Sentence). What emerges from this investigation is the complex manner in which these works disrupt the experience of time and the event and in doing so expose an entirely different mode of material expression.

The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-founded. The experience of reading his works is demanding to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. In this bold and rigorous study William S. Allen sets out the context and implications of Sade's writings in order to explain their lasting challenge to thought. For what is apparent from a close examination of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question that has to be addressed is why Sade pursued these interests by way of erotica of the most violent kind. Allen shows that Sade's interests lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility through their material actualization. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of endless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby puts him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the nature and status of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent.

Maurice Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. However, as this mode is to be found most substantially in the peculiar density of his fictional writings, rather than in his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period during which he arrived at this complex and distinctive form of writing.

The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-founded. The experience of reading his works is demanding to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. In this bold and rigorous study William S. Allen sets out the context and implications of Sade's writings in order to explain their lasting challenge to thought. For what is apparent from a close examination of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question that has to be addressed is why Sade pursued these interests by way of erotica of the most violent kind. Allen shows that Sade's interests lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility through their material actualization. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of endless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby puts him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the nature and status of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent.

Maurice Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. However, as this mode is to be found most substantially in the peculiar density of his fictional writings, rather than in his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period during which he arrived at this complex and distinctive form of writing.

The philosophical significance of Maurice Blanchot's writings has rarely been in doubt. Specifying the nature and implications of his thinking has proved much less easy, particularly in reference to the key figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Examination reveals that Blanchot's thinking is persistently oriented towards a questioning of the terms of Hegel's thought, while nevertheless remaining within its themes, whichshows how rigorously he studied Hegel's works but also how radical his critique of them became. Equally, it allows for a crucial discussion of the differences between Blanchot's responses to Hegel and those of Jacques Derrida, with the implicit suggestion that in some ways Blanchot's critique of Hegel is more far-reaching than that developed by Derrida. William S. Allen demonstrates those aspects of Hegelian thought that permeate Blanchot's writings and, in turn, develops a detailed three-way analysis of Derrida, Hegel, and Blanchot. The key question around which this analysis develops is that of the relation between thought and language concerning the issue of the infinite and its legibility. Illegibility introduces a new and substantially philosophical account of Blanchot's importance, and also showshow his writings laid the ground for Derrida's workswhile developing their own uniquely challenging response to the problems of post-Hegelian thought.

Adorno's aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno's thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno's aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno's thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.

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.