|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
|
|