Books by William S Allen
Papers by William S Allen
Understanding Sade, Understanding Modernism, 2025
New German Critique, 2024
Writing in the preface to Dialektik der Aufklärung in May 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno... more Writing in the preface to Dialektik der Aufklärung in May 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno clearly described the focus of the book: "The aporia that we faced in our work thus proved to be the first subject we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment." 1 Occurring at the beginning of the work, this statement can itself seem aporetic, as it signals a conclusion that would appear to doom their project: that the self-destruction of enlightenment is both necessary and inevitable, that the history of reason is unavoidably destined to failure and collapse. However, it is the very nature of the aporia that is their concern, therefore stating its occurrence in such terms does not render it unapproachable but rather makes it concrete so that it can be studied. If this aporia is in some way intrinsic to enlightenment, in that it leads to its selfdestruction, then it is its place within reason that must be assessed. And if enlightenment bears such an aporia, then their book becomes an examination of how reason might proceed despite this problem. The strength of this beginning has disarmed many commentators who, following Jürgen Habermas's influential reading, have assumed that Horkheimer and Adorno were either being excessively pessimistic or, knowingly or unknowingly, were engaged in a project that was self-refuting, or indeed both. Although this hasty response
MLN, 2022
The recent publication of Maurice Blanchot's early, abandoned manuscript, Thomas le Solitaire, in... more The recent publication of Maurice Blanchot's early, abandoned manuscript, Thomas le Solitaire, indicates what has been tacitly known about his fictional writings for some time: that they are a persistent interrogation of the forms and possibility of literature. Initially, this movement can be perceived in the transformation from roman to récit to his fragmentary, unclassifiable later works, but it is in the pivotal rewriting of Thomas l'Obscur from the novel of 1941 to the récit of 1950 that this reformulation is most concentrated. However, with the publication of Thomas le Solitaire, it becomes apparent that the Thomas story was the arena in which Blanchot developed and extended this interrogation of literature across at least three different versions. 1 The persistent revisiting of this story is not based in its thematic contents-it is not for the sake of a richer or more accurate account that Blanchot keeps rewriting it-but rather because of the formal and methodological problems that it continually raises. That is, the writing of the work is the very problem that it is seeking to address, which necessarily returns 1 According to the editors of Thomas le Solitaire, Blanchot worked on this version until 1938 and then entirely rewrote it as Thomas l'Obscur, which was submitted to Gallimard in May 1940 and published the following year. The differences between these two versions are extensive, and-as McKeane notes in his comparison of the manuscript and the 1941 novel in "Lire Thomas le Solitaire de Maurice Blanchot"-"more significant" than the differences between the published novel and the later récit. As a result, I will not be able to address them in this paper, other than in passing. However, it is notable that while the first section I will examine (from chapter two of the 1941 novel) is not included in the early manuscript, the second section is present, as I will discuss below, and the relative consistency of the latter passage across all three versions demonstrates its crucial role for Blanchot. 2 Poulet recognized long ago that there was a close relation between Blanchot's fictional writings and Descartes' method, see "Maurice Blanchot as Novelist," but this relation has rarely been given the detailed examination that it requires in regard to both its proximity and its distance, as is highlighted, for instance, by Blanchot's later remark in L'Écriture du désastre 90-91; The Writing of the Disaster 54. For example, in "La fêlure du Cogito," Gilonne reads Blanchot's engagement with Descartes largely through its relation to Mallarmé (see note 8 below).
Qui parle, 2020
Maurice Blanchot's critical writings often focus on a few key authors like Kafka, Mallarmé, or Hö... more Maurice Blanchot's critical writings often focus on a few key authors like Kafka, Mallarmé, or Hölderlin, to whose works he finds himself returning again and again. This repeated engagement is evidence of an increasing elaboration of his own thoughts on literature by way of these other writers. One of the most distinctive but overlooked writers with whom he engages across several years and essays is the Comte de Lautréamont, the extraordinary protosurrealist writer whose sole work, Les chants de Maldoror (1869), inspired, baffled, and shocked French writers for generations. The strangeness of this work set out a challenge to the very nature and form of the literary work, so it is hardly surprising to find Blanchot discussing it, but what is of particular importance is the way that it became a touchstone for his own thinking of literature as permanent contestation. Despite the crucial role that Lautréamont plays in Blanchot's development as a writer and critic, there has been no sustained attempt to understand why and how his work came to take on such a role and why, after ten years, it no longer seemed to play any role in Blanchot's thinking. To explore this knot of issues I will track Blanchot's
A major concern of Blanchot's early writings is the nature of the literary image but in his later... more A major concern of Blanchot's early writings is the nature of the literary image but in his later works this appears to be replaced by a thinking of fragmentary writing. This change reflects a tension in which the images that arise through writing deliver a mode of spacing that places an aporetic pressure on its sentences, leading them to break down. To draw out this inter-relation I will examine Blanchot's fictional and critical writings at a moment when the pressures of the image are felt most acutely, exposing the peculiar form of dialectics that emerges from it and the concomitant material spacing of language and thought, which, from his earliest works, marks a profound if not abyssal ambiguity of presence.
This essay will discuss Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli by examining the relation between the space ... more This essay will discuss Blanchot's L'Attente l'oubli by examining the relation between the space of its sentences and that of the room they describe. This relation arises as a new understanding of literary space that indicates how far he has moved from his earlier thought of the récit as a search for an imaginary centre. For in this approach Blanchot has found a thought of space that is eccentric and aporetic, which reveals the nature and possibility of relation as an exposure to the outside.
Screening the Past 39 http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/06/the-cracks-in-the-surface-of-things... more Screening the Past 39 http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/06/the-cracks-in-the-surface-of-things-on-bela-tarrranciere-and-adorno/ Two major studies of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr have been published in English recently, and both are impressively comprehensive, so rather than repeating their work I will take a more focused approach here by working through the key film in Tarr's oeuvre, Damnation. Central to my reading is the relation between the aesthetics and the narrative of the film, which, although resembling Rancière's model of antagonistic regimes, is rendered more subtle and enigmatic by the ambivalence of the work, an ambivalence that becomes tangible when considered in terms of Adorno's understanding of the relation between the auditory and visual aspects of film. I In the 1930s a series of films were produced in France that were to prove very influential. They were dark, pessimistic dramas about characters on the margins of society trying, and failing, to escape their circumstances. These films came to be discussed under the rubric of poetic realism, for while they were situated in specific social milieux and dealt with issues of crime and poverty, they were also shot in an expressionist manner and featured scenes and dialogue of an unusually poetic nature. The latter element was the most problematic as critics disagreed over whether the poetic cast of these films enhanced or undermined their social critique, although this ambivalence is precisely what gave these films such lasting importance, particularly in terms of their role as a precursor of American film noir.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�569�640-��34�30� research in phenomenology 45... more © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�569�640-��34�30� research in phenomenology 45 (�0�5) 53-86 brill.com/rp
Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique first appeared in 1909, but as a major work of the modern... more Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique first appeared in 1909, but as a major work of the modernist tradition it is hardly known and even less well understood in the Anglophone world. I will introduce the text here and explicate its theoretical implications, for in its procedural approach to fiction it operates on a level of formalism that, along with the flatness of Roussel's prose and the bizarre adventures he describes, has contributed to the lack of interest shown by English readers. But this lack of interest overlooks the nature of the experimentation in Roussel's work and the consequences this unveils, as it leads to a narrative that conveys a powerful sense of autonomy, a text that appears to bear a life of its own with the concomitant implications this has for the materiality of its language, a textual approach perhaps unfamiliar to English readers but no less significant as a critical form of modernist thinking and writing. After having examined Roussel's work in depth I will then take up the central part of his writing procedure, the transformation of sentences, and show how this creates a surprising analogue to the notion of the speculative sentence that Hegel developed in his Phenomenology. But the significance of this association lies in the fact that the formal experiments of Roussel's writings deliver a way of thinking about the relation of language and materiality that does not rationalize it into a system of thought. Instead, the syntactical relations of Roussel's writings bear mimetic relations to the world of things, in a manner akin to the language-like quality of the artwork discussed by Theodor W. Adorno but that is here transferred into MLN 129 (2014): 955-992
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Books by William S Allen
Papers by William S Allen
It is a varied selection of notes (on dialectics, postwar Germany, sexuality, sociology, Bloch, Lukacs, Hesse, Gehlen, Wedekind, etc) with some personal comments as well, which provides a considerable insight into his developing thought in the 1960s.
Please feel free to suggest changes if you find the translation too clunky.