Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

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. 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 Blanchots early writings and how Adornos 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. Frontmatter List of Abbreviations (page ix) Acknowledgments (page xiii) Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity (page 1) The Language of the Everyday (page 14) PART I: CONTRE-TEMPS 1. Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel (page 29) The Formative Drive after Kant (page 37) Benjamin's Historical Critique of the Novel (page 45) Hegel and the Ambivalence of Prose (page 53) 2. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation (page 58) Blanchot on the New Music (page 68) Adorno's Notion of Aesthetic Material (page 74) PART II: NEGATIVE SPACES 3. Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka (page 93) Transdescendence of the Writer (page 99) Negating Transcendence (page 108) 4. An Image of Thought in Thomas l'Obscur (page 114) The Idea of Literature as Force of Repulsion (page 122) Recapitulation: Bataille and Klossowski (page 127) 5. Indifferent Reading in Aminadab (page 135) Mallarmé and the Space of Writing (page 139) Material Vision, Imaginary Space (page 145) PART III: MATERIAL AMBIGUITY 6. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork (page 161) Mimetic Identity and the Dialectics of Semblance (page 165) The Form of Linguisticality in Language (page 178) 7. The Possibility of Speculative Writing (page 191) Hegel, Blanchot, and the Work of Writing (page 199) Serial Hiatus Form in Hölderlin (page 209) Linguistic Works of Art (page 214) PART IV: GREY LITERATURE 8. Echo Location: Beckett's Comment c'est (page 223) 9. The Negativity of Thinking through Language (page 241) Appendix: Thomas l'Obscur, Chapter 1 (page 255) Notes (page 263) Bibliography (page 299) Index (page 313) Blanchot’s writings are distinctive for the ways that negativity takes place in them in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, and the nature of its language. However, this role in his thinking is unique and is not to be subsumed to the negativity found in the thought of Hegel or Heidegger, although it partakes of aspects of both. Instead, negativity for Blanchot operates at the level of the ontological status of language, which oscillates undecidably between the assertion and negation of meaning and thereby affects the experience of literature and the possibility of the work with an irreducible ambiguity. To explicate the significance of this negativity it is necessary to turn to another figure for whom it has become as central, Adorno, whose Hegelian background is much stronger, but who also works against this tradition to form his own negative understanding of dialectics that is crucially exemplified in the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art exists as a particular model of its historical and material context, one that both demonstrates its contradictions and also indicates what has been obscured by them. The negativity of the work is thus both that of the critique that it levels against this context and of the possibilities that it negatively raises in its place. To study the two writers together it is necessary to find the place where their thinking converges, which occurs most critically in the area of post-Kantian aesthetics and the question of autonomy 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. --Publisher description A rigorous and many-layered study of the works of Blanchot and Adorno in terms of the relation between negativity and autonomy in the work of art with particular reference to literature, which yields a thinking of materiality in language as an ambiguous force of critique and innovation William S. Allen. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Mode Of Access: World Wide Web.