Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

Aesthetics of Negativity : Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy / William S. Allen.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Perspectives in Continental PhilosophyPublisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2016]Copyright date: ©2016Description: 1 online resource (338 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780823269280
  • 9780823269310
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 149 23
LOC classification:
  • B828.25 .A45 2016
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity -- PART I. Contre- Temps -- 1. Autonomous Literature -- 2. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation -- PART II. Negative Spaces -- 3. Dead Transcendence -- 4. An Image of Thought in Thomas l'Obscur -- 5. Indifferent Reading in Aminadab -- PART III. Material Ambiguity -- 6. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork -- 7. The Possibility of Speculative Writing -- PART IV. Grey Literature -- 8. Echo Location -- 9. The Negativity of Thinking through Language -- Appendix: Thomas l'Obscur, Chapter 1 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: 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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780823269310

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity -- PART I. Contre- Temps -- 1. Autonomous Literature -- 2. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation -- PART II. Negative Spaces -- 3. Dead Transcendence -- 4. An Image of Thought in Thomas l'Obscur -- 5. Indifferent Reading in Aminadab -- PART III. Material Ambiguity -- 6. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork -- 7. The Possibility of Speculative Writing -- PART IV. Grey Literature -- 8. Echo Location -- 9. The Negativity of Thinking through Language -- Appendix: Thomas l'Obscur, Chapter 1 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)