• Kant, Adorno, and the forms of history
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2025.
    William S. Allen sets the works of Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant and Peter Weiss in dialogue, revealing how an interrogation of the aesthetics of 'the whole' and the conception of history in Western thought reveals new ways of thinking about history and historically. This book traces how Adorno's reconsideration of history through his readings of Kant's Critique of Judgement are distinct from formulations offered by other thinkers. More than any of them though, Adorno's aesthetics has introduced…Read more
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    The Absolute Milieu: Blanchot’s Aesthetics of Melancholy
    Research in Phenomenology 45 (1): 53-86. 2015.
    Unlike his other fictional works Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas has received comparatively little attention. The reasons for this would seem to lie in the intense abstraction of his writing in this work, which is forbidding even by his own standards, but as I will show, this intensity can be understood as comprising a singular topography of the experience of writing. Blanchot’s narrative thereby becomes a very precise and concrete form of aesthetics, which can be usefu…Read more
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    Consideration of the work of Sade in relation to Adorno usually refers to the much-discussed chapter from Dialektik der Aufklärung. But Adorno made a number of other remarks across his career that suggest a very different reading. I will discuss the three most significant of these remarks and show how they develop an approach to the libidinal aspect of aesthetic experience that challenges our understanding of the relation of thought and language. In doing so, Sade’s works indicate an extraordina…Read more
  • Fragmentary writing
    In Christopher Langlois (ed.), Understanding Blanchot, understanding modernism, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
  • Glossary. Disaster
    In Christopher Langlois (ed.), Understanding Blanchot, understanding modernism, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
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    An analysis of the development and range of Adorno's aesthetics, incorporating the influence of other thinkers and musicians.