Aesthetics of Negativity

William S. Allen is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot and has published articles on Benjamin, Roussel, and Béla Tarr.

—Gerhard Richter:
Shrewdly mobilizing the tropes of negativity and autonomy that both Blanchot and Adorno develop in ways that differ from the more familiar models offered by Hegel and Heidegger (yet are inevitably indebted to them), Allen’s book convincingly demonstrates how the logic of negativity allows Blanchot and Adorno to circumvent a relationship to the negative that is merely nihilistic. In terms of its style, argumentative rigor, conceptual precision, narrative patience, scholarly circumspection, and overall achievement, the book is truly outstanding.

Allen's detailed analysis... succeeds not only in bringing some much needed clarity and understanding to Blanchot's notoriously difficult style of writing and thinking, but also allows Allen to frame the question of literary autonomy as a question of how and to what degree the materiality of language, in which and through which literature works, represents the promise or denial of freedom from alienation.