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 extraordinary liberation (...) of the dialectic of natural-history through a mimesis of desire, which is made apparent in what Sade’s texts literally present; in their contingency and also their facticity. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 337-349, September 2021.

A critical study of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature. Adorno’s Poetics of Form is the first book-length examination of the elusive deployment of the concept of form in Adorno’s writings on art and literature, and the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the relation of these writings to his broader philosophical project. It examines form within the constellation of concepts that exist around it, considering how it appears when seen in conjunction with (...) and in opposition to content, expression, genre, and material. Illuminated from these angles, form is revealed as the site of a complex web of dynamic conceptual interactions. The book thus offers a resolution to a problem in Adorno’s work that has remained unsolved for several decades, and in doing so sets out the consequences of Adorno’s poetics for literary and critical theory today. (shrink)

In its etymology and in popular discourse, the term ‘avant-garde’ is commonly associated with a future temporality, while in art-historical discourse, it represents a tradition of modernist innovation, periodised as ‘historical avant-garde’ and ‘neo-avant-garde’. Since this historical periodisation was first established in the 1950s, the avant-garde’s futurity has been repeatedly disputed, bringing the very notion of an avant-garde into question. This thesis takes as its starting point the predicament of ‘an avant-garde after the avant-garde’ as a means to investigate the (...) philosophico-political implications of a historical temporality marked by ‘afterness’. Writing in critical dialogue with scholarship that has articulated the avant-garde as a notion of historical time, the thesis modifies the parameters of this scholarship by foregrounding the category of historicism, and by reformulating the avant-garde as a notion that both resists and inhabits historical periodisation. As a study at the disciplinary intersection of comparative literature and critical theory, 'Ahead of its Time' proceeds via close readings of selected theories of the avant-garde (German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s foundational Theory of the Avant-Garde in the 1970s; British art theorist John Roberts’ formulation of a ‘suspensive avant-garde’ in the twenty-first century; and the intellectual debates of the Italian circle Neoavanguardia in the 1960s), while also mobilising the critical resources available in the thought of Walter Benjamin. Through a non-linear, comparativist critical analysis that discusses these theories in, and as, a Benjaminian constellation, the thesis proposes the avant-garde as a relational, indexical category that is constitutively split between historical continuity and historical rupture. In this manner, 'Ahead of its Time' revisits the broader question of mediation between universality and particularity, and by recasting it in temporal terms, it advocates a chronopolitics of singularity, whereby the avant-garde’s split between continuity and rupture also reveals the ethically-necessary relationship between self-determination and contingency. (shrink)