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William S. Allen (PhD, University of Warwick) is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton, UK, and the author of the following books: Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot(2007); Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (2016); Without End: Sade’s Critique of Reason(Bloomsbury, 2018); Blanchot and the Outside of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019); Noir and Blanchot: Deteriorations of the Event (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance: On Dialectics in Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Allen’s latest work constitutes an intellectual contribution of the first order: impeccably written, shrewdly argued, and well informed regarding the existing scholarship. The text is a pleasure to read, as Allen patiently unfolds a fascinating argument that manages to shed new light on the relationship between the philosophy of history and the formal demands of the aesthetic as they emerge in Adorno’s complicated inheritance of Kant and post-Kantian thought. * Gerhard Richter, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor, Brown University, USA * William S. Allen masterfully probes the cipher of time in the aesthetic tradition from Kant to Adorno to show how the finitude and aporias of temporality have been figured and put to work. The book provides a novel and convincing demonstration of how thinking – as with aesthetic experience – in its quest for the whole, approximates and approaches it within the confines of finite experience. The forms of history, as well as the form of the artwork, are here a kind of seismographic tracing of the vacillations between the wholeness and fragmentation of the human. This book is a major contribution to the literature on Kant, Adorno, and aesthetic theory. * Tom Huhn, Chair of BFA Visual & Critical Studies and Art History, School of Visual Arts, USA *
