Books by Audrey Wasser
This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey's rem... more This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey's remarkable—and still provocative—early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume's contributors interrogate Macherey's work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature's resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; “Reading Althusser," in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, on the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and on the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser's thought.
Recent translations of Macherey's work into English have introduced new readers to the critic's enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.
The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at t... more The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.
Syndicate, 2018
https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/the-work-of-difference/
Papers by Audrey Wasser
nonsite, 2024
https://nonsite.org/performative-contexts/ One of the forms that postcritique takes is a devaluat... more https://nonsite.org/performative-contexts/ One of the forms that postcritique takes is a devaluation of contextualizing claims. Against such a devaluation, my essay calls instead for a reconsideration of what we mean by context and of how contextualizing claims work. Reading Derrida’s treatment of intentionality and performativity in “Signature Event Context,” I argue that what we call “context” is not an empirical given but itself the result of a performative speech act.
New Literary History, 2021
My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a disti... more My aim in this essay is to take seriously the idea that the activity of criticism entails a distinct form of thinking. I develop my argument through an engagement with Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, a text in which the two authors look back on their life's work to interrogate fundamental aspects of their shared discipline. For my purposes, to pose and answer the question "What is criticism?," two components of the book's project seem especially important. The first is that it is not just a book about philosophy but about thinking, and about the specific practices that characterize different forms of thought. Deleuze and Guattari hold up philosophy alongside science and art as three ur-forms of thought. Significantly, these three forms of thought can be seen to serve as the three major coordinates marking contemporary debates about criticism. What happens, I want to ask, when we subtract from criticism its affinities with these other practices of thought? What remains of criticism once we identify its specific differences from science, art, and philosophy? My claim is that the distinctiveness of critical thinking can be found precisely in its difference from these three other major practices. Secondly, What is Philosophy? is a book designed to interrogate the doxa of its authors' discipline. In a similar way, the aim of my own essay is to push against the institutional doxa of "critical thinking" by drawing out the virtues of a genuinely critical thinking.
Diacritics, 2019
In the context of contemporary debates about methods of reading, this essay moves between the the... more In the context of contemporary debates about methods of reading, this essay moves between the theory of biblical exegesis Spinoza articulates in his Theological-Political Treatise and the geometrical "style" of the Ethics in order to outline a properly Spinozist theory of reading, one centered on a tension between the immanence of a process of meaning and the transcendence of a despotically ordained truth. It considers the style of the Ethics in light of this tension, in particular the possibility that the language of the text can be read as allegorical. In conclusion, the essay returns to the Theological-Political Treatise to comment on the relationship between questions of textual interpretation and those of force and persuasion, pointing to the way authority is constructed in both textual and political matters.
A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edited by Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey Bell, and James Williams.
Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism. Edited by Christopher Langlois, 2018
The irony of a glossary entry on Blanchot's notion of literature is that "literature, " for Blanc... more The irony of a glossary entry on Blanchot's notion of literature is that "literature, " for Blanchot, names something impossible to define. Still, it is possible to elaborate on this impossibility, and much of Blanchot's writing is devoted to doing so. With philosophical precision and poetic finesse, Blanchot spells out the contradictory expectations that twentieth-century readers and writers bring to an experience of literature. He draws on his training as a philosopher, especially on his readings of Hegel and Heidegger, and he reflects on his own experience as a fiction writer, essayist, and critic with a care that comes from the intimacy of a personal struggle with the written word.
This article approaches Gilles Deleuze's notion of problems through a series of thinkers Deleuze ... more This article approaches Gilles Deleuze's notion of problems through a series of thinkers Deleuze draws on in developing this notion: Heidegger, Plato, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche. Taking these thinkers as its guide, it sketches six broad characteristics that accompany an investment in problems, ultimately arguing that problems are attained through the activity of critique. It echoes Deleuze's essay 'How Do We Recognise Structuralism?' by asking: for whom do problems exist? What does Deleuze recognise in those who recognise problems? And what do those who recognise problems make visible for us?
MLN, 2014
This article examines hyperbolic rhetoric in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu for what it r... more This article examines hyperbolic rhetoric in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu for what it reveals about the organization of the self with respect to its sense impressions and the conversion of the self into an intelligible work of art. Focusing on the “steeples of Martinville” episode as well as the narrator’s train trip to Balbec, I claim that what appears to be the transcendence of the artwork is, in fact, produced by a hyperbolic structure that is more precarious than it seems. Essential to hyperbole is its proximity to both metaphor and irony: like irony, it works in the disjunction between sign and meaning, and indicates the subjective position of the speaker, but like metaphor, it does not surrender its reference to the external world. Proust’s novel is caught between these positions, I argue, and achieves neither the transcendence nor the self-coincidence it claims.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities , 2007
Translations by Audrey Wasser
Book Reviews by Audrey Wasser
Critical Inquiry, Sep 2015
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Books by Audrey Wasser
Recent translations of Macherey's work into English have introduced new readers to the critic's enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.
Papers by Audrey Wasser
Translations by Audrey Wasser
Book Reviews by Audrey Wasser
https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/speculative-formalism/
Recent translations of Macherey's work into English have introduced new readers to the critic's enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.
https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/speculative-formalism/