Professor Leslie Hill FBA
Emeritus Professor
Email: leslie dot hill at warwick dot ac dot uk
Research interests
My main interest is in the relationship between literary texts and literary theory, modern philosophy, film, and social and political issues. I have written among others on Sade, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Proust, Roussel, Bataille, Artaud, Klossowski, Blanchot, Levinas, Barthes, Beckett, Genet, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Duras, Guibert, Godard, Celan, Derrida, and Straub-Huillet, and supervised in the past PhD dissertations on Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche, the fiction of Maurice Roche and Roger Laporte, and the films of Godard, as well as MA work on Bataille, Beckett, Duras, Cardinal, Rivette, and various others.
In 2020 I completed (in French) a lengthy account of the political thinking and the pre- and postwar commitments of the writer, critic, and sometime political journalist Maurice Blanchot, entitled Blanchot politique: sur une réflexion jamais interrompue, which cast new light on that author's sometimes controversial political commitments. Since then I have co-edited two archival prewar manuscripts found in Blanchot's papers which provide fresh information about his early writing career. More recently I have completed a book-length exploration of the innovative French, German, and Italian political cinema of Straub and Huillet, Another Cinema: the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and am currently seeking to finish a book-length study of Pierre Klossowski's personal, philosophical, and artistic engagement with Christianity and the question of the possibility of atheism, and in particular with the work of Nietzsche, currently entitled Circulus vitiosus deus: Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Deconstruction of Christianity. I have also written recently on Barthes and Beckett, Blanchot and Heidegger, and Blanchot and Kafka.
Selected publications
Books
Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, republished 2009, xii + 187 pp., ISBN 978 0 0 521 35645 8 (hb), 978 0 521 11056 3 (pbk)
Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, London, Routledge, 1993, x + 200 pp., ISBN 0 415 05047 2 (hb), ISBN 0 415 05048 0 (pbk), republished 2001 in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, ISBN 0 203 00239 3
Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, London, Routledge, 1997, xii + 302 pp., ISBN 0 415 09173 X (hb), ISBN 0 415 09174 8 (pbk), republished 2001 in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, ISBN 0 203 00475 2
Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, x + 277 pp., ISBN 0 19 815971 4, republished 2010 by Oxford Scholarship Online, at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com, ISBN 9780198159711; eISBN: 9780191716065; DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159711.001.0001.
The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, xii + 140 pp., ISBN 978 0 521 86416 9 (hb), 978 0 521 68281 7 (pbk)
Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism, Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame University Press, 2010, xiv + 438 pp, ISBN 978 0 268 03107 7
Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch, New York, Continuum, 2012, vi + 443 pp., ISBN 978 1 4411 2527 9 (hb), 978 1 4411 6622 7 (pbk).
Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, 264 pp., ISBN 978 1 78660 887 1 (hb), 978 1 78660 888 8 (pbk).
Blanchot politique : sur une réflexion jamais interrompue, Geneva: Furor, 2020, 560 pp., ISBN 978 2 940601 09 7
Critical Editions
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas le Solitaire, édition de Leslie Hill et Philippe Lynes, Paris, éditions Kimé, 2022, ISBN 978 2 38072 071 6; Thomas il solitario, édition de Leslie Hill et Philippe Lynes, edited and translated (into Italian) by Silvano Facioni, Naples: Orthotes editrice, 2023, ISBN: 978 88 9314 380 6.
Maurice Blanchot, Premiers Récits: Le Mythe d'Ulysse (inédit), suivi de L'Idylle (1936) et du Dernier Mot (1935), édition de Leslie Hill et Philippe Lynes, Paris, éditions Kimé, 2023, ISBN 978 2 38072 113 3
Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, version manuscrite, édition de Leslie Hill et Philippe Lynes, Paris, éditions Kimé, October 2024, ISBN 978 28072 151 5
Co-edited volumes
After Blanchot: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism, edited by Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2005, ISBN 0 87413 946 5
‘Blanchot’s Epoch’, edited by Leslie Hill and Mike Holland, Paragraph, 30, 3, November 2007, ISSN 0264 8334, ISBN 978 0 7486 3262 6
Blanchot dans son siècle, edited by Monique Antelme, Gisèle Berkman, Christophe Bident, Jonathan Degenève, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Olivier Le Trocquer, Jérémie Majorel, and Parham Shahrjerdi, Lyon, éditions Parangon, collection Sens Public, 2009, ISBN 978-2-84190-191-3
