Thought-provoking, challenging, controversial at times, Vallury’s edited volume presents a series of brilliant and fruitful dialogues on aesthetics and politics between philosophical discourses (from Camus and Lévinas to Deleuze) and analyses of literary fiction and criticism (Dib, Djebar, Genet, Klossowski, Barthes) as well as filmic texts (Ruiz, Straub and Huillet) that brought a significant contribution to intellectual and artistic debates during the second half of the twentieth century in the French-speaking world and beyond (Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Philip Watts, J. M. Coetzee, and Vilém Flusser).

Caroline Eades, University of Maryland

This timely collection teases out new affinities and filiations among fiction, aesthetic form, and politics in the Francophone world. In doing so, it reminds readers that objects of the past retain clues leading us toward that which we cannot yet think. Its analyses of works by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jacques Rancière, J.M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Raúl Ruiz, Mohammed Dib, Pierre Klossowksi, Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, and the Eichmann trial are broad in range and often daring in their revelation. The result is an apt tribute to the memory of Philip Watts.

Steven Ungar, University of Iowa