Person

Klee, Louis

Biographical Information: I am a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College. My first degree was a Bachelor of Philosophy in philosophy at the Australian National University. I then did an MPhil and a PhD (2018-21) at Cambridge. Research Interests: I work on topics in literature and philosophy, with an emphasis on aesthetics, political philosophy, and theories of the novel. My first book, The Constellational Novel, explores associative and essayistic prose fiction. It begins with Marcel Proust and focuses on a number of novels written over the last three decades by Jacqueline Rose, W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Lisa Robertson, and Olga Tokarczuk. My next book is called Writing and Iconoclasm. It posits iconoclasm as the fulcrum between visual culture and the written word. Other research interests include ethics and moral philosophy; critical theory; continental philosophy; modern and contemporary poetry; Walter Benjamin; Judaism and philosophy; Judith Butler; psychoanalysis (especially as explored by Leo Bersani, Kaja Silverman, and Jonathan Lear); and Australian literature. I am broadly interested in philosophical discussions of affinity, likeness, resemblance, associationism, analogism, similarity, and 'what is it like' statements - the subject of a book project titled Sketch for a Theory of Affinity (after Sartre's Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions). I am on the steering committee of the Judith E Wilson Centre for Poetics. I am also an affiliated researcher with the Walter Benjamin Research Collective and Le Pôle Proust. With Solange Manche and Joe Davidson, I chair the Cambridge Reading Marx Seminar, which is affiliated with the 'lectures de Marx' seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. We organised this conference funded by CRASSH on contemporary Marxist thought in France and Britain. I have been co-convenor for a number of years of the Theory, Criticism, and Culture seminar.