School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies

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Dr. Hannes Opelz

Dr. Hannes Opelz

Assistant Professor, French

3531896 1077https://opelz.work

Biography

Hannes Opelz is Assistant Professor in the French Department at Trinity College Dublin, where he has taught since 2011 in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies.

He read English at University College London, took an MA in French & Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and a graduate diploma in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, and completed an MPhil in European Philosophy & Culture and a PhD in French Thought & Literature at St John's College, Cambridge.

At Trinity he teaches across the undergraduate degree in French (literature, film, philosophy, politics, translation) and on the School's postgraduate programmes in Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Identities and Cultures of Europe. He co-designed and established the last of these in 2019 and directed it until 2025. In the French Department, he has coordinated the Senior Fresh year since 2015 and the Foundation Scholarship examinations since 2013. He supervises doctoral research and has mentored two Research Ireland postdoctoral fellows; in 2024 he received a Research Ally Award from Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland, a national award for research mentors and supervisors.

He has organised and co-organised conferences in Oxford and Dublin, including a 2017 international conference on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and co-founded, with Michael Cronin, The French Seminar @ Trinity, an online research seminar in contemporary French thought, featuring Catherine Malabou (2021) and Emanuele Coccia (2022) among its speakers. He has also convened public events with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2024) and with an astrobiologist from NASA Ames Research Center (2025).

Publications and Further Research Outputs

  • Thus Spoke Literature in, editor(s)Christopher Langlois , Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp37 - 56, [Hannes Opelz]Book Chapter, 2018
  • Hannes Opelz, L'incitation au mythe: Ténèbres de la mimèsis, L'Esprit créateur, 57, (4), 2017, p50 - 63Journal Article, 2017
  • L'Esprit créateur, 57, 4, (2017), 190p, Hannes OpelzJournal, 2017
  • L'exhibition in, editor(s)Ginette Michaud & Isabelle Ullern , Sarah Kofman: Philosopher autrement, Paris, Éditions Hermann, 2021, pp315 - 325, [Hannes Opelz]Book Chapter, 2021
  • Michael Holland & Hannes Opelz, Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2026, 1128ppBook, 2026
  • Hannes Opelz, Mimetic Annihilation, CounterText, 8, (1), 2022, p177 - 205Journal Article, 2022
  • MLN, 137, 4, (2022), 186p, Hannes OpelzJournal, 2022
  • Hannes Opelz, Plasticité du dehors, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p657 - 672Journal Article, 2022
  • Hannes Opelz, Présentation. L'art de Malabou, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p627 - 636Journal Article, 2022
  • Hannes Opelz & Catherine Malabou, L'avenir de la mimèsis. Entretien avec Catherine Malabou, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p801 - 813Journal Article, 2022
  • Hannes Opelz, L'espoir d'une communauté, Les Cahiers Maurice Blanchot, (2), 2013, p138-56Review, 2013
  • Hannes Opelz, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Ending and Unending Agony', New York, Fordham University Press, 2015, -Translation, 2015
  • La précipitation du désastre in, editor(s)Isabelle Ullern Pierre Gisel , Penser en commun? Jean-Luc Nancy et Sarah Kofman lecteurs de Blanchot, Paris, Beauchesne, 2015, pp31 - 62, [Hannes Opelz]Book Chapter, 2015

Research Expertise

One question drives Opelz's research across literature, philosophy, and film: representation -- or mimesis, the technical term in aesthetics -- understood not as the copy of a pre-given real but as the process by which subjects, communities and worlds present themselves and take form, in time consolidating into mythic configurations.

He calls this framework critical mythopoetics. It treats myth not as an archaic or founding narrative to be demystified or left behind but as the working grammar of aesthetic and political reality: the means by which fictions organise experience and make it legible.

Its method is materialist-deconstructive:

- materialist, because it asks how narratives are assembled -- on the page, in the cut -- and by what means an assemblage holds, and where it gives;

- deconstructive, because it attends less to what a myth says than to what it does: how a narrative lays claim to truth, secures an origin, welds an identity, and so forecloses what might otherwise follow.

Such a critique is double by necessity: there is no vantage outside myth-making, and the work of undoing myth is done from within it.

This has consequences for how he reads works of art, since art is where that settling can be undone. A work is a material artefact, experienced as form as much as deciphered as content -- a distinction analysis requires and the work itself refuses -- and it is that materiality which allows it to exceed the concepts brought to bear on it. Re-read, a work unsettles what has settled it: both the horizons a myth has fixed and the theoretical frameworks used to read it. Deconstruction therefore takes place in the very matter of the work rather than in a speculative beyond -- and, since myth is never finished with, neither is that labour.

He pursues this labour through both textual critique and direct exchange, articulating its stakes in public debates with Jean-Luc Nancy (2013) and Catherine Malabou (2021). The inquiry is anchored in a sustained engagement with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Hans Blumenberg, and has yielded the first bilingual journal issues devoted to Lacoue-Labarthe (L'esprit créateur, 2017) and Malabou (MLN, 2022).

Along distinct paths, this inquiry has converged on two domains where the friction between aesthetics, myth, and the political comes into sharpest focus: the writing of Maurice Blanchot on the one hand, and science fiction on the other. The first includes the Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot (Classiques Garnier, 2026), co-edited with Michael Holland (University of Oxford), and a forthcoming monograph on myth at the seam of literature and politics in Blanchot"s thought. The second explores representation at the limits of science and technology, spanning a monograph in progress on the SF films of Alex Garland and a co-edited volume reassessing the theoretical foundations of the genre.

  • Title
    The New Language of Science Fiction: Form and Materiality in Postwar Francophone and Anglophone SF (1959-1976)
    Summary
    Doctoral project led by Giaime Lazzari
    Funding Agency
    Claude and Vincenette Pichois Research Award
    Date From
    2024
    Date To
    2028
  • Title
    Time and the Other Capitalism: The Pasts, Presents and Futures of Work
    Summary
    Postdoctoral project led by Dr Anne Mulhall
    Funding Agency
    Research Ireland (formerly Irish Research Council)
    Date From
    2020
    Date To
    2022
  • Title
    Xenogenesis: Octavia Butler, Gateway for Racial and Gender Aliens at IMMA
    Summary
    Postdoctoral project led by Dr John Wilkins
    Funding Agency
    Research Ireland (formerly Irish Research Council)
    Date From
    2022
    Date To
    2024

Literary studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Languages and literature, Humanities and the arts, Other Humanities, History and philosophy of specific fields, Visual arts,

Recognition

  • Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Competition Award 2005-2008
  • Benefactors' Scholarship for Doctoral Research, St John's College, Cambridge 2005-2008
  • Austrian National Bank (ÖNB) Scholarship 2003-2004
  • Research Ally Award - Taighde Éireann / Research Ireland 2023-2024
  • Society for French Studies (SFS) present
  • Associations des Amis de Maurice Blanchot present
  • Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande (ADEFFI) present