Dr. Hannes Opelz
Assistant Professor, French
Biography
I am Assistant Professor in French at Trinity College Dublin, where I have taught since 2011 in the Department of French, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. I 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. I taught at Cambridge from 2007 to 2010 before coming to Dublin. At Trinity I teach across the undergraduate degree in French and on the School's postgraduate programmes in Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Identities and Cultures of Europe. I co-designed and established the last of these in 2019 and directed it until 2025. In the French Department, I have coordinated the Senior Fresh year since 2015 and the Foundation Scholarship examinations since 2013. I supervise doctoral research and have mentored two Research Ireland postdoctoral fellows; in 2024 I received a Research Ally Award from Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland, a national award for research mentors and supervisors. I have organised or 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. I have 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
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Michael Holland & Hannes Opelz, Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2026, 1128pp
Hannes Opelz, Présentation. L'art de Malabou, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p627 - 636
Hannes Opelz, Plasticité du dehors, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p657 - 672
Hannes Opelz, Mimetic Annihilation, CounterText, 8, (1), 2022, p177 - 205
MLN, 137, 4, (2022), 186p, Hannes Opelz
Hannes Opelz & Catherine Malabou, L'avenir de la mimèsis. Entretien avec Catherine Malabou, MLN, 137, (4), 2022, p801 - 813
L'exhibition in, editor(s)Ginette Michaud & Isabelle Ullern , Sarah Kofman: Philosopher autrement, Paris, Éditions Hermann, 2021, pp315 - 325, [Hannes Opelz]
Thus Spoke Literature in, editor(s)Christopher Langlois , Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp37 - 56, [Hannes Opelz]
Hannes Opelz, L'incitation au mythe: Ténèbres de la mimèsis, L'Esprit créateur, 57, (4), 2017, p50 - 63
L'Esprit créateur, 57, 4, (2017), 190p, Hannes Opelz
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]
Hannes Opelz, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Ending and Unending Agony', New York, Fordham University Press, 2015, -
Hannes Opelz, L'espoir d'une communauté, Les Cahiers Maurice Blanchot, (2), 2013, p138-56
Research Expertise
Description
One question drives my research across literature, philosophy and film: that of 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. I call the position I have developed 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 or in the cut, how they take hold, how they set up and settle into hermeneutic frames, foreclosing alternative futures. Deconstructive, because it attends less to what a myth says than to what it does - the mechanisms by which a narrative lays claim to truth, secures an origin, and welds an identity. 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 I read 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: not only the identities and horizons a myth has fixed, but the theoretical framework being 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. These arguments have been elaborated in dialogue with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Catherine Malabou, and Hans Blumenberg, among others; on the first two I have edited bilingual journal issues (L'Esprit créateur, 2017; MLN, 2022). Two bodies of work follow. The first concerns Maurice Blanchot, a central figure in twentieth-century French literature and thought. With Michael Holland (University of Oxford) I have co-edited the Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot (Classiques Garnier, 2026), and I am completing a monograph on the question of myth at the seam where literature and politics meet in Blanchot's writing. The second extends the inquiry to representation in science fiction, where the relation between aesthetics and the political is recast by science and technology: a monograph in progress on the SF films of Alex Garland, and a co-edited volume reassessing the theoretical foundations of the genre.Projects
- 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
- 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
- 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
Recognition
Awards and Honours
Research Ally Award - Taighde Éireann / Research Ireland
Benefactors' Scholarship for Doctoral Research, St John's College, Cambridge
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Competition Award
Austrian National Bank (ÖNB) Scholarship
Memberships
Associations des Amis de Maurice Blanchot
Society for French Studies (SFS)
Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande (ADEFFI)