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 or in the cut, how they take hold, and how they set up and settle into hermeneutic frames, foreclosing alternative futures.
- deconstructive, because it attends less to what a myth does rather than what it says — 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 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.
These arguments have developed through both textual critique and direct exchange, including public debates with Jean-Luc Nancy (2013) and Catherine Malabou (2021). This work is anchored in a sustained engagement with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Hans Blumenberg; on Lacoue-Labarthe and Malabou, he has edited the first bilingual journal issues (L'esprit créateur, 2017; 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.