Vangelis Giannakakis

This essay explores the structural and historical parallels between Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics – the comprehensive critical-theoretical framework that underpins his analyses of culture, experience, and social integration – and the ethos of countercultural defiance embodied by the Beat Generation. Both emerged as radical responses to the social and ideological landscapes of post-World War II, united by a shared scepticism towards instrumental rationality and normative conformity in late capitalism. They are also linked by a mutual dedication to non-identity, dissonance, and withdrawal as modes of resistance. The paper argues that Adorno’s critique of late-capitalist reality and the Beats’ literary and performative rejection of bourgeois norms converge in a shared endeavour of critical disaffiliation, aimed at preserving experience from being subsumed under exchange relations and ideological closure. Through a meticulous examination of Adorno’s theoretical writings alongside pivotal interventions by Ginsberg and Kerouac, the essay constructs a comparative framework that elucidates how negation, refusal, and withdrawal function not as passive retreats but as active forms of critique against thoroughly administered, conformist societies.

A reckoning with the radicalisation of modernist aesthetics that took hold in the mid-twentieth century, (In)aesthetic Theory illuminates the limits of aesthetic presentation by bringing Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou's divergent philosophies of art into critical proximity. Both theorists uncover moments in which art ceases to represent and begins to insist – where its truth is not stated outright but intimated in a gesture beyond the world as given. Their respective frameworks suggest that aesthetic experience can open an affective breach in which the reifying impulse of cognition is negated, and that which otherwise eludes the regime of established appearances is encountered obliquely. This shared structural insight anchors this book's central hypothesis: that art's power to produce truth lies precisely in this zone of interruption, of failure, of withdrawal, and vanishing intensity. Combining original theory with historically grounded comparative commentary, the text reflects on presence and absence, history and memory, politics and art, entropy and decay. With it, Vangelis Giannakakis offers a vitally current interpretation of aesthetic modernism.

The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown’ between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. This state of affairs pleads for the (re-)elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. This paper studies the lessons that can be drawn in this regard from the intersection between, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of an historically adequate consciousness, and, on the other, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of the historically effected consciousness. The paper opens with a concise reconstruction of Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ as a critical response to instrumental rationality that borrows insights from radical historicism. The focus then shifts to Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which is read as a similar type of protest against instrumental reason that privileges dialogical forms of enculturation. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestive yet inconclusive reflections on some important elements of convergence/divergence between the two thinkers, notably, their theorisations of immanent and transcended critique, the role they ascribe to tradition and language vis- à-vis experience, and the special place of ‘mimesis’ in it. Overall, the argument is made that a ‘negative hermeneutics’ may be what is needed to fashion new interpretations of the world, to foster alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more aptly nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it.

History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, but also with singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world, or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination. Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments, but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence. More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness.

Modern aesthetic Minimalism is neither a flight to abstract spirituality, nor an extracting process of a primordial essence. It is concerned, rather, with the aesthetic object as pure refiguration and the production of “concrete universality”, of form as content and possibility of itself. This becomes especially apparent in the Minimalism of the 1960s. The main focus of this paper will be on Dan Flavin’s luminous minimalism. The latter is characterised by a style that, though simple in appearance, introduced a higher level of complexity with regard to the relation between form and matter, concept and thing, in artistic production. Neither sculptures nor paintings, Flavin’s works fall right under Donald Judd’s category of “specific objects”. Nevertheless, his luminous creations are not particularly specific, just as they are not strictly speaking objects. Their main material – colour-light – is as intangible and diffuse, as its origin – the fluorescent lamp – is commonplace and artificial. Drawing on such influential theorists of art as Theodor W. Adorno, Peter Bürger, Clement Greenberg and Jacques Rancière, this paper studies the lessons that philosophy can learn from Flavin's light minimalism, most notably in relation to the notions of aesthetic materiality and sublimation.

This paper examines the loss of culture as a possible effect of the neoliberalisation of education, especially higher education. The paper opens with a brief comparison between the humanistic education founded on the idea of culture and its modern-day neoliberal form, with the help of José Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on the mission of higher education. It then discusses certain aspects of the historical development of libraries and of the figure of the public intellectual with a view to bringing into relief some negative repercussions that can, and already do affect the university. The paper also explores aspects of John Dewey’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s thoughts to draw lessons with respect to how experience and culture are not only essential components of education as a whole, but also elements of resilience amidst a series of contemporary challenges that threaten its purpose and meaning. The paper draws to a close with some suggestive yet inconclusive remarks on the promises inherent in existing and possible alternatives to the neoliberalised university.

Some 60 years separate us from Theodor W. Adorno’s “Theory of pseudo-culture.” Yet Adorno’s analysis might never have been as pertinent and as compelling as it is in the present moment. The dawn of the “post-truth” era, and the persistent impact of the culture industry on human sensibility and capacity for critical self-reflection, call for a return to Adorno’s critical theorisation of pseudo-culture. This paper revisits Adorno’s assessment of pseudo-culture and proposes a reconstruction of some of his most compelling arguments on the subject in light of the present socio-historical circumstances. The paper starts with a concise discussion of the notions of Kultur, Bildung and Halbbildung in relation to Adorno’s thought. It then discusses the effects of pseudo-culture on human experience by looking into the role of opinions—in particular, what Adorno terms “delusional” opinions—in contemporary late capitalist reality. Finally, the paper ends with a juxtaposition of the barbarism of the banal and neoteric barbarism. I argue that, whereas the former stuns culture and impels it to regress to a state of pseudo-culture, the latter gives it new impetus by opening up new theoretical and practical paths.

The present state of late capitalist society is, mutatis mutandis, eerily reminiscent of that criticized by Theodor W. Adorno more than half a century ago. Indeed, it was against this cultural, social and political backdrop that Adorno invited his students to stay confident in the prospects of a breakout [Ausbruch]. In this spirit, this paper looks into Adorno's notion of "breakout" and studies its relation to Badiou's theory of the event in an attempt to show that alternatives are still possible today.