•  24
    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 i…Read more
  •  16
    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…Read more
  •  36
    Materiality and sublimation in Dan Flavin's luminous minimalism
    Zeitschrift für Ästhetik Und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Special issue / Sonderheft 19): 313-330. 2021.
    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 appearan…Read more
  •  29
    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 bringi…Read more
  •  44
    The relevance of the theory of pseudo-culture
    Continental Philosophy Review 52 (3): 311-325. 2019.
    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…Read more
  •  42
    Adorno, Badiou and the politics of breaking out
    Theory and Event 22 (1): 18-43. 2019.
    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 possibl…Read more