Dr. Vangelis Giannakakis
Research Affiliate & Adjunct Lecturer
Goethe University Frankfurt
Goethe University Frankfurt
I am a Belgian-Greek philosopher based at Goethe University Frankfurt, where I serve as Research Affiliate and Adjunct Lecturer in the Institute of Philosophy. My research lies at the intersection of Critical Theory, contemporary Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Critical Pedagogy. I am concerned with how philosophical thought can interrogate the limits of culture, art, and education under late modern conditions, and how theory might renew the possibilities of critique, transformation, and emancipation.
My work engages particularly with the philosophies of Theodor W. Adorno and Alain Badiou, exploring how their respective conceptions of non-identity and event can be brought into dialogue to address questions of experience, culture, art, history, and praxis. My book Negative Dialectics and Event: Non-Identity, Culture and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness (Lexington Books / Bloomsbury, 2022) examines this encounter in depth, reconstructing Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics in light of Badiou’s notion of the event as complementary responses to the crises of modernity. Negative Dialectics and Event was recently reviewed in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. My forthcoming monograph, (In)aesthetic Theory: An Essay on Adorno, Badiou and Aesthetic Modernism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), extends this inquiry by rethinking modernist art as a site of resistance and renewal at the limits of representation.
Alongside this work, I write on the philosophy of education and the role of critique in contemporary society. My approach to Critical Pedagogy treats education as a transformative and emancipatory practice, linking the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political in order to respond to the intellectual and social demands of the present.
I hold a BA in Philosophy from the University of London, and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from University College Dublin. My research has been supported through fellowships, invited lectures, and publications in leading philosophical and cultural journals.