Publications

Reviews
How can we consider structural features intrinsic to art without, for that reason, abstracting from their historical embeddedness? Vangelis Giannakakis answers this vital question through the interpretation of aesthetic modernism by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou. Very few thinkers can generate a fruitful dialogue among classics without being repetitive, naive, and excessively scholarly. This is an original and erudite book by a first-rate philosopher of art and specialist on Adorno and Badiou. All those interested in contemporary aesthetics will find Giannakakis's interpretation of events, reality, and aesthetic experience – all central concepts for Adorno and Badiou – a new paradigm to think with in the 21st century. This paradigm is called the (In)aesthetic. A must read.

Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University, Spain, and author of Signs from the Future (2025)

Through a compelling and lucid exploration of the aesthetic philosophies of Adorno and Badiou, Vangelis Giannakakis advances a series of challenging propositions on the affirmative and subversive powers of art today. Both aesthetically attuned and philosophically rigorous, this study not only sheds new light on two of the twentieth century's most original thinkers, but also stands as an insightful contribution to contemporary aesthetic theory.

Brian O'Connor, Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland

Giannakakis' argument is new, sensitive, and critical-and attentive to the complexities that mark the theories of both Adorno and Badiou. He argues that Adorno's negatively dialectical aesthetics share several features with Badiou's program of inaesthetics: the confrontation with otherness (the shudder and/or the event); the imperative to resist instrumental reason through negation; the importance of recognising the priority of the object over reified subjectivity; and the nature of the aesthetic image-which allows fantasy, speculation, and the possibility of philosophical interpretation, capable of following and transcending the object. The concept of “art at the end” is also appropriate for our own era-which offers nightmarish repetition as well as the uncanny trace of difference. If history is a path of despair, it is also one of resistance, hope, and the ever-unforeseen.

Justin Neville Kaushall, University of Warwick, UK

Reviews
Can dialectical thought still carve our late capitalist reality at its joints? In this bold, lucid, and searching book, Vangelis Giannakakis revisits the writings of Theodor W. Adorno to make a compelling case for negative dialectics as a vital intellectual resource in the face of our 'new old barbarism.' He does so by recalling, from different angles, the imperative to think together negation and novelty-and by bringing Adorno into an unexpected if fruitful dialogue with the philosophy of Alain Badiou. An important intervention for all those persuaded that the first axiom of a critical, emancipatory philosophy is: society must not be defended.

Alberto Toscano, Simon Fraser University and Goldsmiths, University of London

What is the connection between a critical, historical experience and the concept of the event? In his superb and penetrating study of Adorno and Badiou, Vangelis Giannakakis articulates a compelling and novel response to this question. Through illuminating explorations of the concepts of experience, the nonidentical, the shudder and the event, Giannakakis outlines a new path for Critical Theory in the 21st Century. This fine book is itself an event, a breakout from totality into undiminished experience.

Alastair Morgan, University of Manchester

The originality of the book lies not only in the critical re-reading of [...] lesser-studied works [by Adorno] but also in the way Giannakakis juxtaposes them with the philosophy of the contemporary French thinker Alain Badiou, in particular his theory of the 'event'. Giannakakis' central argument is that a combined reading of Adorno and Badiou – two philosophers originating from ostensibly divergent traditions – can yield a deeper understanding of certain pressing problems in contemporary capitalist society and perhaps even gesture toward possible solutions.

Kristian Lyndorff Paris, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books