Vangelis Giannakakis’s book, (In)aesthetic Theory: An Essay on Adorno, Badiou and Aesthetic Modernism is now avaliable.

Vangelis Giannakakis is a Belgian-Greek philosophy scholar and Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His research engages with the first generation of critical theorists and contemporary continental philosophy, with a broader interest in alternative models of cultural and socio-political experience. He has published in the fields of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Aesthetics, and Critical Pedagogy.

Click here to access the book from the publisher’s website.

Here is the publishers blurb:
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.