«The philosophy of a work refers not so much to its terminology as to its position.» —Walter Benjamin’s letter to T. W. Adorno.
Current projects
“An Affliction of the Imagination”: On the Dialectic Between Nostalgia and Critique. My current research, within the framework of my doctoral thesis, explores the concept of nostalgia and its critical dimension. As a word increasingly in use, it is important to interrogate the role of nostalgia in political and cultural discourse: Who says we are becoming more nostalgic? What does the genealogy of this feeling as a clinical illness tell us? What are the political potentials of nostalgia, and whom does it address? Is nostalgia an obstacle to imagining a possible politics, or does it rather represent a symptom that the present has not left its past behind —perhaps because the promises of another future still live there?
Lines of Research
Politics, Time, Modernity. The transition from the Ancien Régime to philosophical and political modernity is often explained as a shift in temporal and historical regimes. Some authors speak of the acceleration of historical time, of a frenetic pace of life, of a changing horizon of expectations, of the loss of tradition amid the shock of constant novelty. I am interested in questioning, in this sense, the possibility of doing history and philosophy under such conditions —even how a historical philosophy or a philosophical history might be articulated. The aim is to radicalize both the Marxist critique of capitalism and the postmodern attack on ideology, within the broader reflection on what Modernity is, how it has been carried out, and what kind of Enlightenment might still be possible.
Philosophy and Method. The death or end of philosophy has been declared so many times that it would be naive to think it will ever truly arrive. The truth is that philosophy exists within history, in the sense that it is historical and stands in contrast to History with a capital H. I am interested not in the possibility of philosophy in our time, but in the “how” of doing it: Is phenomenology and hermeneutics still a viable path for a philosophy that makes life livable? What is the materiality of philosophical study? What order, what strategy, what materials should one seek and collect? This approach privileges the work of interdisciplinary and hard-to-classify thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault.
Max Horkheimer: Pessimism and Concepts. In recent decades, interest in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the interrupted tradition of the first generation of the Frankfurt School has been renewed. However, one of its most cited yet least studied thinkers is Max Horkheimer. This line of research seeks to unearth texts and concepts from Horkheimer that remain relevant to today’s world: his reflections on injustice, his unique relationship with Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his late theory of solidarity —which may offer a new interpretive key to Horkheimer’s entire body of work.