Dimitris Vardoulakis
Biographic Data
| ID | 493294 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dimitris Vardoulakis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dimitris |
| FAMILY NAME | Vardoulakis |
| SIGNATURE | VARDOULAKIS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Faculty of Media |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7852-8900 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Hermarchus–Spinoza Complex: Epicurean Politics and the “Naturalism vs. Constructivism” Opposition
The Epicurean theory of social formation has been preserved in Hermarchus’s account, a major figure of the early period of the School. The “Hermarchus-Spinoza complex” refers to the Epicurean articulation of a politics that is inherently incompatible with the contrast between naturalism and constructivism. The Epicurean approach manages to overcome this binary because of its conception of phronesis as performative. The Hermarchus-Spinoza complex …
Susan James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together; and Mogens Laerke, Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing
Heidegger’s Other Path: The Problematic of Action within Monism
The paper examines the importance of monism in Heidegger’s thought. Monism is understood here as the supposition of one kind of existence, or a single mode of being. Monism matters for a better understanding of Heidegger’s approach to practical philosophy. The paper explains that monism always faced the question of how to account for action. If there is a single, unified being, then aren’t all actions merely modifications of that being? The paper…
Φρόνησις and Instrumentality: The Import of Aristotle’s Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics Today
Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism
The Seljuqs and their Successors: Art, Culture and History
Renowned scholars present key new thinking on art, sciences, belief and history in the Seljuq period Draws on new and updated use of historical sources Opens new paths in the research on magic beliefs, religion, astronomy, the concept of craftsmanship versus artistry, interaction between rulers and elites, ethno-religious and ethno-cultural diversity and emigration of people Case studies on the treatment of art objects (the oldest extant Shahnama…
The Three Apples: Agonistic Democracy in the Age of Calculation
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11, agonistic democracy promised to navigate away from both liberalism and dialectical materialism. How can we renew that discourse to highlight its significance in the times of COVID-19? I answer this question by looking at three articulations of the apple metaphor
Encountering the People: Causality and Instrumentality
Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy
This book critiques the relation between sovereignty and democracy. Across nine theses, Vardoulakis argues that sovereignty asserts its power by establishing exclusions: the sovereign excluding other citizens from power and excludes refugees and immigrants from citizenship. Within this structure, to resist sovereignty is to reproduce the logic of exclusion characteristic of sovereignty.In contrast to this "ruse of sovereignty," Vardoulakis propos…
The figure of Moses: The origins of authority in Spinoza
How baroque was Spinoza in his treatment of the prophets? I examine this question by comparing the pictorial treatments of Moses from the Netherlands to Spinoza’s treatment of Moses at the beginning of the Theological Political Treatise. I concentrate on two representations of Moses descending from mount Sinai, one by Ferdinand Bol and the other by Rembrandt. Of particular importance is the idea of hierarchy. I will argue that Spinoza takes an am…
Solon's Ekstatic Strategy: Stasis and the Subject/Citizen
The articles considers how the "death of the subject" influences ways in which we understand the aestheticization of the political." It explores how Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" can contribute to a conception of the political implications of thinking the subject. It also turns to Solon's conception of subjectivity as a way of mediating the current discussion on the subject
How Many Does It Take to Dance? The Mystery of the Political in G. K. Chesterton
Mystery is not merely a theological or literary category for G. K. Chesterton. It is also instrumental in understanding his conception of the political. The essay demonstrates the political significance of mystery through a close reading of Chesterton's short story ‘The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd’. A comparison with Heidegger's construal of the political will highlight Chesterton's originality
Spinoza's Authority Vol. 1: Resistance and Power
Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by …
Le plus grand logicien du vingtième siècle »: La liberté selon Derrida
partiellement ou totalement le prsent article, de le stocker dans une banque de donnes ou de le communiquer au public sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit
The Politics of Nothing: On Sovereignty
1. Introduction: The Negativity of Sovereignty, Now Clare Monagle and Dimitris Vardoulakis 2. A Sovereign Act of Negation: Schmitt's Political Theology and its Ideal Medievalism Clare Monagle 3. Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt Jurgen Fohrmann 4. The Sovereign Without Domain: Georges Bataille and the Ethics of Nothing Charles Barbour 5. The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben Dimi…
Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence
Judgment and Justification
Chapter 1 argues that the logic of justification characteristic of sovereignty relies on an immediate connection between the means and the ends of the exercise of power. It also shows two different ways that a democratic politics can responds to sovereignty's justifications of violence, which amount to two different ways of exercise judgment. Ultimately, a distinction is made between judgment as a characteristic of democracy and justification as …
Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages
Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in mod
Spinoza now
The Doppelgänger
The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the “double” of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as dece…
The Doppelganger: Literature's Philosophy
The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben
Agamben contends that 'There is ... no such thing as a stasiology, a theory of stasis or civil war' in the western understanding of sovereignty. His own vision of a politics beyond biopolitics explicitly culminates in the end of stasis. How can we understand Agamben's political theology by investigating his use of stasis? Stasis is particularly suited to an inquiry into political theology. It is linked to politics, since its primary meaning is po…
War and Its Other: Review of Nick Mansfield's Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
In this ambitious, erudite and at the same time impassioned book on conceptualisations of war since the seventeenth century, Nick Mansfield starts from the premise that war can only be thought in relation to its other. This other can assume different guises, such as peace, the social, sovereignty and so on. Mansfield persuasively argues that only a ‘humanist sentimentality’ would see war’s other as unquestionably good. (165) Such naivete forgets …
The Quintessence of Dust: Sovereignty and Creaturely Life
Critical Praxis: Or, Is Everything Political
Stasis: Beyond Political Theology
Vardoulakis examines the concept of political theology in terms of the ancient greek term "stasis." The term "stasis" means both mobility and immobility. Vardoulakis explores these seemingly contradictory meanings generate a notion of agonistic politics that challenges perceived ideas about political theology.
The Return of Negation: "The Doppelganger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny
The Return of Negation:The Doppelgänger in Freud's “The ‘Uncanny’” Dimitris Vardoulakis (bio) The Doppelgänger as a motif arose within German Romanticism and became a canonical theme in "Gothic" literature. The term was coined by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkäs, published in 1796. Authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Alan Poe exemplify the originary narratives of the motif and theme of the Doppelgänger.1 Doppelgänger characters tend to be a…
The critique of loneliness: Towards the Political Motives of the Doppelgänger
The critique of loneliness: Towards the Political Motives of the Doppelgänger
The Return of Negation: "The Doppelganger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny
The Return of Negation:The Doppelgänger in Freud's “The ‘Uncanny’” Dimitris Vardoulakis (bio) The Doppelgänger as a motif arose within German Romanticism and became a canonical theme in "Gothic" literature. The term was coined by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkäs, published in 1796. Authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Alan Poe exemplify the originary narratives of the motif and theme of the Doppelgänger.1 Doppelgänger characters tend to be a…
The Political Animal
The Political Animal Chris Danta (bio) and Dimitris Vardoulakis (bio) There is an anecdote, or perhaps a fable, about the philosophers of the Platonic Academy attempting to define the human. After much debate, the members of the Academy arrived at a seemingly succinct and accurate definition: man is a wingless biped (dipous apteron). At that moment, Diogenes the cynic, who had been eavesdropping on their deliberations, suddenly threw in the philo…
"The "Poor Thing: The Cosmopolitan in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose?a text will examine later?the perfect operation of reason will result in autonomy. But, as Descartes had already argued, the animal needs to be excluded from this project of individual liberation because it acts without reason, that is, it acts automatically (139). Autonomy and automaticity structure the subj…
Confession and Time: The Subject in Papadiamantes's The Merchants of the Nations
Confession and Time:The Subject in Papadiamantes's The Merchants of the Nations Dimitris Vardoulakis Alexandros Papadiamantes's importance for modern Greek letters is enormous. His short stories and novellas exhibited the first signs of a mature Greek prose following the emancipation from the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. They captured a whole era's socio-political upheavals, and they inaugurated Greek modernism in the twentieth centu…
Stasis: Beyond Political Theology
Vardoulakis examines the concept of political theology in terms of the ancient greek term "stasis." The term "stasis" means both mobility and immobility. Vardoulakis explores these seemingly contradictory meanings generate a notion of agonistic politics that challenges perceived ideas about political theology.
The Doppelgänger
The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the “double” of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as dece…
The Doppelganger: Literature's Philosophy
The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben
Agamben contends that 'There is ... no such thing as a stasiology, a theory of stasis or civil war' in the western understanding of sovereignty. His own vision of a politics beyond biopolitics explicitly culminates in the end of stasis. How can we understand Agamben's political theology by investigating his use of stasis? Stasis is particularly suited to an inquiry into political theology. It is linked to politics, since its primary meaning is po…
War and Its Other: Review of Nick Mansfield's Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
In this ambitious, erudite and at the same time impassioned book on conceptualisations of war since the seventeenth century, Nick Mansfield starts from the premise that war can only be thought in relation to its other. This other can assume different guises, such as peace, the social, sovereignty and so on. Mansfield persuasively argues that only a ‘humanist sentimentality’ would see war’s other as unquestionably good. (165) Such naivete forgets …
The Quintessence of Dust: Sovereignty and Creaturely Life
Critical Praxis: Or, Is Everything Political
The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy
Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka's Cages
Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in mod
Spinoza now
The Politics of Nothing: On Sovereignty
1. Introduction: The Negativity of Sovereignty, Now Clare Monagle and Dimitris Vardoulakis 2. A Sovereign Act of Negation: Schmitt's Political Theology and its Ideal Medievalism Clare Monagle 3. Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt Jurgen Fohrmann 4. The Sovereign Without Domain: Georges Bataille and the Ethics of Nothing Charles Barbour 5. The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben Dimi…
Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence
Judgment and Justification
Chapter 1 argues that the logic of justification characteristic of sovereignty relies on an immediate connection between the means and the ends of the exercise of power. It also shows two different ways that a democratic politics can responds to sovereignty's justifications of violence, which amount to two different ways of exercise judgment. Ultimately, a distinction is made between judgment as a characteristic of democracy and justification as …
Le plus grand logicien du vingtième siècle »: La liberté selon Derrida
partiellement ou totalement le prsent article, de le stocker dans une banque de donnes ou de le communiquer au public sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit
Solon's Ekstatic Strategy: Stasis and the Subject/Citizen
The articles considers how the "death of the subject" influences ways in which we understand the aestheticization of the political." It explores how Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" can contribute to a conception of the political implications of thinking the subject. It also turns to Solon's conception of subjectivity as a way of mediating the current discussion on the subject
How Many Does It Take to Dance? The Mystery of the Political in G. K. Chesterton
Mystery is not merely a theological or literary category for G. K. Chesterton. It is also instrumental in understanding his conception of the political. The essay demonstrates the political significance of mystery through a close reading of Chesterton's short story ‘The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd’. A comparison with Heidegger's construal of the political will highlight Chesterton's originality
Spinoza's Authority Vol. 1: Resistance and Power
Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by …
The figure of Moses: The origins of authority in Spinoza
How baroque was Spinoza in his treatment of the prophets? I examine this question by comparing the pictorial treatments of Moses from the Netherlands to Spinoza’s treatment of Moses at the beginning of the Theological Political Treatise. I concentrate on two representations of Moses descending from mount Sinai, one by Ferdinand Bol and the other by Rembrandt. Of particular importance is the idea of hierarchy. I will argue that Spinoza takes an am…
Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism
The Seljuqs and their Successors: Art, Culture and History
Renowned scholars present key new thinking on art, sciences, belief and history in the Seljuq period Draws on new and updated use of historical sources Opens new paths in the research on magic beliefs, religion, astronomy, the concept of craftsmanship versus artistry, interaction between rulers and elites, ethno-religious and ethno-cultural diversity and emigration of people Case studies on the treatment of art objects (the oldest extant Shahnama…
Philosophy (22 works) · Political science (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Political Theology and Sovereignty (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Literature (7 works)