Armen Avanessian

With Berlin director Christopher Roth, he has produced the film Hyperstition (2016), which draws on ontology, science fiction, and sociology to question the concept of time. Screened at several festivals in Europe and the United States, the film consists of conversations with established as well as younger philosophers such as Nick Srnicek, Elie Ayache, Ray Brassier and others.

His book 'Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge, Poetics of Existence' (2015, English translation forthcoming) confronts the deplorable state of academia in an explicitly accelerationist way. Not limiting himself to mere criticism, Avanessian is constantly at work constructing alternative platforms such as the summer school he organized with Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, on "Emancipation as Navigation: From the Space of Reasons to the Space of Freedoms."

Avanessian can also be considered a postcontemporary artist. He uses not only classical publication formats but also art festivals and exhibitions. The 2015 gallery festival "Tomorrow Today / curated by_vienna" for example, was based on Avanessian's homonymous essay and combined the work of twenty curators with the idea of an actual post-capitalism. Within the framework of the ninth Berlin Biennale, Avanessian conducted a ten-day Young Curators Workshop on alternatives to the economic and political models of contemporary art.

Following his dissertation, which had already explored phenomena at the intersection of art, politics, and philosophy, Avanessian focused on developing a new approach in literary theory and philosophy of language. Collaborating with colleagues such as Anke Hennig, he began working in 2011 on connecting new speculative-ontological approaches with twentieth-century philosophies of language, which resulted most notably in two co-written books, 'Present Tense: A Poetics' (2012, English translation 2015) and 'Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain' (2014, English translation forthcoming 2016). Moreover, he played a central role in bringing accelerationism into German-language political philosophy. In 2015, Wired Magazine named him an intellectual innovator, noting in particular his concern with post-capitalist ideas.

With columnist Georg Diez, media theorist Paul Feigelfeld, and author Julia Zange, Armen Avanessian hosts "60 Hertz", a talk show airing every Monday on Berlin Community Radio. The show is conceived as an artistic rendering, in interviews and conversations, of everyday life in the 2010s. Episodes are usually broadcast in a mix of English and German language.

From 2007 to 2014, he taught in the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. In 2011 he was a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and in 2012 in the German Department at Yale University. Since 2013, he has held visiting appointments at a number of art schools (in Nuremberg, Vienna, Basel, Copenhagen, California). In 2014, he became the chief editor at Merve Verlag, a Berlin publisher specializing in philosophy and political theory. In 2011, Armen Avanessian founded the bilingual research and publication platform Speculative Poetics that brings together philosophers, writers, and artists from across the world around the idea of a new theoretical discipline in the making.

Armen Avanessian (*1973 in Vienna) is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist. He has taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other institutions, and held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia University and Yale University. His work on Speculative realism and Accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia.

Of Armenian descent, born 1973 in Vienna, Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science under Jacques Rancière in Paris. He completed his dissertation, 'Phenomenology of Ironic Spirit: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics in Modernity' , under the supervision of conservative theorist Karl Heinz Bohrer at the University of Bielefeld. For several years, he worked as a free-lance journalist, journal editor (Le Philosophoire, Paris), and in the publishing industry in London.