Agnès Gayraud

OVERVIEW:

Agnès Gayraud is a French philosophy professor, former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm (Paris), specialized in aesthetics, Critical Theory, German modern philosophy and French philosophy of the twentieth century.

She just completed her Ph.D in philosophy on « The critique of subjectivity and its figures by T. W. Adorno. A modern construction » (Université Paris IV-Paris Sorbonne).

Through the whole work of the philosopher, she examines his tenacious and constant critique of subjectivity. Inherited from Idealism, this concept is actually constantly challenged by a materialistic counterweight within Adorno’s construction of the negative dialectic. Materialism, which is an intellectual option that Adorno considers, since the beginning of his career, in the thirties, as necessary to understand Modernity, thus appears as a safeguard for thought itself, which cannot but deal with idealistic categories.

Such an approach leads to various consequences in the interpretation of his global theory of domination, spread in his aesthetical like sociological and metaphysical thought. Indeed, Adorno is not the postmodern philosopher that some of his readers portray. He is not convinced of the supremacy of aesthetics above philosophy, and even though he rejected popular music out of the autonomous art sphere, his analysis still carry unsuspected resources to understand the popular music historical phenomenon (see below some articles where these aspects are examined).

Besides her research on Adorno’s philosophy, Agnès Gayraud taught aesthetics (from Diderot to Kant, Hegel, Danto, Goodman and Adorno) and general philosophy at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne.

She is also interested in the question of nature and the contemporary temptation of a return to its innocence and/or wildness as of authenticity. She is working on a book exploring the various inspirations of this temptation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to actual extreme environmentalist movements, from Emerson and Thoreau to Arne Naëss, last important figurehead of Deep Ecology.

Awards:

2008: Laureate of the Fondation Thiers’ Funding (Institut de France)

2010: Researcher excellence Grant from the University of Montréal