Armen Avanessian (1973, AT) studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and in Paris. After completing his dissertation in literature, Phenomenology of the Ironic Spirit: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics of Modernity (in Bielefeld, Germany, with Karl Heinz Bohrer), he worked as a freelance journalist and editor at Le Philosophoire in Paris, and then in publishing in London. In 2007, he returned to academia to begin his current position as a researcher at the "Collaborative Research Center 626: Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits", and at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at Free University Berlin. In 2011, he was a Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University, and in 2012 at the German Department at Yale University. In 2013/14, he was Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. In 2014, he became chief editor at Merve Verlag, a Berlin publisher specializing in philosophy and political theory. He is the founder of the bilingual research and publication platform “Speculative Poetics”, which brings together philosophers, writers, and artists from across the world, around the idea of a new theoretical discipline in the making.