Jan Völker appointed professor for philosophy

Jan Völker, born in 1976, studied philosophy, comparative literature and cultural studies in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. His work focusses on aesthetics, continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He completed his doctorate at the University of Potsdam in 2009 with a thesis on Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, which was published under the title Kants dritte Kritik. Ästhetik der Lebendigkeit by Fink-Verlag in 2011. In 2023, he completed his habilitation at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main with a thesis on Geteilte Denken bei Marx, Freud, Kant, Hegel, which will be published by Turia + Kant in Vienna in 2025.

Jan Völker was a research assistant in a sub-project of Prof. Winfried Menninghaus at the SFB Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste at the FU Berlin and at the same time a member of the Research Training Group Life Forms and Life Knowledge, which was led by Prof. Christoph Menke and Prof. Anselm Haverkamp in Potsdam and Frankfurt an der Oder. He was subsequently a research assistant to Prof Alexander García Düttmann at the Berlin University of the Arts and a Visiting Lecturer at Bard College in Berlin for several years. In the period 2018-2023 he was also ass. Professor of Philosophy at the postgraduate school ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For several semesters, he held the Chair of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Bauhaus University Weimar.

Jan Völker has contributed to various translations and editions from French and English of books by Alain Badiou, Alenka Zupančič, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière and others, and in 2017 conducted a conversation with Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy on Deutsche Philosophie , which was published by Matthes & Seitz in Berlin. His latest book is entitled Ein Weltall des Kapitals. Die Überwindung der terrestrischen Vernunft and was also published by Matthes & Seitz in Berlin in 2025.
He is very much looking forward to Vienna!