Emmanuel Alloa
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Emmanuel Alloa is Full Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg since 2019. He studied philosophy, history and art history in Freiburg, Padua, Berlin and Paris. In 2009, he received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Paris I-Panthéon and the Free University of Berlin with a binational dissertation. He taught at the Département d'arts plastiques of Paris 8, as well as at the Collège international de Philosophie, held a postdoc position at the NCCR Image Criticism eikones (Basel), and worked as assistant professor of philosophy at the University of St. Gallen.
Various visiting professorships and fellowships have taken him to diverse international institutions such as the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University (New York), Universidad San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Mexico), UFMG Belo Horizonte (Brazil), IKKM at Bauhaus University Weimar, University of Vienna, Torino, UC Berkeley and Yale. His work has received several awards, including the 2016 Latsis Prize and the 2019 Aby Warburg Wissenschaftspreis.
Emmanuel Alloa currently serves as Deputy President of the German Society for Aesthetics.
Emmanuel Alloa joins the Paris IAS in January 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Contemporary philosophy; aesthetics; media theory; visual culture; social philosophy.
TransparentoCene. A Critical Pharmacology of the Present
Transparency is seen as a general remedy to many evils, yet it is often contributing to sustain them. Transparency is the "pharmakon" of our time, although it is hardly ever reflected upon in its own right. The fact that transparency has become a consensus factor across the political spectrum today says much about the anxieties of an age that considers itself post-ideological. It is significant that the medial-technical colonization of our experiential space conversely entails ever greater desires for immediacy.
As will be argued, the ideal of transparency goes hand in hand with a new social conformism that can also be characterized as a terror of the authentic. Faced with the self-asserted neutrality towards ideology, the project will scrutinize what appears to be, in fact, an ideology of neutrality and its effects, both on the collective and institutional level and on the individual level. In order to counter the effects of such an ideology of neutrality, which assumingly lead to a conception of a totally unified, self-transparent I, a disregard for the influence of procedures on the content and a technocratic conception of democracy, a number of strategic concepts will be put forward, among which: Theatricality, Reciprocity, Civil inattention, Contingency. These concepts are critical insofar as their presence can be held a criterion for a reflexive relationship to the self and to society. Respectively, these concepts have the capacity to cultivate a pluralistic conception of individual subjectivity, an agonal approach to participation, a negotiation-based model of privacy, and a radically open concept of democracy.
Key publications
Emmanuel Alloa, Dieter Thomä. Transparency, Society, Subjectivity. Critical Perspectives, PalgraveMacmillan, 2018.
Emmanuel Alloa. This Obscure Thing Called Transparency. Politics and Aesthetics of a Contemporary Metaphor, Leuven UP, 2022.
Emmanuel Alloa. The Share of Perspective, Routledge, 2024.
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