Eftichis Pirovolakis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Theatre Studies Department of the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between deconstruction, hermeneutics and phenomenology. His doctoral research, completed in 2006 under the supervision of Geoffrey Bennington at the University of Sussex, UK, focused on the contentious relation between the thought of Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. Since 2001, he has taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on philosophy, critical and literary theory at the Universities of Sussex and Brighton in the UK, and at the Universities of Athens, Crete, Patras, Western Macedonia and the Hellenic Open University in Greece. Pirovolakis co-organised two major international conferences at the University of Sussex: ‘Encounters with Derrida’ in 2003, and ‘Philosophy and Literature/Literature and Philosophy’ in 2008. He was also a member of the organising committees of two international conferences: ‘Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom’ (Athens, April 2015), and ‘Performing Space’ (Nafplion, August 2022).
Pirovolakis is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (SUNY Press, 2010), which also includes his translation into English of Derrida’s essay ‘La parole: Donner, nommer, appeler’. He has published articles in Philosophy Today, Word and Text, and Literature, Interpretation, Theory, as well as in Greek academic journals. Between 2007 and 2012, he served as assistant editor to the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, of which he edited seven volumes altogether. Pirovolakis has co-edited, with Dorothea Olkowski, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains (Routledge, 2019), and his co-translation into Greek (with Apostolos Lambropoulos) of Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington’s influential work titled Derrida (Seuil, 2008) was published by Nissos Publications in 2019. Currently, he is working on the relation between law, violence and justice in Derrida and Benjamin, as well as on philosophical theories of tragedy and performance. He is also co-editing a volume titled Performing Space, forthcoming in 2023.
Contemporary European Philosophy, Moral and Political Philosophy, Hermeneutics (Ricoeur, Gadamer, Heidegger), Deconstruction (Derrida), Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), Critical Theory (Benjamin), Social Philosophy and Theory, Ancient Greek Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Philosophy of Literature and Art, European Aesthetics, Critical and Literary Theory, English Literature, History of European Literature, Psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), Structuralist Linguistics, Post-structuralism, Post-modernism.