Alexandre Alves

Alexandre Alves (born September 29, 1974 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian History of ideas. In 2003, he concluded his doctoral thesis “Critique and Genealogy. The Reception of Nietzsche in Foucault´s Work” at the University of São Paulo. It is a rigorous and systematic account about Genealogy and its historical significance.

In this work, Alves argues that Genealogy inherits and transforms the Kantian critique of reason, converting it into cultural value criticism. Instead of submit the analysis of all the possible experience to a transcendental subject (as a non-historical fixed point), Genealogy abolish the privilege of the subject, searching the conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience in the contingency of history.


The intellectual project of Alves consists in searching a synthesis between the two main paradigms of the human sciences: the historical materialism and the post-structuralism.


Currently, he works on the research project “The Heroism of Modern Life. Individuality, culture and power in Stirner, Nietzsche and Baudelaire”, where he try to define the relations between aesthetization of individual life and resistance to the normalization society. The strategic point here is to undertake a genealogical history of anti-capitalist subjectivities, who can resist and "bend" or change the power relations.


His interests spread from the ancient stoicism and cynics to La Boétie and Montaigne, from the mystical and heretic groups in the Middle Ages to the modern socialist and anarchist currents, from the tactics of subversion of the 20th century avant-garde to the strategies of the Situationist International.