Boyan Manchev
LOGIC OF THE POLITICAL
(In Bulgarian)
Original title:
ЛОГИКА НА ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОТО
Sofia: Iztok-Zapad, Series: Critical Studies, 2012, 303 p.
Graphic design: Georgi Sharov
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The current task of political philosophy, in a situation of radical and possibly irreversible crisis of contemporary political models, is to provide the possibility for fair common co-existence of a multitude of newly emerged (political) subjects. The necessary pre-condition for the realisation of this task is: to preserve the idea of deconstructing the modern notion of subject through the concept of persistence of the subject in the world’s metamorphosis as such. It is high time for a re-subjectification of the political: a time for renouncing the repressive patterns, imposing upon us all a kind of convertible quasi-subjectivity, originally subjected to regimes of power. Therefore, the main practical issue facing philosophical reflection, which, despite everything, insists on being an active agent of the world, is the following one: how is this change to be accomplished?
Logic of the Political attempts to respond to this question through a genuine theoretical proposition based on the political hermeneutics of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and polemical interpretations of crucial texts of modern political philosophy. The identified initial political structures, formed within the classical Greek polis, are brought to bear on the current transformation of basic political categories such as sovereignty, power, violence, resistance, political subject and political community. The possibility for their reconceptualisation as critical agents of the liberation of political subjects outlines the utopian horizon of Boyan Manchev’s Logic of the Political.