The Nature that Comes, or the Return of Pan

Boyan Manchev's Blog

The Nature that Comes, or the Return of Pan

Lecture and Seminar Series, May-June 2020

Studium Generale, Universität der Künste Berlin

(Addendum April 2020:

The ‘pre-pandemic’ planning of my seminar included as its last topic the figurative analysis of an enigmatic Renaissance painting, a painting that only persists as a ghostly presence today: Luca Signorelli’s fascinating The School of Pan (c. 1490), which was lost in a fire in Berlin precisely 75 years ago, in May 1945.

Strangely, under the conditions that our lecture series will take place, this proposal acquires a highly symbolic value. Beyond the ancient folk-etymological equation of Pan’s name [Πάν] with the Greek word for ‘all’ [πᾶς, παντός] – a root we meet in many common words, such as pandemic, this work has a deeper connection to what we experience today. Pan, the Great God of Nature – nature itself, impels us to reflect on our present condition beyond its ordinary measure. We have to imagine new concepts of nature in order to face nature anew: not only as the universal object of thought, but also as subject of ‘our’ thought: not as what we think, not even as what makes us think, but also as what is thinking us.

We need to reopen the School of Pan).

Our starting questions: Is there freedom in nature? Is freedom the origin of nature? Or is it its future?

The experimental task of the lecture and seminar series is to test the hypothesis that the philosophy of nature, in order to catch up with the frenetic rhythm of science and nature itself, requires a turn towards the fantastic. In order to face up to the future of nature, philosophy must venture on a fantastic journey and become a philosophy of the fantastic, and even more: a philosophical fantastic. The oblivion of art is as much pernicious to the philosophy of nature, as the lack of sensibility to nature is fatal to the philosophy of art.

The four sections of the lecture and seminar series will correspond to its four conceptual phases.

In the first phase, I will make an overview of the concept of nature, from its origins in Greek philosophy until Modern times, laying special emphasis on the Aristotelean notion of poiesis (creation, material production, fabrication), through which I will establish the connection to the philosophy of art. I will focus on several Renaissance ideas of the poietic nature in Cusanus, Ficino, Bruno, but also in Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, showing that Renaissance ideas of art are deeply rooted in this concept.

The second phase will be dealing with the emergence of the modern scientific notion of nature and the gradual marginalisation of the concept of poiesis, being replaced by the new ideas of universal natural laws from Bacon, Boyle and Newton to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. I will tackle the internal ambiguity of the modern scientific paradigm, revealing within it the persistence of quasi-magic and poetic ideas (from the alchemical writings of Newton to the Helmontian or even Kabbalistic origin of the Leibnizian concept of the monad).    

In the third block, I will focus on David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s crucial contribution to the philosophical universalisation of the idea of nature, as well as on the antinomic instrumentalisation of their respective positions in the contemporary debate on nature. While major trends of contemporary philosophy and anthropology proudly assume an anti-Kantian turn, I embrace a ‘super-Kantian’ position. We need to move beyond the critical Kantian opposition between nature and freedom, and imagine freedom as immanence of nature itself. If we must persist alongside Kant beyond Kant, we must then persist alongside the fundamental question of critical philosophy, the question of philosophy itself: the question of freedom.

The planned fourth section, dealing with Luca Signorelli’s School of Pan (the painting’s title is uncertain), will provide common horizon and experimental frame for the lecture series, as well as focal point for their conclusion.

THE NEW ATHANOR

Photo: Boryana Pandova

Boyan Manchev

THE NEW ATHANOR. PRINCIPLES OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL FANTASTIC

(In Bulgarian)

Original title:

НОВИЯТ АТАНОР. НАЧАЛА НА ФИЛОСОФСКАТА ФАНТАСТИКА

Sofia: Metheor, 2019/2020

The New Athanor is in the strict sense volume one of Boyan Manchev’s book series ‘Philosophical Fantastic’, yet it also provides the figure of its unity: Athanor, the philosophical furnace, synthesising new concepts and ontological techniques.  

The stake of The New Athanor is a prolegomenary one. It deals with imagining the horizon of a forthcoming philosophy of nature. To face up to this challenge, The New Athanor opens with the question of the principles, thus drawing on the elementary power of philosophical concepts. It aims at mobilising conceptual counter-techniques as an alter-ontological force, in order to imagine differently the philosophical becoming-world of the world.

The New Athanor includes the Prologue ‘Principles of the Philosophical Fantastic’, followed by the first five books of the ‘Philosophical Fantastic’: ‘The Perils of Philosophy’, ‘Apeiron, the Boundless’, ‘Fire’, ‘Chaos’ and ‘Chaos Unbound’. The dynamic trajectory of the five books draws the outlines of challenging conceptions about time and causality, readjusting the compass of the subject in the high seas of the world. Will the helmsman of the incoming ship be the one who first embarked on the quest? Is this the same ship? Is this the same world?

The New Athanor is a methodological experiment where the philosophical quest engages in a shared adventure of concepts, theories and hypotheses from the domain of modern science, while at the same time mobilizes the latent potential of mythological and fantastic figures. Anaximander, Heraclitus and Aristotle encounter Chaos, Kronos and Aphrodite, and all of them join with Boltzmann, Prigogine and Atlan.

The New Athanor is a laboratory of the Philosophical Fantastic. The Philosophical Fantastic is not a hybrid genre, it is no mixture of philosophy and the fantastic. It is an experiment with the very form of philosophy: an experiment with new possibilities of articulating the philosophical form. The Philosophical Fantastic is an act of philosophy in the mode of desire. It yearns the invention of the New Athanor

* Athanor, a fragment from the book by Heinrich Khunrath Truthful Report Concerning the Philosophical Athanor, Its Use and Effectiveness (Warhafftiger Bericht Von Philosophischen Athanor, Und Dessen Gebrauch Und Nutzen [Magdeburg: Johan Botcher, 1597]). Engraved frontispiece (signed Hein. Muller) on the title page of the Leipzig edition (1783).

Athanor – the philosophical furnace (from Arabic at-tannūr [رونتلا], ‘furnace’, ‘kiln’, ‘tandoor’, ‘a baker’s oven’, ‘hot spring’), is an alchemical device for maintaining a constant temperature required for the process of alchemical transformation of substance, its crystallization as lapis philosophorum, a philosopher’s stone.

The New Athanor is the philosophical furnace of images, which must synthesize pure concepts, the matter of the philosopher’s stone, of the philosophical crystal. Alchemy of the philosophical image, nuclear acceleration of philosophy. 

Nowadays, when thinking and imagination are being constrained no less than bodies, the Philosophical Fantastic sets the goal of inflaming imagination and thinking, of imagining new possible worlds. It restores to philosophy the task of being an active force in the world, and to the world – of discovering its fantastic pith. 

Boyan Manchev has been working single-mindedly on the project of a Philosophical Fantastic during the past ten years. The trajectory of this experimental methodology includes the books Miracolo, [Miracle] (2011) and Clouds (2017); the method was already outlined in The Unimaginable (2003) and L’altération du monde, [The Alteration of the World] (2009).

DARK POEM

Dark Poem
Design: Boyan Manchev and Boryana Pandova. Photography: Boryana Pandova
Typeface: Quasimoda by lettersoup

DARK POEM

Sofia: Metheor, 2020

Translated from the Bulgarian by Philip Stoilov

Photography: Boryana Pandova

Graphic design: Boyan Manchev, Boryana Pandova and eMetheor

36 pages, including 14 black and white Photos

Boyan Manchev’s theatrical-philosophical poem is organically related to photographs by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem extends Boyan Manchev’s philosophy of body by experimental means, juxtaposing text, image and movement.

The book is the result of experimental work on staged actions and situations with the participation of the actor Leonid Yovchev and Boyan Manchev, related to Metheor ’s performance Hijikata and His Double (2019). Dark Poem is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary founder of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts. It was inspired by Butoh-fu [舞踏譜], an experimental form of notation invented by Hijikata, as well as by Eikoh Hosoe’s photographic series Kamaitachi, with the participation of Tatsumi Hijikata (1969).

Half a century after Hijikata’s scandalous performance Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people (1969), Dark Poem puts forward the question on the possibility of the (artistic) revolution.

“Together with Tatsumi Hijikata, we raise the question of the rebellion of the body. What does body rebellion of the body mean? We are interested in the way the body always exceeds itself. Life always stands out. The body always stands out: in ecstasy and pain, in birth and in death.” 

Boyan Manchev

New Bodies

I, Hijikata Tatsumi, address the people today.
I release my infant warriors. I will not perfrom seppuku, but I will cut off one hundred thousand heads. 

No, I will not cut off one hundred thousand heads, but I will assemble one hundred thousand new bodies. An army of excess. New bodies, a new raw titanic race, a race of football players unmarked by an X-spot, a new anatomy, new organs,
a new gender, a new star. 

My infant football players, my mud-spattered criminals, we will glue together new bodies with mud and slime and loose veins. We will use the loose tongues of the veins to connect the knee joints, while the heels will pass through the ear canals, we will flow into our own veins in reverse, and the violent wind of the North will ventilate the brain folds in our lungs. This is how bodies dance upside down. This is how the small suns of the atom scatter like new constellations, galaxies, universes in our placenta, in our protein soup, in our boneless cosmos.

HIJIKATA AND HIS DOUBLE

Hijikata and His Double

HIJIKATA AND HIS DOUBLE

Work in progress by METHEOR

Concept, staging and dramaturgy: Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev

Consultants: Futoshi Hoshino and Yasuo Kobayashi

Visual artist: Stefan Donchev

with: Leonid Yovchev, Boyan Manchev and Futoshi Hoshino

The premiere took place at the State Puppet Theater, Plovdiv, on 20 September 2019.

Hijikata and his Double premiered in Sofia on 30 October 2019 at the Culture Centre of Sofia University and on 31 October 2019 at the Cinema House. It will be presented in Tokyo at the University of Tokyo’s East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts (EAA) on 1 December 2019.

Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev gave the introductory lecture Radical Experience and Performative Counter-Techniques: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Beginning of Butoh on 30 October 2019 at the Cultural Centre of Sofia University.

Hijikata and his Double was accompanied by the publication of the book Dark Poem by Boyan Manchev, with photographies by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem was presented in the frame of the Sofia premiere of Hijikata and his Double on 30 and 31 October 2019.

Hijikata and his Double is part of the program of Plovdiv 2019 – European Capital of Culture, Focus: Japanese Culture Programme, implemented in partnership with the EU-Japan Fest Foundation. The project received additional support by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, and was accomplished in partnership with the Cultural Centre of Sofia University, Cinema House, Etude Gallery and HaHaHa Impro Theater.

* * *

Hijikata and his Double is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary founder of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts, half a century after the premiere of the cult and scandalous performance of Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people.

Tatsumi Hijikata introduces entirely new body techniques and possibilities for the language, based on Antonin Artaud’s visions of a Theater of Cruelty. Metheor has worked in a similar direction over the last decade: the engagement with radical artistic practices understood as exploration of the possibilities (and limits) of the body, language, theatrical techniques as well as forms of existence, has been shared with Hijikata.

Hijikata and His Double

The concept, staging and dramaturgy of the performance are the collective work of Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev (Metheor). Leonid Yovchev’s solo work is combined with a performance-lecture by Boyan Manchev with the participation of Leonid Yovchev and Futoshi Hoshino, a consultant of the show, together with the philosopher Yasuo Kobayashi.

* * *

Who is Tatsumi Hijikata? Who is his Double?

Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is one of the most radical figures in the field of the performing arts in the second half of the last century, the founder of a new stage form known as Butoh: more precisely, ankoku butoh: the dark Butoh, or literally, the dark dance. Hijikata tried to unlock the potential of the human body as an expressive instrument, going beyond normal performance techniques and even beyond the general patterns of body movement as such. More than half a century has passed since the first Butoh spectacle. During that half a century, Butoh was aesthetized as a somewhat macabre, somewhat didactically beautiful spectacular dance form, and Hijikata has progressively become a cult figure in the performing arts scene. Yet too little is known about his early programatic works, from which only fragmentary frames and documentation are preserved. Therefore, the starting point of this spectacle will be the attempt for a fantastic reconstruction of one of the key butoh performances, created half a century ago: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese people. This fantastic re-enactment will also engage in a story about the life and iconoclastic work of the Hijikata; Hijikata’s Double will also roam in it.

Who is Hijikata’s Double?

His Double is first of all, Yuneama Kunio – the person, who later on became Hijikata Tatsumi, adopting the name of a legendary rebellious samurai from the 19th century, being in the meantime Hijikata Genet, after the name of the French writer Jean Genet. His double is therefore also Jean Genet. But also Yukio Mishima. But he is also the weirdest and queerest of the decadent Roman emperors, Heliogabalus, the crowned anarchist. Furthermore, his Double is even the Japanese People. Last but not least, Hijikata Tatsumi’s Double is, perhaps, the Bulgarian actor Leonid Yovchev.

This spectacle is dedicated to the reasons, the patterns and the flamboyant eccentricity and insanity of these weird transformations.

It will frontally ask the question: What is a Rebellion of the Body? What is a radical experience? What is radical Art? Is radical Art still possible?

This spectacle is the first sequence of the series of philosophical-performative laboratory dedicated to the work and life of Tatsumi Hijikata, half century after his legendary spectacle Tatsumi Hijikata and the Japanese People.

Hijikata and His Double

DARK POEM

Front cover of Dark poem, photography: Boryana Pandova
Photo: Boryana Pandova

Boyan Manchev

DARK POEM

(In English and in Bulgarian)

Translated in English by Philip Stoilov

Sofia: Metheor, 2019

*

36 pages, including 14 black and white photos

Text: Boyan Manchev
Photography: Boryana Pandova
With: Leonid Yovchev and Boyan Manchev
Graphic Design: Boyan Manchev, Boryana Pandova and eMetheor
Typeface: Quasimoda by Lettersoup, courtesy of Botio Nikoltchev

Boyan Manchev’s theatrical-philosophical poem is organically related to photographs by Boryana Pandova. Dark Poem extends Boyan Manchev’s philosophy of body by experimental means, juxtaposing text, image and movement.

The book is the result of experimental work on staged actions and situations with the participation of the actor Leonid Yovchev and Boyan Manchev, related to Metheor ’s performance Hijikata and His Double (2019). Dark Poem is dedicated to Tatsumi Hijikata, the legendary founder of Butoh – a radical Japanese dance form, which played a crucial part in the history of contemporary performing arts. It was inspired by Butoh-fu [舞踏譜], an experimental form of notation invented by Hijikata, as well as by Eikoh Hosoe’s photographic series Kamaitachi, with the participation of Tatsumi Hijikata (1969).

Half a century after Hijikata’s scandalous performance Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese people (1969), Dark Poem puts forward the question on the possibility of the (artistic) revolution.

“Together with Tatsumi Hijikata, we raise the question of the rebellion of the body. What does body rebellion of the body mean? We are interested in the way the body always exceeds itself. Life always stands out. The body always stands out: in ecstasy and pain, in birth and in death.” 

Boyan Manchev

*

New Bodies

I, Hijikata Tatsumi, address the people today.
I release my infant warriors. I will not perfrom seppuku, but I will cut off one hundred thousand heads. 

No, I will not cut off one hundred thousand heads, but I will assemble one hundred thousand new bodies. An army of excess. New bodies, a new raw titanic race, a race of football players unmarked by an X-spot, a new anatomy, new organs,
a new gender, a new star. 

My infant football players, my mud-spattered criminals, we will glue together new bodies with mud and slime and loose veins. We will use the loose tongues of the veins to connect the knee joints, while the heels will pass through the ear canals, we will flow into our own veins in reverse, and the violent wind of the North will ventilate the brain folds in our lungs. This is how bodies dance upside down. This is how the small suns of the atom scatter like new constellations, galaxies, universes in our placenta, in our protein soup, in our boneless cosmos.

CLOUDS. PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE BODY

Boyan Manchev

CLOUDS. PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE BODY

Translated from the Bulgarian by Katerina Popova

Sofia: Metheor, 2019

Originally published in Bulgarian:

ОБЛАЦИ. ФИЛОСОФИЯ НА СВОБОДНОТО ТЯЛО

Sofia: Metheor, 2017

*

Philosophy is in debt to poetry. But it is also in debt to science, whose poetic attitude philosophy has ceased to understand. Philosophy is in debt to the creative power of nature itself, and therefore to freedom. Philosophy must think what makes it possible; only then will it reopen its possibility.

Therefore: the clouds.

Besides being a difficult, if not paradoxical, object of science or figure of representation, or a privileged poetic image, could clouds also be a philosophical concept? Yes, is the answer of philosophical fantastics –

the method introduced by the book Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body. Yes, because every concept is a cloud. The cloud is a form that thinks.

Neither a Hyperborean nor a white horseman, the cloud is an enigma which, before being thought, thinks us.

Excerpts:

The cloud is a form that thinks. New philosophy means a new form. That is why the book about clouds, the cloudy book, is also a prolegomenon to a new philosophy of form. 

Ontology of the Cloud 

The cloud is a more solid foundation for ontology than any other element. Anaximander knows that crossing the boundless inevitably leads to an area eternally shrouded in clouds. The boundary is a cloudy space, condensed space. There, time bends and warps. 

Anaximander walked in our footsteps. He rode our waves. He drank of our breath, encountering our cloud, our mist that soaked the sea, pale-pink swirls rolling along its shimmering surface at dawn, accompanied by the hollow murmur of the dark water, by the silence of the gloomy depths. The unknown and the frightening visit us in these liminal spaces, in these spectral places. The ship sails on, every breath abates, as though air slides on air, there’s no momentum, no acceleration, nor is there inertia without a force. When the mist clears, what will we see there?

https://desorganisation.org/en/books/clouds-philosophy-of-the-free-body-by-boyan-manchev-en.html

METEOR. SELECTED TEXTS FOR THEATRE

Photography: Boryana Pandova

Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev

METEOR. SELECTED TEXTS FOR THEATRE

(In Bulgarian)

Original title:

МЕТЕОР. ИЗБРАНИ ТЕАТРАЛНИ ТЕКСТОВЕ

Sofia: Metheor, 2018

Graphic design: Teodora Venedikova

The book Meteor. Selected Texts for Theatre presents Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev’s texts, related to their joint theatrical work within Metheor – a group of artistic accomplices who work with theatrical, visual and experimental theoretical forms, developing their radical poetics. Together with the actor Leonid Yovchev, who participated in most of the stagings of the texts included in the book, the authors are the driving force of Metheor.

The book collects all the texts of Metheor’s performances written by Vaseva and Manchev, among which A Dying Play, Sick, Frankenstein, Phaeton: Miscreants, A Play for You, Lovеcraft, Roadtrip to Hell. The book also includes two not staged texts, The Stone and Bacchae, as well as Miscreants: A Manifesto for a Non-human Theatre. The three thematic nuclei – The New Body, Miscreants and The Irreparable, around which the texts are organised, correspond to the passions in which Metheor persists over the last decade: imagining of new, unimaginable (artistic, political, existential) techniques; from there – the metamorphosis of the body and the subject, the formless figure of the monster – a disturbing but exciting form of life with inhuman sex-appeal, the (ir)reversibility of time.​* * *

About Metheor

Metheor is a group of artistic accomplices who work with stage, visual and textual artistic and critical forms, consistently building their radical poetics. The central figures of Metheor during its ten-year history include Ani Vaseva (author, director, theorist, costume designer and stage designer), Boyan Manchev (author, playwright, theoretician) and Leonid Yovchev (actor, co-author). Metheor’s projects are determined by the group and interpreters of its work as “Theatre of disorganization”, “non-human Theatre” and “Theatre oratorio” and are based on a “strong idea” of ​​Theatre. Each Metheor performance strives to invent a unique form based on experimental work on the text and productive critical use of theatrical techniques, leading to elaboration of system of counter-techniques.

https://desorganisation.org/en/books/meteor-selected-texts-for-theatre-by-ani-vaseva-and-boyan-manchev.html

KOBAYASHI, THE COMING PHILOSOPHY. RETURN TO SOPHIA

Boyan Manchev with Yasuo Kobayashi
Photography: Boris Delchev

At the invitation of Boyan Manchev and the Department of Art Studies and History of Culture of New Bulgarian University, the Japanese philosopher Yasuo Kobayashi visited Bulgaria for the second time to deliver a lecture on The Coming Philosophy. Return to Sophia [La philosophie à venir. Retour à Sophia]. The lecture took place on February 12, 2018, Monday, from 2 pm to 4 hours at the UniArt Gallery, NBU.

See the lecture

The lecture was also the first event of the series related to the 10th anniversary and the premiere of the new editions of Metheor.

More here

Prof. Yasuo Kobayashi is one of the most influential contemporary Japanese philosophers, founder and long-time director of University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP). He is the author of numerous books in the fields of philosophy of art and political philosophy, cultural theory and the history of modernity. Among his latest works are La cœur / la mort : De l’ana-chronisme de l’être (2007); Odyssey of Knowledge (2009); Deconstruction of History (2010); The Aporia of the Heart: Between Happiness and Death (2013); The World of Miquel Barceló: Form as Life / Matter and Violence (2013). He is one of the leading intermediaries between European and, in particular, contemporary French philosophy and Japanese culture.

The co-operation of Yasuo Kobayashi with Boyan Manchev

The collaboration of philosophers Yasuo Kobayashi and Boyan Manchev began 10 years ago in Paris during Manchev’s direction of program and vice-presidency of the International College of Philosophy (CIPh). The first joint lecture and public talk of Manchev and Kobayashi took place in Tokyo in 2010 at the invitation of Yuji Nishiyama, at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo. Their first meeting in Sofia, in the framework of the forum Metamorphosis and Catastrophe (2013), conceived and organised by Kobayashi and Manchev, was carried out with the cooperation of Darin Tenev. Kobayashi is particularly well-known among the Bulgarian cultural and academic community as a spontaneous inspiration for the student movement in 2013 after his address to the General Assembly of the Students’ Occupation of the Sofia University in November 2013.

More here

The first Japanese-Bulgarian philosophical forum gave impetus to a series of seven forums held in Sofia and Tokyo, including co-organized by younger Bulgarian and Japanese philosophers and literary scholars, most of whom former students of Kobayashi and Manchev, including Fuchoshi Hoshino, Koichiro Kokubun, Yuji Nishiyama, Darin Tenev, Kamelia Spassova, Dimitar Bojkov, Bozhana Filipova and Vassil Markov. The last two forums The Imagination of Philosophy and The Philosophy and Its Other were organized by Futushi Hoshino and Boyan Manchev in partnership with Metheor and NBU at the New Bulgarian University and Theatre College Liuben Groys.

At the same time, Kobayashi and Manchev’s direct co-operation takes place in other contexts, such as the gathering in the Cultural Center La Tourette in France, organised by Kobayashi dedicated to the question of the Sense of the World (2014). The two philosophers exchanged a series of texts, and Kobayashi’s poem “Cloud Night” is included in the stage performance of Manchev’s book Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body in Sofia and Plovdiv, with the participation of the young Japanese philosopher, a central figure of the Bulgarian-Japanese philosophical exchange, Futoshi Hoshino and the actors of Metheor under the direction of Ani Vaseva.

After their next meeting in Tokyo in the Spring of 2017, Kobayashi organised in November 2017 Boyan Manchev’s lecture Light, Clouds. Philosophical Piracy and the Invention of Apeiron at the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (2017).

(Press Release of NBU and Meteor)

PREMIERE: METEOR. SELECTED TEXTS FOR THEATRE

Metheores
“Roadtrip to Hell”, photography: Svoboda Tsekova

The premiere of Meteor. Selected Texts for Theatre took place on 16 February 2018 at the House of Cinema, Sofia, in partnership with the Goethe-institut Bulgaria.

The book was presented by Ani Vaseva – director and author of the texts, Boyan Manchev – philosopher, playwright and co-author and Dirk Cieslak – director and Theatre activist, founder of Vierte Welt, iconic space for artistic and critical practices, Berlin, Germany. With the participation of Leonid Yovchev, Galya Kostadinova and students from Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev’s class, Theatre College Liuben Groys.

The book premiere was the culmination of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Metheor – the group that started functioning with the collaboration of the two authors of the piece Svidrigailov precisely 10 years ago. In the last decade, Ani Vaseva has made 13 performances with Metheor, nine of which based on Vaseva and Manchev’s texts, and three in co-authorship. Six of the performances are still being performed today; in all of them the third central member of Metheor Leonid Yovchev is taking part. The events of the 10th anniversary celebration are united in an intensive program, including a Theatre marathon of the current performances, meetings and conversations with guests from abroad.

See more

Meteor. Selected Texts for Theatre

The book Meteor. Selected Texts for Theatre presents Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev’s texts, related to their joint theatrical work within Metheor – a group of artistic accomplices who work with theatrical, visual and experimental theoretical forms, developing their radical poetics. Together with the actor Leonid Yovchev, who participated in most of the stagings of the texts included in the book, the authors are the driving force of Metheor.

The book collects all the texts of Metheor’s performances written by Vaseva and Manchev, among which A Dying Play, Sick, Frankenstein, Phaeton: Miscreants, A Play for You, Lovеcraft, Roadtrip to Hell. The book also includes two not staged texts, The Stone and Bacchae, as well as Miscreants: A Manifesto for a Non-human Theatre. The three thematic nuclei – The New Body, Miscreants and The Irreparable, around which the texts are organised, correspond to the passions in which Metheor persists over the last decade: imagining of new, unimaginable (artistic, political, existential) techniques; from there – the metamorphosis of the body and the subject, the formless figure of the monster – a disturbing but exciting form of life with inhuman sex-appeal, the (ir)reversibility of time.

About Metheor

Metheor is a group of artistic accomplices who work with stage, visual and textual artistic and critical forms, consistently building their radical poetics. The central figures of Metheor during its ten-year history include Ani Vaseva (author, director, theorist, costume designer and stage designer), Boyan Manchev (author, playwright, theoretician) and Leonid Yovchev (actor, co-author). Metheor’s projects are determined by the group and interpreters of its work as “Theatre of disorganization”, “non-human Theatre” and “Theatre oratorio” and are based on a “strong idea” of ​​Theatre. Each Metheor performance strives to invent a unique form based on experimental work on the text and productive critical use of theatrical techniques, leading to elaboration of system of counter-techniques.

LOGIC OF THE POLITICAL

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

*

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.    

OUT OF TIME

Boyan Manchev

OUT OF TIME

Publication on the occasion of the exhibition Out of Time (По никое време) curated by Boyan Manchev in the series “The Other Eye”, Sofia City Gallery, 1 March – 3 April 2011.

What stands out in this collection, built over the last sixty years, are dominant themes and associative lines such as the relationship between work and leisure, fatigue and rest; the relationship between everyday and holiday (where holiday signifies the transition from private to public or, conversely, the reduction of public to private); the image of nature, intimate, ”domesticated” by human presence. Through those themes one may identify a series of organizing oppositions: private/public, everyday/holiday, human/inhuman, coercion/freedom, ideological utopia/idyllic utopia.

The exhibition Out of Time attempts to examine precisely this imagery – and precisely these images, exploring their enigmatic energy and focusing on the variations and shifts in the repetition, accumulation and dynamics that organize the images in a way that is different from the historical narratives concerning what paintings represent and why they were made, as well as from the immanently historical narratives of the history of art which examine, in their turn, how paintings represent and how they are made. Instead, we are interested in the matter of these images, in their dynamics over time. Over a time that is out of time.

THE BODY-METAMORPHOSIS

Boyan Manchev

THE BODY-METAMORPHOSIS

(In Bulgarian)

Original title:

ТЯЛОТО-МЕТАМОРФОЗА

Sofia: Altera, 2007, 245 p.

Graphic design: Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova

THE UNIMAGINABLE

Boyan Manchev

THE UNIMAGINABLE. ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY OF IMAGE

(In Bulgarian)

Original title:

НЕВЪОБРАЗИМОТО. ОПИТИ ПО ФИЛОСОФИЯ НА ОБРАЗА

Sofia: New Bulgarian University Press, 2003