A lethal power has tried to saturate the world, to absorb all forms of existence, the whole potentiality of life, to consume it, to seize the all: it has tried to take the place of Pan.

The false Pan has now got in trouble. He is in suspension.

The Great Pan is back: Pan mortuus non est.

The cloud isn’t a mysterious script (as Theophrastus believes), a hieroglyph, an ideogram in the open book of the sky. The book of celestial omens, the alphabet of paranoiacs, of necessity, fate and determinism, has been outlined by the Chaldean readers ever since the first Morning Star lit up the night of reason. But no, ...

The comet is an enigma. It comes from the spaces beyond the bounds of the world, it brings serene peace and joy.

We are immortal enough to never again run into the arrogance of life. We are dead enough to leap across any grave. We are proud enough to overcome all vanity of desire.

We are the doubles.

Yes, the philiosopher must roam along boundaries: the one who swerves off the beaten track and away from the tamed sea-waves, the one who in the end diverts the course of the world, this diversion is the only possible trajectory of the world that cannot persist without taking the risk of diverting itself, of going ...

The bodies of gods, do they burn?

This blog is an experimental philosophical laboratory of Boyan Manchev.

Is nature an artist? Is creation peculiar to stars, metals, fire? What does the stone imagine? What does the cloud want?

Moving away from poeticising that has been divested of its creative power, Magia Naturalis will take on these questions, in all seriousness and on the level of their eccentricity, in order to elevate them to ...

Magia Naturalis is the new library of the New Athanor: Boyan Manchev’s experimental laboratory for philosophical fantastic.

It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an ...

The word pandemic derives from the name of god Pan. Pan means all: Πάν = παντός.

In the middle of the sultry summer day, at the seemingly dullest of noontide moments, when time follows its usual course as if nothing could ever break it, when danger is out of mind, then all of a sudden its course somehow comes to a standstill: time stops running.

The rupture of time becomes a rupture of the ‘inner sense’, a rupture of ‘subjectivity’. The paralysis of reflection, of ‘one’s self’, reveals ‘one’s self’ as a lapsing into the infinite moment of selfness. The self becomes Legion.

Suspension, Time

Panic is suspension. But suspension is not a mystical rupture, it is not a vertical axis of time, an apocalypse. Suspension is a turnover. It is the turnover of what is forthcoming. Panic is the very forthcoming of nature.

Panic is an affect of what is forthcoming, of what is ...

Panic is suspension. But suspension is not a mystical rupture, it is not a vertical axis of time, an apocalypse. Suspension is a turnover. It is the turnover of what is forthcoming. Panic is the very forthcoming of nature.

In Le jeu des possibles, François Jacob describes the emergence of the new as the consequence of chance, which imposes a ‘bricolage’ and therefore a retroactive selection, thus ensuring a possibility for the counter-final organization of finality, as well as the creation of a metacausal situation as a proto-form of decision: ‘It ...

Hell is about obsession. Actually, what takes place on the road to Hell is the gradual surfacing, through organ cavities, through skin pores, of a new unknown body, an unknown creature.

It is the season when the most scorching region of the heavens takes over the land and the keen dog-star Sirius, so often struck by Hyperion’s sun, burns the gasping fields.

Sirius is rising.

After fifty seasons under Sirius the Scorcher, 25 of them under the sign of Saturn the Philosopher, I never thought the white and black star could set a figure together.

Two streams shoot out of the stone, the stream of life and the stream of death. Shadow and light shine from the stone, bow and bow, cannon and cannon. The name of the bow is life, but its deed is death. The name of the bow is stone, one of its deeds is life, the ...

On this day, May ***, 1945, at the very end of World War II, a few days after the fall of Berlin and on the eve of Nazi Germany’s surrender, during an unexplained fire in Flakturm Friedrichshain, a concrete air-defense tower built in 1941 by the national-socialists in the Berlin park Friedrichshain, part of the ...

The stone of freedom shattered the glass of the Human.

Every beam of space is tightened into a knot of time, every fiber – into a stitch. A spider-orifice, this hole in the belly whence time passes through. We are the dis-paired, the paired children of time, our cobweb is the insect-star dissemination, our vice is the section of the event. There, under the meteor ...

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 ...

The New Athanor is a laboratory of the Philosophical Fantastic. It 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.
The stake of the Philosophical Fantastic’s ...

Time vs Weather

Let us presuppose the existence of two species of times, which are in any case separated by language (at least in some languages, while in others they coincide significantly): tempo and tempo, temps and temps, време and време, das Wetter and die Zeit, weather and time.

The first one, time, is vectoral and linear, ...

What is philosophy?
In order to face such an infinite question, we need courage; or, even more so, a philosophical hubris. Let us evoke two companions who were amongst the first and most audacious of philosophers: Anaximander and Heraclitus.

The Creator is not gone. Let us quit the apophatic mysticism of the God gone missing, of the gods in retirement. We know no less than Hölderlin and all the delirious patients in the waiting-room of the Messiah that the gods who have retired may fancy coming back. No, the creator never chanced ...

It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an ...

If during the reign of Emperor Tiberius superstitious sailors spread throughout the empire the rumor that the Great God Pan was dead, and if this rumor was furthermore found to be an unconditional truth for two millennia, today the Great God Pan shuts the mouths of liars by his own hand. Today Pan returns.

Meteorology is the truest descendant of both alchemy, the science dealing with the transformations of the elements and their immanent figures that manifest the pro-conceptual potentiality of cosmological processes, and magic, which modulates the course of time, i.e. anticipates the future by means of material and structural transformative interventions.

The subject is a super-machine that produces complex time. The subject is the technique, with which complex time arrives into the world. The cloud, the galaxies, the gases – the subject is all of these. A/the subject knows them as a subject. The forces reinforce themselves even when they annihilate one another. The thinking reed ...

For seven years now, I am teaching for three weeks during the summer sessions of Dance M.F.A. program of Hollins University, taking place in Frankfurt and Berlin. These are the days of summer heat under the sign of Sirius, days, in which I was usually, or unusually, experiencing freedom in another realm. At the beginning, ...

The front: an ontological erogenous surface. An erogenous surface of the event.

The element that envelops, that is a front, not a resisting body but the very resistance of the sensual pleasure that overwhelms, exposes, an ultra-erotic front of the total – and minimal – “incorporeal” – caress.

The cloud as an incorporeal body-front.

The Weather Witches, they smoke through us, they smoke like the axis of time. See them wrap their black manes in the sky, ride the fire-breathing cats, see them orb the matter of the night, the flesh of the cloud, see these heavy etheric bodies, these irresistible, irreversible, unbelievable substances.