Boyan Manchev, Seminar at CARPA4, Helsinki

CARPA4

The Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts CARPA4 brought together 70 experts in their fields from 13 different countries to the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki on 10 – 13 June, 2015. Colloquiums theme was The Non-Human and the Inhuman in Performing Arts – Bodies, Organisms and Objects in Conflict.

CARPA4 observed critically anthropocentrism in performing arts and wondered the meaning of objects and non-human extent in arts and artistic research. The theme was approached from different perspectives by the colloquium’s keynote speakers Professors Peta Tait, Timothy Morton, and Boyan Manchev.

CARPA is a biennual international colloquium that focuses on performance art and artistic research. The colloquium is organised by the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke) of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Proceedings of CARPA4, including articles from the accepted presentations, will be published in NIVEL – an open access web publication, by December 2015. We are happy to include different types of papers, presentations and workshop reports including images, video and audio clips in these proceedings of the colloquium.

CARPA4 was supported by Tieteellisten seurain valtuuskunta / Federation of Finnish Learned Societies.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

● Professor Peta Tait FAHA, La Trobe University, Australia

● Professor Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA

● Professor Boyan Manchev, New Bulgarian University
Program for Inhuman Theater, or The Monstrous Desire of the Things

Manuscripts and Philosophical Wagers

By invitation of the Sofia Literary Theory Seminar on June 20 2015 Beata Stawarska gave a talk on some unexpected alliances between Saussure and Kristeva. The talk presented a continuation of the re-evaluation of Saussure’s legacy carried out in Stawarska’s book Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology. In the talk, as in her book, Stawarska re-examines in a radical way the philosophical implications of Saussure’s work whose (mis)conception has shaped almost any aspect of 20^th century humanities and, through the influential figure of the Swiss linguist, provides a fresh perspective on those thinkers who (beginning with Socrates) have been (re)constructed by their followers. Her arguments are based on the plentiful material which postdates the publication of the Course in General Linguistics and includes Saussure’s own manuscripts as well as the correspondence of his editors and students; but they also bring in the marginalized East European predecessors (Kazan School of Linguistics, Kruszewski), inheritors (The Prague Linguistic Circle) and, in general, “structuralism East and West,” thus offering an altogether different take on Saussure’s thought.