Boyan Manchev

Boyan Manchev is philosopher, Professor at the New Bulgarian University and at the Universität der Künste (Berlin), Guest Professor at the Hollins University and Sofia University. He is also former Director of Program and Vice-President of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. His actual research, which advances the perspective of a radical mobilism and materialism, is focused on the fields of ontology, philosophy of art and political philosophy. The ontological concept of metamorphosis, the ethical concept of disorganisation and the aesthetic concept of alteration are central for his transformationist approach.

Manchev has lectured widely at European, Asian and North-American universities and cultural institutions. He has organised and/or collaborated to number of projects, congresses and public forums dealing with philosophy, art and politics at the CIPh, EHESS, CNRS, Palais de Tokyo, CND (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Volksbühne, FU, NBK (Berlin), IWM, MUMOK, Tanzquartier (Vienna), ZKM (Karlsruhe), University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), Apexart, PS1, Columbia University, NYU (New York), BAK (Utrecht), among others.

He has debated and/or collaborated on different occasions with leading philosophers and cultural theorists from various generations; he has also participated as theorist, dramaturge or performer in theatre and contemporary dance projects, including Tim Etchells and Adrian Heathfield’s The Frequently Asked, Boris Charmatz’s expo zeroand Poster session “Mouvement” for the Festival d’Avignon and Ani Vaseva’s Frankensteinand A Dying Play. Manchev has curated the exhibition Out of Time at the Sofia City Art Gallery (March – April 2011).

Manchev is the author of seven books and more than hundred book chapters, catalogues and other publications in various languages. In the last years appeared Logic of the Political (Sofia: Critique&Humanism, 2012), Miracolo (Milano: Lanfranchi, 2011), L’altération du monde: Pour une esthétique radicale (Paris: Lignes, 2009); La Métamorphose et l’Instant – Désorganisation de la vie (Paris: La Phocide, 2009); Rue Descartes 64: La métamorphose, ed. by B. Manchev (Paris: PUF, 2009) ; Rue Descartes 67: Quel sujet du politique?, ed. by G. Basterra, R. Ivekovic and B. Manchev (Paris: PUF, 2010). His book The Body–Metamorphosis (Sofia: Altera, 2007) deals extensively with contemporary art, performance and dance.

Member of  the editorial committees of the magazines Lignes (Paris), Materiali Foucaultiani(Rome / Paris), Critique and Humanism (Sofia), Stasis (St. Petersburg),Transeuropéennes (Paris), Transeuropa (London), the research networkTerra (Paris) and the publishing house La Phocide (Paris / Strasbourg).

In the last two decades Manchev’s work is focused on ontology, philosophy of art and political philosophy. He is consistently developing the project of philosophy of metamorphosis, or modal ontology, in which central are ontological, modal, ethical and aesthetic categories like metamorphosis and alteration; matter, form and transformation; potentiality, force and energy; chaos and complexity; chance and necessity; disorganization and persistence; organic and inorganic (artificial, monstrous); technique, nature,thing, things and formless; possibility, desire and necessity; reality, efficiency and truth, articulated in relation to the attempt for proposing new possibilities of thinking the forms of world and life, of the subject and the body-subject, of the status of the philosophical idea and/or concept, of poiesis, image and narration, as well as of the political questions related to the categories of subject, community, struggle, change, decision, justice. The methods, defined as modal analysis, surcritique, illustration andphilosophical figurology or fantastique, are of special importance for his work.