Meteoropolitics

2018. Lecture

At first glance, Meteoropolitics appears as a contradictory term, to the extent that the two Greek words that are composing it seem to be in sharp semantic contrast. On the one hand, the notion of politics, deriving from polis, city, refers to the faculty of being together of human subjects, to the principles that are grounding their common (political) existence in the determinate space of the city. On the other hand - the science of the meteors, Meteora, Μετεωρολογικά, the science of the celestial phenomena, those that are rising up in the air (μετέωρος μετά + ἀείρω, ‘to lift’, ‘to raise up’), that tries to explore the indeterminate realm of natural phenomena, the impenetrable alphabet of the skies. However, the first remaining systematic treatises in both fields, belong to the same thinker, to the one that invented the ultimate tool of thought, the concept: Aristotle.

Hence, the realms of human praxis and of natural activities are connected, implicitly at least, by the same conceptual matter. Thus, I will try to take the challenge and to show that the principle of common existence should be approached beyond the domain of the human - in the indeterminate space of the phenomena, of their obscure and fascinating configurations, of the logic of events. Furthermore, I will claim that it is not possible to conceive of a possibility of common existence without facing its general economy, i.e. the economy not restricted to human deeds. Thus, a future Meteoropolitics has to stand for the general ethos of existence, the ethos of co-existence of the infinite number of its finite modi, the hordes of forms of existence.

Thus my argument will operate in the regime of what I call philosophical fantastic. I believe that Operaismo naturale is a project that needs and claims for philosophical fantastic; that it has the potential to contribute to and stimulate its poïetic dynamics.

Bio

Boyan Manchev is a philosopher and theatre author. His current research, which proposes the perspective of a radical materialism and dynamic ontology, is in the fields of ontology, philosophy of art and political philosophy. Manchev is the author of nine books and around two hundred book chapters, catalogues and other publications in twenty languages, among them: Meteor. Texts for Theatre (co-authored with Ani Vaseva, 2018) and Clouds. Philosophy of the Free Body (2017), Logic of the Political (2012), Miracolo (2011), L’altération du monde: Pour une esthétique radicale (2009), La Métamorphose et l’Instant – Désorganisation de la vie (2009). The search of a new philosophical form and a possibility of new expression of ethical, aesthetic and political experience is central to his teaching and research work, which has been taking place in Sofia (New Bulgarian University and Sofia University), Paris (Collège international de philosophie), Berlin (Universität der Künste), Vienna (Academy of Fine Arts), Frankfurt (Hollins University) and Tokyo (University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy) in the past twenty years. Together with Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev, Manchev is a founding member of Metheor.

boyanmanchev.net