Individual projects
(1) The nature and varieties of human understanding of reality are related to its finitude.
(2) Тhe finitude of understanding manifests itself particularly in the limitations of the a priori access to the necessary conditions of phenomena.
(3) These limitations imply that there is an incommensurability between the logical space of understanding and the logical space of its objects.
(4) The phenomenon of incommensurability is essentially related to the nature of representation and indicates the structural limitations of the different kinds of understanding of reality.
(5) The competition of incommensurable conceptions transforms the boundaries of human understanding.
Our everyday experience of time has been transformed by the scientific discovery of the geological past and predictions of anthropogenic environmental impacts extending into the far future. This is captured by the proposal to christen our current epoch the “Anthropocene,” reflecting both the contextualization of technological society within geological time as well as the unprecedented global scale and future impact of our current ways of life. Bringing scientific discourses of deep time in geology, paleontology, and nuclear semiotics into conversation with philosophical analyses of time in Nietzsche, phenomenology, and post-structuralism, I argue that deep time is characterized by “anachronicity,” a catastrophic rupture of everyday temporality. This anachronicity suggests an alternative to current accounts of intergenerational ethics and global sustainability, namely, a speculative imagination that interrogates and contests possible futures for responsibility and justice.
The topic of the intellectual has had its ascents and descents in different epochs and terms. In the recent past, François Dosse's study La marche des idées (The March of Ideas) - 2003, gave an analytical picture of intellectuals' history and thus provided a serious basis for a so-oriented investigation. The theoretical support of this research, though, refers to a certain number of thinkers whose ideas can be gathered within the general frame of the intellectual as an exile. In this course of thinking, the names of Julien Benda, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre and Edward Saïd should be listed, as they all outline the figure of the intellectual as a kind of outsider: a spiritual martyr of truth (Benda), a character of ecstasy, solitude and tragedy, who is by nature different from the others (Ortega y Gasset), someone homeless in his own self (Adorno), the one who argues with the common truths and attitudes (Sartre), and in the end - the figure depicted by Saïd, in which I would chose to sum up the whole description - the exile who always feels himself out of the secure world, who is always unstable and destabilizing the others, who breaks the norms in a heroic destructivity.
With a view to the Bulgarian context, three representative intellectual figures will be distinguished as samples of the marginal intellectual: Dimo Kyorchev, Kiril Krastev and Tsvetan Stoyanov. They will be surrounded by other thinkers, critics and writers, related to their work. For the purposes of the study, I will focus on the works, creative life, social place and the complex context (political, social and cultural) of each of the three chosen figures.
The aims of the study are: to enlighten some little-known sides of Bulgarian culture; to present some of its underestimated doers in their actual importance; to investigate the collaboration between national and universal values, regarding certain crucial social and political circumstances; to enrich the knowledge of the intellectuals' role in Bulgarian society; to study the phenomenon of intellectual's marginality - within the Bulgarian context and with a view to the world context; to elucidate better some historical cultural processes of fundamental importance to our contemporary culture - especially the ones concerning the conceptual area of modernity, modernism and their metamodern reminiscences.
The project investigates the collective memory discourses and the politics of memory related to the deportation of the German minorities from Romania to the Soviet Union (1945-1949) in a transnational context. It looks at the place occupied by the deportation in the memory discourses and practices of a series of actors with interests at stake in the memorialization of the event, from the beginning of the 1950s to present times. Furthermore, by using the Romanian German case, the project critically discusses the place of ‘German victimhood’ in a memory landscape which is ‘multidirectional’ and ‘transnational’ and in which the Holocaust is a fundamental reference point. Thus, the present project aims to contribute to answering key issues for both memory studies and German studies.
This project goal is to gain knowledge of the spatial harmony between the identified morphological past and present spatial layers. Identification of spatial links between the architectural elements are achieved through three scientific tasks:
- To highlight the vernacular urban design networks in public space of three selected prefabricated building quarters by mapping. The artifacts could be, but are not limited to, self made of second hand materials items like benches, fences, dog houses, garden elements. Representative three panel quarters are selected with different market values.
- To define relationships between the spatial elements of the socialist and vernacular layers in terms of visibility, accessibility and distribution. I examine their social weight in the theoretical frame of Space Syntax Theory (Hillier, Hanson; 1987) that connects quantitatively the spatial structures with social and behavioral features of architectural and urban systems. The second informal layer of artifacts is analyzed politically and not aesthetically. A critical component is in understanding of how the network of vernacular design contextualized socio-cultural identities.
- To compare the results between the three selected quarters with different market values and to find out why some quarters with prefabricated concrete apartment buildings are better than others. Although prefabricated buildings are constructed in unified units and plan schemes that have been applied countless times all over the Sofia periphery, the residential quarters have different market values.
The project to be undertaken at CAS is to commence a monograph study of music and ritual among the medieval Orthodox Slavs, specifically the urban processional and stational liturgy, and the performance practices of set musical numbers. With a specific focus on the Marian Feasts, the project has a threefold purpose: (a) to examine Slavic hymnographic settings and their musical style in their liturgical context (i.e., according to the rubrics); b) to trace their origins in the cathedral practices of Constantinople’s Great Church; (c) to show how their performance shaped liturgical ritual.
The proposed study will examine the figure of the double in the intersection between theory of literature and philosophy in order to conceptualize the doppelganger as a political figure. The genealogy of the doppelganger will be traced back to Plato's mimetic theory.
The approach to the figure of the double will not be literary-historical, i.e. the motif of the double will not be followed from its beginning in ancient tragedy through its peak moment in the Romantic literature to its contemporary interpretations in modern and postmodern literature. Such investigations have already been done. My own work on the problem of the double will have as its starting point the introduction of Plato's theory of mimesis and the birth of images. In order to explore this, I will focus not so much on frequently discussed dialogues, such as "Republic" and "Laws", but rather on dialogues such as "Sophist" and "Statesman". The double as a political figure can be uncovered in the last two dialogues, where the role of phantasma without a prototype in the sphere of ideas is explicitly formulated.
Vernant and the birth of images, Auerbach and the term figure, and Lotman' s conceptualization of narrative will provide the three cornerstones of my research project with its goal to conceptualize the double as a political figure with respect to mimetic theories. The core of my project is formed by philosophical, political and social anthropology, although it will also incorporate argumentation from critical theory and deconstruction and will rely on the works of philosophers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot, as well as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, René Girard, and others.The hypothesis which I hope to argument through my study is that the double as a theoretical construct emerges as the point of interrupted conjunction between philosophy and literature. The political, hence, might be said to emerge in this interrupted conjunction.
The Bulgarian society has undergone profound changes after 1989. How did the teaching of literature changed in the transition period and did it change at all? What happened with the ideological orchestration of canon-reading after 1989? Did it vanish, just like the monuments of Lenin, or it has been transformed into something new?
The teaching of literature in the post-communist school system in Bulgaria could be described as an heterogeneous mixture of "liberal" and "conservative" attitudes. By reading and interpreting literary texts the students are supposed to adopt universal and national "values" and at the same time to learn socially applicable communicative "skills". This mixture is a source of increasing tension, with the literary teaching now looking "too conservative" and "archaic" to the liberal technocrats, and at the same time "too liberal" and "rootless" to the conservative, pro-nationalistic public.
Literary education is a field with agents, acquiring and defending their positions in regard to "internal" and "external" sets of criteria. The internal criteria are based on the professional expertise in literary studies and pedagogy, while the external criteria are connected with the stakes in the public space - ideologies, public opinion etc. All these competing frameworks should be examined if we want to understand the relation between the school reading of literary texts and the public debates.
The first level of analysis will be the examination of the normative documents - the curricula and the so called State Educational Requirements (SER), which are the codified framework of literary education. The next level of interest will be the interpretative machinery, extracting meanings from literary works and combining these meanings into something we may call "structures of experience." The focus will be on several specific "nodes" - identifiable themes and problems, taking part in different discourses and fiercely debated in public (terms like "slavery", "oppression", "exploitation"; temporal thresholds like the years 1978, 1944, 1989 etc.)
The main objective of the study is to explore the way literature is taught in Bulgarian educational institutions and to provide insights how it could be taught in the near future. The precarious balance between liberal and conservative elements in the curricula and teaching methodology most probably will be put under public pressure, growing from the general disillusionment of society and the retreat to "national values" - a process already visible in the public space.