On June 23, 2025, starting at 8:00 PM, at the KSP Center – Jadro, as part of KRIK 2025, framed thematically as “Metarmofosis,” we are pleased to invite you to an evening dedicated to Slavcho Dimitrov and his theoretical visions.
We are thrilled to announce the publication of his book:: ANARCHIC BODIES: CORPOREAL MATERIALISM, AFFECTS AND THE POLITICAL :: in English within our edition :Punktum:, a series that Kontrapunkt and KRIK – Festival for Critical Culture dedicate to contemporary critical theory, continental philosophy, theories of contemporary culture and art, gender theory and philosophy, and political philosophy.
The book will be promoted with the analysise by Jelisaveta Blagojević and Ljubomir Danailov Frčkoski.
Join us for this significant event and discover the transformative ideas that Slavcho Dimitrov brings to contemporary thought! Your presence will enrich our discussions and open new pathways for reflection.
:: ANARCHIC BODIES: CORPOREAL MATERIALISM, AFFECTS AND THE POLITICAL ::
In his book Dimitrov tackles the concept of the political (le politique) by exploring its complex and constitutive entanglement with corporeality, affects, and matter. The central problem and the question of his research endeavor is: how can we imagine and enact the political as radical difference – signifying the groundless, contingent, abyssal, and disruptive moment – making im/possible the very grounding of society, if we set thebody, as agential, dynamic, transformative, excessive, and relational world – forming materiality, at the center of our understanding of political ontology. In order to pursue this project, Dimitrov sets some of the core philosophers of the post-foundational philosophical canon, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, in critical dialogue with the trans-disciplinary scholarship of corporeal feminism, new materialisms, affect and body studies. The political he argues, marks an ontology of bodies, that is affective and aesthetic ontology. The form, the identity, and the sense of community are thus attuned to the ever-changing and plural relations between bodies and their sense-making practices. The body is the site where being-in-common (community) discloses itself as bodying-in-common. Starting from this primary hypothesis, another proposal of the book is that the institution of the social is a material performative practice, that is to say, a self-organizing, complex, and dynamic practice of materialization understood as iterative intra-activityproducing different material configurings of the social world and bodies, which are open to perpetual antagonistic contestation. The political, therefore, is approached the dissensual principle that prevents the closure of the community and the distribution of bodies and sensible experience in it on the grounds of a definite principle. Dimitrov uses a transdisciplinary methodology, and offers a hermeneutical reading, and critical analysis of the concept of the political as it has been developed in the work of four post-foundational political philosophers, and sets their conceptual apparatuses in motion by a diffractive reading in relation to new materialisms and affect/body studies. What makes this book particularly significant project, apart from the in-depth theoretical engagements is its focus on specific case studies crossing through the fields of art practices (visual arts), political action and protest, and cultural production. Dimitrov looks at artworks by the artists Velimir Zernovski and Felix Gonzalez -Torres, the political protests in North Macedonia known as the Colorful Revolution, and the subcultural and punk scene in Ljubljana during the socialist ‘80s.
Biography:
Slavcho Dimitrov, PhD in Contemporary Arts and Media from SINGIDUNUM University, Belgrade. He holds a Master’s degree in Gender Studies and Philosophy from the Euro-Balkan Institute in Skopje, and a Master’s degree in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies from Cambridge University. He has worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Law and Political Sciences at FON University and the postgraduate Gender and Cultural Studies at the Euro-Balkan University. He is the founder of the International Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures, and Politics in Belgrade, and curator of Skopje Pride Weekend, a festival for queer arts, culture, and theory. Currently, Dimitrov is the Director of Coalition MARGINS Skopje. Dimitrov has conducted research and published dozens of papers in the field of cultural and gender studies, political philosophy, performance studies, and queer theory in regional and international journals and books. He is a recipient of the AICA Macedonia – “Ladislav Barishic”Award, 2018, and the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory Grant, 2020.
Споделено на: June 19, 2025 во 4:35 pm