Event overview
This talk outlines a political-phenomenological project that investigates visual plasticity as a condition for the construction of popular identities.
It explores this phenomenon through an emergent visual genre shaping Bulgarian social consciousness: tattoos etched on the body—most often male bodies—depicting national heroes, historical events, official documents, signatures, and an array of historical artefacts—political, military, legal, and religious. Hyperbolized histories and antagonistic demands are (re)inscribed on the body, acquiring a phenomenal presence that gestures toward an absent collectivity.
While these visual markers were once associated with progressive and revolutionary ideals, they have increasingly become aligned with nationalist and far-right movements through their evolving visual employment. This dynamic exemplifies a full-fledged hegemonic logic, and it is not unique to Bulgaria. In the U.S., for example, a similar shift in visual identifiers among the working class and Hispanic and Latino populations has amplified the affective force of Trump’s populist rhetoric.
In Bulgaria the collapse of totalitarian ideology—demonstrated in the dismantling of socialist monuments and avant-garde sculptures—has created a unique symbolic void. Unlike in Western contexts, where hegemonic visual regimes have remained largely intact, and unlike many post-socialist societies where the legacy of the left retains some symbolic continuity, Bulgaria offers a rare case in which the visual vocabulary of the left has been almost entirely eroded. This absence has opened a space for emergent populist visualities whose forms, while locally situated, possess a potential for global resonance.
This project asks: To what extent is the spectral process of signification anchored in phenomenal content? Can a new visual locus be creatively generated to fill the void on the left? Or, given the extrasymbolic and cicatricial ground of this process, is it the form of an ethical promise that makes the political possible at all? Engaging the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Catherine Malabou, and Jacques Derrida, this project is not only theoretical but also practical—intervening at the intersection of political thought, artistic research, and embodied visual culture.
Boris Pantev is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria). He has previously taught at the University of Toronto, York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. He earned his PhD from York University, where his dissertation focused on the concept of intersubjective temporality in the work of Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas. His research is situated primarily within phenomenology, philosophy of art, philosophy of history, and post-phenomenological continental thought. He is currently preparing a monograph for Northwestern University Press, titled Communication Instinct: Husserl, Social Time and Media Archaeology.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 May 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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