Abstract
The publication proposes the first English translation of “Metamorphosis, the World,” Boyan Manchev's conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy carried out in 2008. Manchev's introduction to the English translation puts the conversation in the context of the philosophical momentum reached in the early 2000s—the emergence of new ontological proposals and the turn to the world. “Metamorphosis, the World” aims to mobilize the materialist and even implicit Spinozist tendencies of Nancy's philosophy. In opposition to the ontophenomenological structure of the ecstatic revelation of Being for and through the existence (of) Dasein, it sets the world, unorthodoxly, on the side of “subjectivity”: the world is the power of desire or will, the drive itself: a world-“subject.” This radical idea cannot be reduced to the projective attribution of subjective qualities to the world, to its spiritualization or subjugation to consciousness or, conversely, to its obliteration in the mystical and impenetrable revelation of Being. On the contrary, this new idea affirms the world as a multiple field of self-manifesting immanent forces, of effusive desire and persistent will: a will to persist in its own metamorphosis. It is not only a return to the world but also a radical change, a reversal of the very idea of world. The final horizon of “Metamorphosis, the World” is a cosmo-erotic horizon: the horizon of philosophy's desire, the persisting desire for the world and of the world; the will to world; the struggle for the world.
