In the Anthropocene, technology in its indispensability for humans has begun functioning as a geological factor destructing both nature and humans, or the natural and the human. Accordingly, Bernard Stiegler identifies the toxicity of our current (technological) condition, and my presentation demonstrated that his analyses can be fruitfully connected with Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the technology of his time. The talk connected Stiegler’s general organology with Benjamin’s concept of technology as an organ of humankind and then linked Benjamin’s concept of innervating technology with Stiegler’s concept of bifurcation. To be able to (re)design a really human movement in the Anthropocene, or to caringly open the future in the Stieglerian sense, we need to innervate technology as Benjamin suggests.
POSTHUMANIST WORLD AND THE HUMAN OF THE NEGANTHROPOCENE
A keynote (in Czech) at the Summer School of Semiotics organized by the Department of Electronic Culture and Semiotics, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. The talk identified our philosophical tradition as essentially humanist and described various kinds of posthumanism that seek to remedy its flaws. Then I depicted our current world as radically conditioned by technology. I demonstrated that the ideas of Bernard Stiegler are useful in understanding this conditionality in the age of the Anthropocene.
An interview (in Czech) with Petr Šourek for his podcast Sylva sylvarum in the framework of “Strategy AV21” of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The interview takes Mark Coeckelbergh’s book Green Leviathan as its point of departure and asks whether we need to revive Hobbes’ concept of Leviathan, i.e. of a strong state limiting citizen's freedom, to manage our current climate crisis. Should we use artificial intelligence to control, or nudge, human actions? Is it necessary to sacrifice human liberty to advert a coming disaster, or do we rather need to rethink freedom itself?
POSTHUMANIST WORLD AND THE HUMAN OF NEGANTROPOCENE A keynote (in Czech) at the conference on “Critical Posthumanism” in Ústí nad Labem (http://www.kritickyposthumanismus.cz/). In the lecture, various kinds of posthumanism are characterized and distinguished from humanism, especially that of Enlightenment. Then, our current world is depicted in its being radically conditioned by technology. Finally, Bernard Stiegler’s plea for transforming the Anthropocene into what he calls the Neganthropocene is discussed. Thanks to such a transformation, we shall become able to resuscitate human caring for the world.
23rd Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media “Being together in the Digital Age”, March 25-27, 2022, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
In the talk entitled Living Thoughtfully in a Digital Milieu. A Conjunction of Stiegler and Benjamin, I outlined how Walter Benjamin’s ideas, although formulated a nearly century ago, can be linked with Bernard Stiegler’s thoughts on the (Neg)Anthropocene and help us in better understanding our current being conditioned by technology.
In the talk "Saving the future in the present. Benjamin on (con)temporary revolutionary experience", I explain how our relation to the past makes us sensible, according to Benjamin, to the future in the present, calling us to break through the tradition and to reconstruct, or re-imagine its different futures. This way we save the future not as something that will happen but as a possibility in the present.
The talk “No imagination without innervation. Benjamin on Technology and Imagination” demonstrates that Walter Benjamin offers an inspiring reflection on how the aliance between technology and art can help people to “harmonize” with the technologically mediated world, thus making their experience politically effective
In the talk "What is (not) the body in the embodied cognition approach" I argue that the embodied approach in cognitive science calls for rethinking the very materiality of cognition and for a reconceptualisation of the mental as well of the mind as the "where" cognition takes place.
