Hiero-Zoontotechnics: Individuation and Techno-Religion (original) (raw)
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Ekin Erkan | Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual
Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2019
Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital.
This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals, 2014
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals offers radical new possibilities for encountering and thinking with other animals, and thus for the politics of animal liberation. Examining the machinations of power that legitimize the killing of nonhuman animals, Zoogenesis shows too how thoroughly entangled they are with the 'noncriminal' putting to death of human animals. Such legitimation consists in a theatrics of displacement that transforms singular, nonsubstitutable living beings into mute, subjugated bodies that may be slaughtered but never murdered. Nothing less than the economy of genocide, Iveson thereafter explores the possibility of interventions that function in the opposite direction to this 'animalizing' displacement - interventions that potentially make it unthinkable that living beings can be 'legitimately' slaughtered. Along the way, Zoogenesis tracks just such 'animal encounters' across various disciplinary boundaries - stumbling across their traces in a short story by Franz Kafka, in the bathroom of Jacques Derrida, in a politically galvanising slogan, in the deaths of centipedes both actual and fictional, in the newfound plasticity of the gene, and in the sharing of an inhuman knowledge that saves novelist William S. Burroughs from a life of deadly ignorance. Such encounters, argues Iveson, are zoo-genetic, with zoogenesis naming the emergence of a new living being that interrupts habitual instrumentalisation and exploitation. With this creative event, a new conception of the political emerges which, as the necessary supplement of an ethical demand, offers potentially radical new ways of being with other animals. Reviews: "Encounters between human living, and other living entities, and between fictive and imaginary, Aristotelian and Cartesian animals are here staged with respect to competing notions of life and value, of writing and of literature. ...Richard Iveson reads a variety of sources with insight and discrimination, contributing highly effectively to this recently emergent and rapidly expanding new life form: zoogenesis" - Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Derrida on Time (2007). "one of the most thorough and exhaustive treatments of philosophy's recent encounters with animality ... With both impressive scope and penetrating critique, Zoogenesis allows us to think through a comprehensive rearticulation of 'the human' in a radically subversive manner" - John Ó Maoilearca, Professor of Film Studies at Kingston University, London, and author of Postural Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015).