[This event had to be cancelled. It will be re-scheduled in the 2022/23 academic year]

Susanna Lindberg

Leiden University

From Technological humanity to bio-technical existence

7 June 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Our time tends to depict itself as an epoch of technological humanity – not only because its environment is increasingly pervaded by technology, but above all because the human being itself is more and more affected by the technological situation. Some even claim that the technical transformations of the human are leading towards its overcoming, so that the obsolete form of humanity slowly gives way to something called posthumanity. But is this perception justified? Hasn’t the human world always been artificial and haven’t human beings always applied self-techniques on themselves? In my paper I refer to philosophers (Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler and Giorgio Agamben) who do not think that attention paid to technology will generate a new figure of the human, but that it will unfold human existence itself as originary technicity. This technicity is not another figure of the human, it is humanity as a capacity of figuration. The question is in the spirit of the times, however: How do technics affect human existence? Are contemporary technologies developing towards an overcoming of humanity, like some trans- and posthumanists claim? Instead of providing a simple answer to such a question, I aim to delve into the terms in which the questions are made. What is called “human” when “humanity” cannot be reduced to “mankind” anymore but is thought in continuity with a more general idea of life, instead? And what is called “technics”? We will see that the term “technics” has the most general possible sense covering tools, instruments, machines, technologies, techniques, disciplines, etc. What is called “technics” when it cannot be reduced to the skillful use of instruments or to the overwhelming machine culture that sweeps off everybody, but is intertwined with every aspect of life, so that contemporary existence turns finally out to be a bio-technical existence in the midst of an overwhelming techno-nature?