To be human is the only way out of being human. An alternative exit— either by unbinding sentience from sapience or by circumventing sapience in favour of a direct engagement with the technological artefact—cannot go beyond the human. Rather it leads to a culture of cognitive pettiness and self-deception that is daily fodder for the most parochial and utilitarian political systems that exist on the planet. In delivering sentience from its so-called sapient yoke, one does not become posthuman, or even animal, but falls back on an ideologically charged ‘biological chauvinism’ that sapience ought to overcome, for it is the very idea of humanist conservatism that misrepresents what is accidental and locally contingent as what is necessary and universal.
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
Giorgio Agamben, from Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 2000)
Giorgio Agamben, from Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 2000)
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If horror is banalized it is not because we see too many images of it. We do not see too many suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak. The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of ‘deciphering’ the flow of information about anonymous multitudes. The politics specific to its images consists in teaching us that not just anyone is capable of seeing and speaking.
— Jacques Rancière - The Emancipated Spectator (2009 Verso Edition)
— Jacques Rancière - The Emancipated Spectator (2009 Verso Edition)
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