Humanism & Its Discontents (Session 4)

Hello and welcome to our third session of Humanism Needs This Contents with Professor Razanegaristani. So please, Razanegaristani. It's fourth session, right? Oh yeah, sorry about that. I guess I'm just sort of good. So thank you everyone. So I hope you're doing great. We go with presentation and now I try to probably most the major part of today would be just kind of wrapping up

anti-humanistic critique and clearly saying about what might be shortfalls and yet still see if we can save some of its elements and then we go toward you know the kind of like the critical post-humanist turn. But we have Hayless, Dunaway, Brake Dirty. That will be probably next two sessions.

And then last two sessions, we will just move to essentially uh who might call to be a if there is such a word for it a renewed critical humanism that might appear on the different source of uh terms uh so that's our plan so um shall we the presentations. Great. Thank you, Reza. Absolutely. Okay. Let me share my screen.

The Stowaway. The sea batters fragile wreckage. A rat retreats and burrows deeper in rotting wood. Another twists inside knotted rope and folded burlap. Two inside an empty barrel soon to be broken for pieces to shore up the mast or for self-defense. Maybe both. cracks, light and wild noise pours in. The stench joins the wind-strewn sea air, accumulated droppings, and drenched rotting bodies of fellow stowaways. They scatter and find another hovel. Anywhere will do. Hardly any survive, but enough do. When the wreckage finally hits land, they will find the

first place dry enough, warm enough, resourceful. Anywhere will do. The post-human is not just a critique of humanism. It also takes on the even more complex challenge of anthropocentrism, the convergence of these two lines of critique in what I call the post-human predicament. For Bredoti, a new we must be forged to confront the position in which we find ourselves, a convergence of the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction, a missing we which transcends the shadow of bios, the human, and embraces the potential of zoe, all living beings, an embrace of quote material imminence across multiple planes of encounter. A people is always missing and virtual and that it needs to be actualized and assembled.

It is the result of a praxis, a collective engagement to produce different assemblages. But are all assemblages equal? Are all assemblages to be accepted neutrally? Can we truly be aware of all potential assemblages in our timescale? A recent project, Seeds of Change by artist Maria Teresa Alves, illustrates how weeds like mugwort and amaranth traveled the globe as stowaways on the ballast of ships. New theories on the decline of the Rapa Nui of Easter Island point to societal collapse caused by rats, stowaways in the wooden and fibrous canoes of Polynesian explorers, rapidly populating the island and consuming all new plant growths over centuries, leading to the

eventual deforestation and resource shortages for the Rapa Nui. Anthropologists are now retelling the story of the Rapa Nui as one of resilience rather than demise. But if Bredotti is asking us to embrace material imminence, is there an implied equivalence to embrace all imminence? Are all we's good? Are we capable of accepting all assemblages, even when they may lead to our own demise? What travels with us as we transition from BIOS to ZOE? Even when we pitch a new sail to this creaking raft of the human? Post, un, in, neo, what unseen stowaways still lurk within the boards? And can we accept any and all of their outcomes?

Thank you very much. I am the wind. I am the flow of becoming. A drift on the raft of the Medusa and striving for survival while feeding from your path and subject to specific conditions of embodiment for you to embrace becoming or to move to desired meta-stable scenario of the safe land on the horizon, induces a conceptualizing enterprise. The one that's necessarily active, material, embodied within your interdependent collectivity, and thus entangled with the actuality and immanence of a dynamic and contingent materiality that pertains new members of the human species within the animal and the animated as centers of perspective

and activity in the world. What is at stake in this friendship of potential redefinitions of the human after humanism and anthropocentrism is the issue of how contemporary power is being constituted how it impacts on what you know and on the ways you may or may not feel that your we is in this together the sailing device of costume and knowledge starts with constructing a plane of encounter for multiple different positions which acknowledge the since alfredo my sincere apologies yep my sincere apologies there is a storm there apparently there is a door open here okay one second let me take care of it my my sincere apologies uh to uh interrupt you sure no problem let me know one second the elements are manifesting themselves now

you mentioned the wind and it came yeah exactly yeah And my apologies. Yep, no problem. Should I continue? Yes, absolutely. Okay, good. So along this, yeah, the wind, the flow of becoming.

The sailing device of post human knowledge starts with constructing a plane of encounter for multiple differential positions, which acknowledge their situated and hence partial perspective. The project rests on the preliminary agreement that you need to renegotiate beyond humanism and anthropocentrism, the terms by which the human is composed, conceptualized, and experienced socially. To negotiate who this we is. And the quoting by Dottie. For we are not one at the same. In my view, the human needs to be assessed as materially embedded and embodied. Differential, affective, and relational. For the subject to be materially embedded means to take distance from abstract universalism, to be embodied and embraced and theirs this ensuring transcendental consciousness.

To be the subject as differential implies to extract difference from the logic that reduces difference to being different from. Difference is an imminent, positive and dynamic category. The emphasis on affectivity and relationality is an alternative to individualist autonomy. This is the sale of post-human subjectivity. Most post-humanists would agree that the needed sale device is an enlarged, distributed, and transversal concept of what a subject is and how it deploys its relational capacities. Moving beyond humanist exceptionalism, this subjectivity has to include the relational dependence on multiple non-humans and the planetary dimensions as of all. What constitutes subjectivity is a structural relational capacity, coupled with the specific

degree of force or power that any one entity is endowed with, their ability to extend towards and in proximity with others. The knowing subject is not man or anthropos alone, but a more complex assemblage that undoes the boundaries between inside and outside the self by emphasizing processes and flows. Neither unitary nor autonomous, subjects are embodied and embedded relational and effective collaborative entities activated by relational ethics. This is the atmosphere of post-human knowledge to speak of forces that are above, below and alongside the subjects in a constant flow of mutual implication. Going above the subject points to the supra subjective phase of institutional and social power. Below the subject operate the sub-subjective and affective factors, including the singular

psychic landscapes. And alongside the subjects, there are the adjunctive biotechnical assemblages of post-human relationality. The specificity of humans consists in their anthropomorphic capacities and the degree and quality of the relational abilities they can mobilize. Post-human thinking is post-identitarian and relational. It turns the self away from a focus on its own identity into a threshold of active becoming. Vital materialism puts the post-human subject on a time continuum in which experiences, thoughts and relations flow in a continuous present. This present never fully coincides with an actualized spatio-temporally saturated now but goes on becoming. The post-human subject always yearns towards the virtual.

Critical and creative cartographies can assist methodologically in bringing forth alternative conceptual persone or figurations of the kind of knowing subjects being constructed. All figurations are localized, situated, perspectival, and therefore eminent to specific conditions. So they function as material and semiotic signposts for specific geopolitical and historical locations. As such, they express grounded complex singularities, not universal claims in a form of transcendental empiricism that broadens the spectrum of what counts as evidence-driven thinking. As a conceptual persona, the post-human is a theoretically powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of the present as both actual and virtual. In other words,

cartographies are both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming. These are the tidal seas of ethics in constant friction with myself. To serve with me is transcendentally entwined with the capacity of tides to enhance or thwart becoming. Ethically, vital neo-materialist subjects are animated by the positivity of an ontological desire that orients them towards the freedom to express all they're capable of becoming. What grounds this ontological aspiration is the fact that virtual possibilities need to be actualized by a missing way, that is to say a transversal subject that will be composed in concrete historical circumstances in the open structure of time with the virtual potentials at its core

through affirmative ethics the communal process of composing transversal subjects committed to the collective actualization of the virtual entails the overthrowing of negativity through the recasting of the oppositional resisting self into a collective assemblage this transversal alliance most involved non-human agents technologically mediated elements earth others and non-human inorganic agents. A post-human ethical praxis involves the formation of a new alliance, a new people. This comes down to an evaluation of forces on what bodies can do in terms of sustaining intensity, processing negativity, and producing affirmation. Affirmative ethics builds on radical relationality and aims at empowerment. This means increasing one's ability to relate to multiple others in a productive and mutually

reinforcing manner and creating a community that actualizes this ethical propensity within the framework of affirmative ethics the notion of evil or the ethical evil is equated with negative effects what is negative about them is neither a psychological move nor a normative value judgment in order to understand this point we need to de-psychologize the discussion about negativity and affirmation and approach it instead in more conceptual but also more pragmatic terms The normative distinction between good and evil is replaced with that between affirmation and negation or positive and negative effects. The process of becoming, of collectively constructing affirmative ethics involves the composition of planes of becoming for a missing people.

Some of these missing peoples were never fully part of the human understood as the man of reason. These complex post-human ensembles that constitute subjectivity are negotiable. human is just a vector of becoming. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. I was the first dramatic, fully dramatic presentation with the whole thing getting colored. I wish that the corpse had ultimately was that the half eaten corpse was some sort of shade of green. I, hello, was born a tree.

My siblings were trees. My parents were trees. Their siblings were trees. I come from a large family tree of trees. But ever since I read Deleuze as a sapling, I bitterly resented my arborescence. I didn't want to subsume nor be part of a cohesive hierarchy. I wanted to be rhizomatic. All the cool kids were doing it. Plus, I was sick of learning about things. I and my family tree have learned so much about the seasons. My parents told me about the air and its movement, its temperature and humidity. We needed to learn that, and we needed to learn about the dirt, too, in order to spread our seeds. but I didn't simply want to pass my knowledge down in this genealogical form through some

local scattering of droppings come what may to them and without consulting the soil. Yes, I figured I should consult the soil. I wanted rhizomatic transversality after all, me and the soil in this together. I also wanted affirmation. I wanted desire, ontological desire. I wanted the dirt and the wind to want. I wanted them to desire ontologically, displace categories, even my own categories, in their desire and becoming. I wanted them to relate to me and share an understanding of themselves and of me and our family, not a tree, as we recognize that we are all in this together, but not one and the same. Without my seeds or my death, no biomass factored into the soil's fertilization. Without that fertilization, no me, no me, and the

wind loses its oxygen content, and then what? So I thought, let's all talk this out. Dirt, Tell the wind what you want. Wind, tell us your genealogy. We'll tell you ours. We'll be cartographers, mapping our multiple pathways of becoming knowing subjects. We'll each contribute our own conveniently color-coded bits to our shared understanding. And then we'll have some critique, maybe some creation. And in this space of encounter, our shared understanding will be the center of a new transversal ecosophical assemblage. One we'll make and remake as we go, critique and creation working hand in hand. Hey, maybe we'll even invite the humans. I'm sure they'll want to know all about the seasonal changes of the wind, the nutrient content of the dirt that you'll both need to survive and thrive.

As for me, I'm sure they'll love to know about my knots and whirls, how they're formed, what that has to do with the rest of the forest and its flora and fauna. Certainly they wouldn't care about the grain of my wood for something as banal as the aesthetics of a seagoing vessel. Anyway, that's what I thought when I was a sapling. I hadn't even let fall a single seed or netted any oxygen for the wind to carry off, so what did I know? How ecosophical was I or my hypothesized assemblage with the dirt and air? but uh we sure did invite some humans into our ecosophical assemblage i got my rhizomatic transversality after all and now here i am a plank on a raft tied right next to a plank from some other tree i'm covered in blood mostly human blood i think mixed with brine and xylem sorry brine and my xylem are downright choking on hemoglobin and salt i think a rat is chewing

through the rope holding me to that other plank but worst of all one of the friggin humans on this raft keeps hitting me, slapping me with their palm every time they think they're making an important point. If we aren't affirmative of the multiple ways of becoming knowing subjects at work on this raft, we will have no Zoe Geo Techno perspective in our shared understanding. If we aren't practicing solidarity with other humans, an embrace of non-humans as we chart these multiple ways of becoming or somehow making our subjectivity transversal, then we won't be able to actualize any of our virtual knowledges. If we aren't accountable for the genealogy of our subject positions, we can't structure the transversal subjectivity around relational capacity.

And without that form of shared understanding, indeed of shared hopes, we can't generate new forms of action of critique and creation. And I mean, come on, that praxis, that collective praxis of critique and creation as the basis of the revisability of any posthuman subject position, since it's how we compose new transversal assemblages. Anyway, I get what this slapping person was saying. You can't just, you know, pair, you can't just propose a kind of ethical praxis that's supposed to help us survive on a raft long enough to figure out some form of subjectivity to replace ourselves with, without, you know, also having ethical stances derived from an underlying form of subjectivity.

But, you know, especially if that subjectivity is supposed to be aimed at composing a generic virtual missing people as opposed to any particular the people in a sort of space of encounter that is all you have to work with, space of encounter or raft or whatever it is, I don't know. So yeah, you definitely don't want to just go off composing new transversal assemblages without any guiding ethical principles. But still, I didn't want to be here. I don't see what the slapping has to do with anything. Maybe that's not necessary. I definitely don't see how those ethical stances help with the rat problem. I mean, that rat is still chewing that rope tying me to that other plank right now. I'll shut us up next, but I'm still going to share.

The whales were sleeping in the sky yesterday. The pod was resting altogether. Mothers and calves all huddled up. They had dived in from the clouds above and were slowly drifting back up. The sun will dip down and they will be again swimming in the night sky. I think I have lost my mind. I am definitely hallucinating The wind carries strange words And then whispers them in my ear There is something in the woods Scurrying around The wood itself feels suspicious When I left the land of humanism

And boarded the ship of the anti-human I had high hopes I had dragged my son along for the journey as far as i could remember i always wanted to be a cartographer when i was a young boy my mother told me about the cartographer of emptiness the map maker who sits alone at the at the room at the end of time and draws up and marks out the nothingness all around him every non-being that moves or stays still and all the signs that point endlessly to other signs that point endlessly to other signs to other signs. Slide change. But now my son is dead. And I am not a human anymore.

I had set out to be something more, but I feel something less. Slide change. Map makers of old, they never left the sea empty. They drew up and imagined strange creatures that would inhabit the space. Dangers of the sea of the water. When the boat of the anti-human ran aground, other peoples went off in their own different separate life-saving boats, the in-human, the unhuman. What was left for us Nothing but a hastily assembled raft The raft of the post-human The wood, the rope, the sail

And too many people for it to support On the seas of unknowingness On the seas of uncertainty This raft did not hold up And now we are sinking My son is dead And now I am not a human anymore I am something less. Slight change. On the isle of knowledge, where the human lived, we had some who, but we had to become more. So we set out into the sea of ignorance in order to search for the unknown. And so did Predotti. Predotti is for the lack of a better

better word, a list maker, an assembler. She collects a lot of different ideas from a lot of different places and she puts them together. But this is nothing but a hastily assembled raft because there is no compass. It's not sea worthy. Her insistence upon ontological pacifism, her critique of land, her critique of sturdy boats when all she has to offer is an unsafe raft are things of concern to us because we cannot live on the raft and we could not. People did eat each other. People died. I have lost all hope but hold on to my son because there is still some meaning left.

I will use the rope to tie him around and carry him and drag him to the boat on the horizon. Slide change. There is a boat on the horizon, but is this boat going to take us to a new land? Or is this boat going to take us to other boats? We do not know. There are people who are waving to the boat. They are hopeful. They feel maybe some other sign, some other prefix in front of the human would lead them to a new shore. I am a pessimist. I don't have much hope. While my mother told me the story of the cartographer of emptiness, if I were to tell a story to my son who is no longer with me, it would be about the mechanics of angst.

Simple machines of dread that are connected to each other and constrained by their connections. Kinematic pairs of dread that connect to other simple machines of dread, that connect to other simple machines endlessly. Complex machines of dread. machines that look at each other and feel great complex machines that look at themselves and feel great complex machines that look at the night sky and feel great prodotti's project is a very good critique prodotti's desire to leave the land and set out into the sea is a correct desire but without a direction without a sturdy boat there is no point in leaving the sea she is self-aware of her critics and every time you would think oh no you're faltering here there is something wrong

with this she will point out critics will no doubt say xyz of this skeptics would no doubt say xyz of this but self-awareness never absolved anybody of anything boburden and to extend uh this into a a little more Boeburn territory. He performed a very nice skit with a sock on his hand. And the sock was supposed to represent the position of the academic or the position of the minority. And as they are criticizing the person, the moment it gets out of hand, the person threatens to pull them out of the hand and wipe them away from existence. So, it feels at times that

Bradotti's position is of the scared soft, trying to justify its own revolutionary thesis to itself while still being on the same hand. Essentially, we can use her critiques, but there is no praxis there. She will criticize the neo-fascists, but then uphold a liberal left paradigm, which is essentially imperialist, at least in the country that she is talking about. So she will talk about people like De Castro, who are concerned with a continual decolonizing of thought.

But there is no decolonial praxis in her book. So at the end of the day, there are people who are going to claw out their way out of this raft of the post-human, out of the raft of Medusa, wave down to the new ships at Horizon, but I remain a pessimist. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much. Fantastic. Excellent presentation, excellent talks. We have another presentation, right? Or that was about it? Today, it's the only one. Yeah, next Friday, we have Haraway and Hayes, I think.

Yes. Okay. Let me... give me one minute. Now we'll come with some answers and you think about some questions. We have 15 minutes max to go over the questions and stuff and then I will start. But thank you.

So does anyone have? Any question or something? Or is everybody a bit shy, a bit impacted by this? One quick conceptual clarification, and I'm trying to remember whose presentation it was.

I think it was the second one where we were narrating the tree talked about ontological desire. Do you think you could go into what you mean by ontological desire? Sure, yeah, that was me. I struggled with a lot of this, as I think has been mentioned in the chat, and as Akshat mentioned, there's a ton of vocabulary and terminology and a lot of disparate thinkers that Bray-Duddy brings together. So I, throughout all of this, was struggling a lot to figure out what each different term means. But the way that she describes ontological desire is as an ontological force seeking to actualize essentially the potentiality of becoming that is imminent in vital matter, or some people call it vibrant matter, whatever.

And it was actually one of the things that I never did succeed in making sense of. So if somebody else has an example, my guess is that it comes from a kind of Delusian or Missoumian kind of perspective that I'm not that familiar with. So maybe there's just a concrete answer out there somewhere, but I'm not I'm not exactly sure. So, maybe I should start from taking your metaphors of the raft and rats being on the raft very seriously. And just as ancient philosophers usually love these sorts of macabre allegories, make a point here. is that you can actually find rats on a raft right you know where did they come from

i mean why do you actually ever see rats on on in a ship right they don't belong there so it is quite actually famous that Rats usually used to board ships by the very moorings, the ropes, that attached the ship to the poles at the edge of the sea, right? And this has been a completely a very Greek sort of horror to find rats on a raft at the

middle of sea. They are not supposed to be there. So of course, there are various versions of this. Usually it is a very new platonic metaphor for heterogeneities of body, right? do actually chase mind or basically psyche or the soul as it sets sail in an infinite ocean. Right. There is, in this metaphoria, our is actually more of a different story that if land is really what allegorizes or metaphorizes knowledge, human knowledge,

and the raft itself is post-human and sort of navigational praxis of the open sea, then rats are actually metaphors of that sort of ingredients of objective knowledge, requirements, so-called judgments, necessary rules that they will haunt you. even if you're completely, as Odysseus navigates a broken ship at the middle of night, using what Greeks call metis or conning, conning intelligence.

So there is always, as I said, there is always two ends to this sort of metaphors. And unfortunately, if you equate land with knowledge, which used to be body in a platonic sense, then human knowledge will haunt you, or the principles of its judgment will haunt you, even if you embark on the source of cartographic open navigation. now another thing so when we are talking about trees a tree wants this, tree wants that

what do we actually mean by that do we mean wants or do we mean desires in a Deleuzean sense if we actually mean desires or desiring assemblages, desiring machines and all that sort of stuff. Then do these desires have contents? How their contents are being generated, right? If, because if the question that every belief, every desire has a specific content and that content is not simply given by the totality of desire itself,

then you have to account for an extremist element, which is the contentual element. Now, decide that you are not going to answer this question by simply, as Deleuze would have done that, by immanentizing desire, right? but if you do that then uh how do you actually navigate these assemblages really in so far as you're already within that sort of what you might call to be uh eminentized network

right uh then then why to actually ascribe once or teleological ascriptions to it um i mean is it would it be a certain sort of uh underground rather than surfacial underground form of aristotelialism right, in which telus is always already there, right, and we are simply navigating the telus. And in that sense, if you have only that sort of telus of navigating,

then why actually talk about emancipation? Why talk about resistance? Right? I mean, definitely the metaphor of navigation is quite strong and I absolutely cherish it. But I think this comes back to me that critical post-humanism definitely has not fully shed the sort of reactionary that anti-humanist critique had.

as I will talk about it, it begins to rightfully criticize some of the essentialist facets of classical humanism. But without actually dissipating the fog, right? And in that scenario, it ends up to valorizing some shady metaphysical components of classical humanism under a new guise, which then becomes foreclosed to the organon of the critique.

It is, I remember I've forgotten the name of this writer, I will find it for you, this guy who criticized Derrida and his critique is actually quite famous and good. That you know, Derrida is actually quite a kind of idol among these sorts of people. There is essentially, it captures the notion by way of the whole term of difference and stuff, that this guy is accusing Derrida for inventing a stilt supratranscendentalism.

He has essentially, do you know what they have done that? So classical humanism in its sort of religious fervor, unlike Kantian transcendentalism, deems human as transcendent object, not a transcendental object. What Derrida does and anti-humanism in a different sort of way and probably some forms of critical post-humanism. I mean the overarching narrative with disregard with particularities of their critique, which I think that that's actually makes them interesting.

interesting. But the overarching narrative is that they simply reverse human as transcendent object and put it in the ur ground, in the immanental ground. So you have to deal with all sorts of nastiness of the transcendent human as a transcendent rather than transcendental object on a very, very materialist, naturalist, basically, subground plateau. Let me actually find the name of this guy for you. It's been a long time since I've read this.

Okay. Okay. It's not Rorty's essay on Derrida, is it? No, no, no, no, no. Thank you.

Can't find it for some reason. One second. One second. how to get my google docs cannot find it I will put it when I actually find it.

Oh, actually, okay, okay. I have a better solution to find this. nope I cannot find it well one another another thing that you might actually there is a little bit of this but this is not the writer that I'm talking about comes with this kind of similar critique of Derrida is Dorkin's Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm.

That's actually not a bad book, but I will definitely find you the other one. That's actually a very good book. But yes, so So there is a, I mean, we should ask ourselves that why this actually happens? Why this sort of reversal or reinvention of human as a transcendent object, as a nasty form of humanism repeats again itself? even though you have tried to completely annihilate human essentialism or human exceptionalism in that classical sense.

One of the things is that, I mean, there are three reasons. I'm going to talk about them. But one of the reasons is that there is definitely an attempt for a new science of man, for a new science of world. We have seen it with Althusser and Aaron talked about it, that why call it science really? Because it doesn't want to actually do the job of natural sciences. It does not want to be fully quantitative and causal in its full sense of quantifiable causal laws, right?

But nevertheless, it wants to have the apparition of science, a certain sort of systematicity within which we can look back at the preneal and perhaps even mundane questions of philosophy. But that attempt at systematicity unravels the moment that the notion of system itself being eminentized, such that it does not leave a room for gradations. Essentially it's a flattening out at a deep ontological sense.

Without that sort of gradationality in the ontological realm, any attempt at systematicity, hence science in the new sense fails. And soon you find yourself with much more insidious sort of problems. will find yourself that you know that mean are we baddies now you know you actually see that sort of leftism that you have propagating is as blind as it was as uh you know uh basically capitalism

was to or capitalist ideology was to basically social life forms. So of course there is a story even behind this one that I said, not just that this attempt at making science of man fails in this new form, trying to both undermine classical humanism and philosophical anthropology by way of a new system of critique, namely a new science.

It fails precisely because it does not, that sort of emanatization, process of emanatization insofar as it does not have gradations, ontological gradations, or qualificational gradations, or contextual ones, it fails to be a systematicity, and hence it fails to be a science, precisely because they already do not want to deal with um natural sciences they want to reinvent the idea of science as such uh as a sort of organon of critique of uh humankind another reason that

i think that there is origin to this whole anti-humanist tenet is that it does not want to completely forego with the idea of anthropology absolutely not we have seen it in fuko we have seen it in altusser and we see it in critical post-humanism rather it wants to have an extremized version of negative anthropology like negative theology but negative anthropology instead of asking what is human it always tries to say what human is not

right I think that this is actually a very good tool that we can inherit negative anthropology But negative anthropology without positive philosophical anthropology ultimately ends into that sort of flattening, emancipizing process where basically you can't precisely, accurately, and critically formulate what the human is like. I mean, at the very least, negative theology always maintains a certain sort of dialectical relationship with positive theology.

What is God, right? But if you try to fundamentalize negative theology as the basis of escape from classical humanism, you essentially end up reifying and valorizing its shadow traits. it's like some people who wants to have ingredients that go into the cake of humanism but not have the cake of humanism that's essentially what they are trying to do but I feel that this sort of position

ultimately is not tenable the sort of negative theology as the foundation of a new science to cut across uh you know all the all the metaphysical baggage of classical humanism ends up precisely to be in the position that negative theology found itself in reinventing the positive metaphysics of god so uh some questioning here i sorry i uh i cannot see anything on the on the sidebar and stuff

but uh yeah you feel free okay so uh if i might ask a question right so i'm just going to put my biases out there um i think i came into this class kind of thinking that a project of humanism of defining the human would be delusian or would at least carry on from the work of bredotti and like Cobrook or Buchanan, right? So that's my position. I think the question that I want to ask here is, does Deleuze completely give a kind of negative theology of the human? Because I think what I appreciate about Deleuze's position

is his emphasis that it is constructed by this sort of transcendental empiricist project it's something that arises out of the virtual and then I think he goes beyond that and he also gives you sort of an application in the desiring machine of the human so I'm sort of wondering is he necessarily doing a negative theology equivalent for humanism or is he trying to do what he calls you know sort of the mobile concept trying to keep it dynamic in one text Yes, the mobile concept is really important. No, I don't agree that Deleuze fully is a negative anthropologist

in his account of the human, right? But nevertheless, we should understand where he's coming from, right? You wouldn't have actually dealing with this source of problems if it were not for the project of negative anthropology that became basically started to emerge from Heidegger onwards, right? But yes, I agree that it gives a certain sort of mobility to the concept of human. But as I said, and so as Rosie, they both do. but that sort of mobility as I said mobility at what level you see precisely because they're

they are essentially materialists or naturalists in the deep philosophical sense they soon find themselves in some sort of Althusserian dilemma where basically they have to say that, well, this mobility, yes, but then you should see exactly how this mobility that has been purported to be existent under this so-called new sort of system of inquiry

or critique or science can actually apply back as a praxis to humans. Not only how, but to what extent, in which domains, right? otherwise that sort of idea of mobility is not really new. I mean particularly Hegel is quite famous for this whole idea that life forms, so is Wittgenstein, life forms or species beings

are concrete universals right so the individual is concrete but the individual is only individual and objective in its concreteness to the extent that it's a social being it is a life form for it to be a life form it means that the grounds of its concreteness something else being a life form a family resemblances which are as we can have said it

which are fundamentally objective and any sort of objectivity any account of objectivity that is being posited ultimately derives from this source of objectivity, namely a species being or life forms as objectively and universally concrete. without human as life form. And this is actually quite a very interesting idea. What does it actually mean for human to be a life form?

What does constitute a life form? I'm going to talk about this at the end of our seminar. but essentially what's is interesting is that without this sort of life form as universal concrete and the principle of objectivity in judgment and judgments pertain to that which is necessary and necessary in different sorts of way not only necessary in terms of natural makeup of the human but necessary in the way that makes this life form to begin with. And so far as this is the principle

of objectivity, then any sort of idea of alienation, Althusserian alienation, coming from the implicit recognition of the human as a life form, a concrete universal principle for any sort of objectivity and nothing more. And I think Marx also has it really in a sense that, you know, the alienation in labor, right, that happens in labor. it's not alienation by virtue of some sort of what you might call to be

pure immanental material historical processes but is alienation first and foremost against the backdrop of the sort of life form we deem ourselves as right and also is a source of the sort of objectivity of our claims about our own alienation negative alienation in a sense not positive alienation but then the the come back the life forms have their objectivity not only negatively in the sense of being alienated from the sort of

stuff we hoped for, the sort of species we could be, but also it is always again in tandem with positive alienation of life forms as a different horn of life form as a principle of objective judgments. Alienating in a positive sense means that it is actually part of our own freedom to deliberate to deliberate what we want to actually by the way I found the name of that person it's a diter uh phone lay lay

F-R-U-N-D-L-I-E-B. So, I think, so just a quick response, I think, to your idea of praxis being contingent on the life form, right? I just want to pitch a quick question to the four presenters as well. Would it not be possible to respond to this critique that there is no praxis in such a dynamic and such a mobile idea of the human? Would it be possible to respond and say that the move that Deleuze and Bredotti have made by re-describing ethics as either an ethology or as affirmative ethics is to displace ethical questions away from the realm of pure philosophy and into the realm of grounded research critical theory?

and the realm of activist knowledges, the nomads, the war machines, right? Would that not be a possible response to that? Yeah, that's my question. I would say that, sure, I would say that it's not unfortunately possible. I mean, when we are talking about praxis again, as always, I would say that we need to be very careful handling such fragile concepts. in the sense that when we are talking about praxis, do we mean by that context sensitive sort of praxis that we have to do in order to navigate this raft at a particular moment?

or is it also that for us to have such a praxis such you know what you might call to be toolboxes armamentarium of context sensitive practices which I completely cherish and I completely understand that is very important should it not be that such an the very fact that we have such or minatoriums precisely because we have a principle of practice, principle of practical judgment, practical reasoning, right? So, and ultimately the groundwork of self-consciousness,

as Hegel would have understood it, or I would say that even Kant, cannot be exhausted by discrete or assemblages of various different context-sensitive praxis. There is this whole point that, you know, you want to basically get to a point B and help your friends. You ask yourself, what should I do? What ought I have to do? And then you get a bicycle.

That's a practice, right? To get faster rather than on foot to your friends and help. you get another sort imagine that there are some obstacles you change vehicles your bicycle breaks up and you know how to fix it quickly and so on so forth all that sorts of scenarios of context sensitive practices right but ultimately all of it all of these time finite sort of practices or multitude of practices are beholden to a time general time infinite idea of practical reasoning that if my friend gets sick I ought to do x right that's a piece

of practical reasoning a practical reasoning that does not come from a discrete context sensitive or time-bound practices, but it originates from something that is not really outside of anything other than philosophical self-consciousness, concrete self-consciousness in that sense, even though not fully realized. It's in its own progression. So I would say that this is one of the things that I've always been fascinated with. You see that

the whole meme, why not have both? Why not have both the toolboxes of anti-humanists and critical post-humanism, but also having what you might call to be the sort of philosophical, critical anthropology that has been given to us. I feel that without the latter, we will soon find ourselves in a what you might call to be in a position that you know

So, Frondlib calls radical undecided, radical undecided of praxis. Yes, yes, yes. Question. Sorry. I think Akshat and Kenneth want to respond to Sean. Yes. So Kenneth, do you want to go first or should I go ahead? No, go for it. Okay. So Sean, say, first of all, I know some people would maybe take issue with me saying this. I don't actually see Rosie's work as a direct extension of the loser's work.

So, um, the loses project is like very wide and it's like very vast. So it can be taken into many directions and it has been taken into many directions by many people. So in this instance, I would say Andrew Culp is perhaps something that I would consider more of a post addendum note to the delusion Qatari done in any sense, uh, with respect to like praxis and like mobile war machine. Again, when you look at the delusion concept of war machine, if it is not intended as pure rhetoric, which I believe it isn't because Qatari was involved, who was militant, right? So if you look at protests, if you look at the structure of protests

that erupted in 2019, and there was a global... I was doing a personal project of sorts where I was tracking how many countries have had major protests in 2019. There were 29 countries which had major protests and another 15 which had minor protests but in the capital. So in all of these, let's say a protest is a war machine. What would make a protest a continuing war machine? So now if we take the example of like my local protest, one of them being the protest, the farmer protest against these bills, which would like introduce neoliberal reforms, which would rob them of their, like rob them of their, the money that they get against the minimum selling price that they get for their crops.

so this neoliberal reform has been already been uh implemented in some other states those states are destitute now the people there are destitute and they're working as like laborers throughout the country so on some level this is like a strategy to displace farmers and make them work as urban laborers cheap urban laborers in different states for the developmental giants right so this is what capitalism is doing on one level hand to hand in with democracy so a protest that erupted against this was largely centered around the sikhs or the Punjabi and what they did was they had proper channels and systems connections from the village to the city

capital connections which would provide water connections which would provide food grain and they had setups and you know six are very good at this six are very good at langar they feed people so there were these like proper channels from the villages to the cities where food would come in water would come in money would come in other than that they eventually developed their own newspaper as well because fake news is obviously a problem and the status quoist media is obviously a problem and while internet critical websites are good they're all in the English language so they're not accessible to the farmers so they started a newspaper in Punjabi right

so this for me is a war machine this is a delusion war machine for me it is completely different I It is completely different from Pradoti's project. Pradoti's project is essentially, don't take your exhaustion or your alienation as a defeatist sign. Think of it as an internal rebellion. I refrained from criticizing Pradoti a lot in my presentation because I did not want to dig into her, but I will just say a few more things about it. So when you look at her project, It's trying to justify the American academia and its continued relevance.

But the way she is doing it or the way people do it is it's relevant because fascists are attacking it. Because the far right is attacking it. But in a country whose sense of a center is so offright, anything even mildly liberal left will be considered the far left. So in the sense of criticizing the new fascists, in the sense of criticizing the alt-right, she's at the same time accepting their conception of the liberal left as something as really revolutionary or radical, just because they're being erased and pushed out of university. by the said right. Now she wants us not to be like war machines,

but in the sense of capital, the academic university to be gears in those calls, but self-aware gears. And then this is how we're disrupting it on the individual level. But without political organization, there is no practice. So Bradotti, I just don't see Bradotti as a useful, path to take from the loose. Ashkat, one question for you. Be candid about this. You think that, I mean, look, I'm going to put my beans here, right? Throw my beans here out in public. I would say that without a systematic process of hegemonization, there is no form of resistance.

Literally, there is none. No matter how much you are talking about assemblages. And hegemonization for me is a fundamentally philosophical and political act. Right. So what she does in her book is, let's just run with that for a moment. she criticizes two people who were in the debate of the century a few years ago Jordan Peterson and then Zizai in the same paragraph so she says Peterson and I think everyone in this seminar has had their share of Peterson memes and are extremely exhausted with it so please bear with me for a moment so Peterson is essentially what he is doing is he is consolidating the exhausted, alienated

young individual man and then bringing them into the fold of um christianity or like conservative politics she is against this uh but then she also criticizes zizek for supporting trump right which is a complete mischaracterization of his position his position isn't trump is good his position is Trump is the establishment Trump is the acceleration of the hegemony and once Trump is there the opposition to Trump will revitalize and revivify the left, the American left and it has a little, I won't say a lot and a very perfect like parallels to this exist

in UK, India and Brazil because UK had the schoolboy Brazil had Bolsonaro and India has Modi and the far left of India all of these assemblages have risen as political opposition to the intensification of the fundamentalist hegemony so even there I think Braduti fails because her criticism she is supporting the liberal left of an imperialist country which by itself is again like so this is like a very mean thing to say but it's like saying America has one political party and the republicans and the democrats are its two representative factions so it's essentially

that logic of operation which i'm against i see i see thank you so much uh let's have one more question and ara uh maybe uh and then we have a we are going to have a uh short break five minutes come back, take maybe two questions, because I know that this whole presentation has been rather, you know, triggering people in a good way, philosophically understood. So I'm not going to cut it down. But two more questions after the break, and that's it. We're going to forward lecture and then questions at the end. Kenneth, do you want to go first?

I was going to try to switch the subject back to ontological desire and Deleuze. And so if your response is more topical, you should. I'll go just very, very quickly because, and I'll be 100% honest that again, like my background is not in a world of philosophical vocabulary. So I will step on some terms that are probably not. no worries at all yeah but um I think for me and again this is something I'm also picking up in the chat that I guess I just wanted to bring in is that I think in going through the text so for me coming from a bit of a kind of organizing background a bit of kind of like arts politics kind of world background that was the thing that I felt like a deferral in

Bredotti's text was this idea that discerning which we's are acceptable and which assemblages are useful. And more than anything, to me, I think what was difficult is, especially when you're in an organizing world, you also set time limits of when to stop bringing, you have to kind of say, at this point, this is our time of absorbing information, and then this is our time of acting. And I think that was the thing I felt very missing in the text, was this awareness that you can't be in observation mode endlessly and that there was just kind of no schema to discern. Nor in the action mode, in the long run action mode with great sorts of strategies. I mean, coming from a system engineering background, there is this jargon that I have seen that it

has come up quite often these days with regard to blockchain, a resistance to blockchain and crypto, but also organizational matters. They call it coordination headwinds. You know, that's the most canonical sense that assemblers just fall apart by virtue of, not by virtue of malicious actors, but by virtue of not being able to scale up their actions

in a realistic concrete sense, right? To move from one scale of assemblages or armamentarium of activities to another, trying to simply navigate basically various scales of a problem or calamity with basically as if they were just navigating on one scale only. And the coordination simply fails. Coordination between actors and nodes of the assemblage. and leftists, to be honest with you, this is why I think that leftists need to have

more managerial and scientific ways of organizations to understand that it has nothing to do with bad actors capriciously acting on their own behalf. Sometimes that's not really the problem. The problem is the problem of coordination. Okay. Rest five minutes, we come back and we will start.

All right. In the rest period, Sean, can I just like... I would say that even the post-humanists, critical post-humanists and Braidati do not actually take the idea of expanding your armamentarium of praxis seriously. There is a lot to actually be done with regard to the battle readiness, tactical, strategical infrastructure, and so on and so forth. Right? For a, you know, consequential emancipatory project.

but precisely because I think that they fail ultimately because for them any sort of universalism in whatever guise ultimately is just Nazis shoving people into the gas which is quite sad I've got a lot to think about here. I'm now very, very frustrated with this question now. So thanks everybody for answering my questions. The fragility of theory like Jean-Marie being almost killed by Nazis. He writes about that as well.

There is this book came recently. My apologies, I forget names these days. I have started to read like 20 pages in. It looks actually really good. It's by Hearst, the publisher. It's called Against Decolonialization and Defense of Agency in Africa. That's not the accurate title, but you can definitely find the writer and the actual title. It's actually quite good. I like these books being produced because, as Akshat made it clear, that I think that

the sort of praxicism, I wouldn't say that practicism, practicism, you know, is to an extent the fruit of a certain sort of Western ideology. that cannot come to grips literally with that. Not everyone on the planet, certainly not in our countries, wants to completely

forego with the idea of human agency. So Aaron, who were two questions, we have two questions and then. So this will take us back to the conceptual a little bit, but it is relevant because I'm still going over in my head and maybe my Deleuze is shaky, but this concept of ontological desire, right? That I really don't, seems to me to be a kind of mistake or a weird kind of, but I think it does sort of lead to the question of sort of

whether the concept of species is tenable and under what circumstances and the way in which a lot of people influenced by Heidegger on the one hand, or the kind of science and technology studies stuff, sort of filtering into biology, sort of have come to reject the concept of species and refer only to sort of biological lineages. Sure, sure. Isn't it the whole idea that biology is truly the science that puts an end to the idea of life as an ideal, and hence everything that is attached to it, including the species. Sure. The role that someone like Braidotti or Deleuze

seem to take is to hold life as this ideal. We need an ethics of zoe, this kind of thing. And I guess where I wanna push right now is like, what is ontological desire, right? What is it for material assemblages to do something, to engage in some kind of activity that we would consider to be ontological, right? And so I understand how in this kind of way you can sort of, what is the displacement of categorical distinctions, right? And this is something that is common to hear the way that someone will talk about a human being is not a separate and apart species or entity. We are suffused with a microbiome

of tons of different other species that we couldn't exist without. We depend on our companion species, our domesticated plants, animals, we're assemblages of horses and wheat and things like that. But it does seem to sort of get at a real error in this, like, let's go back to the Heideggerian basis of this, right, where the concept of ontology is kind of changed from ontology do is sort of delineating distinction from the kinds of beings that there are to the Heideggerian ontology is talking about being qua being or what anything is like the sort of unity that anything that is has insofar that it is. For Heidegger, even though he's sort of making

this slide and trying to transform ontology, ontology still defines a certain type of being. He doesn't want to call it human, he calls it Dasein, but ontology is something that only a certain type of being can do by virtue of being normative, of having normative distinctions, right of having what we would call sapience um and so dasein or humans if you want to make that i think it's not a good reading of heidegger to simply equate dasein with humanity but dasein is ontically ontological right that it can it can make these distinctions and problematize being

And somewhere along the way, we get from language using beings who are normatively capable of making judgments, doing ontology, to sort of material assemblages doing something like problematizing ontological distinctions. Despite that, right, like this slide seems to me really sloppy, and I don't understand how it could happen in the history of French thought. I mean, one of the things is that I'm not supposed to say that I read Heidegger in my free time. But I think that Heidegger actually never sought to undermine humanism in its profound philosophical import.

or rather it tries to renegotiate the idea of human by renegotiating its relation with being reductively speaking the world, simple as that I agree with that that's all fine but yes, I think that the French reading of Heidegger fundamentally takes this to an extreme that is not justifiable Yeah, I guess what I would, it's like the stakes of separating Dasein and human is about more about the sort of historical contingency of what of the kinds of beings that are engaging in linguistic self reflection, right, sort of conceptually mediated self reflection.

and not attaching that particularly to a biological species, but attaching that to historically situated modes of life. And that's why languages and sciences are the modes of existence of Dazon, right? And they can die, and that's not the same as the human species dying. And we can sort of make an ethics out of that. So, I mean, my question more is sort of how does How does Deleuze get anything ontological out of pure matter? I guess, yeah, it's sort of how that gets sort of pulled into this vital materialism in the French tradition. Because that, the influence of Spinoza, the influence of the French philosophy of science

tradition or the thing... completely agree that there is a fundamental undergirding uh uh uh what you might call to be motif here that espinosis uh monism was for them an absolutely instrumental uh for them to insidue that sort of ontology right without that uh espinosis monism you cannot do that simply you can't but then for me the interesting question is why they do that what are the consequences of doing such a thing can I try to

answer the question about the loss I think I've just found that thinker which can help us to understand how the laws the laws's imminent desire makes sense it's in his book about kafka a small book about small little literature where he talks about that distinction between transcendental law and imminent desire and in this book it is quite it is quite cunning intelligence that he does because he actually

they actually criticize their desire they it seems that the literary criticism that they're aiming at used that category of desire to talk that all young revolutionaries from France are great, that all writers that are applying desire are great too, but Deleuze and Guattari say that no, it is ridiculous, actually there is no revolutionary desire as that, because you don't need to be in a revolutionary crowd to feel the desire, you just can work in

the office when where there are a lot of companions of yours office companions bureaucrats and you just uh you just uh constantly feel the desire a flow of bureaucracy machine uh that's it and they uh what they say in the beginning of that passage that uh uh they um they make clear that in that mocking of leftists which they do there is no real ontology there they don't want to do ontological thinking they just say we don't even know what the assemblage

we are looking at is we don't know whether it is good or bad. We just have the ideas about all of its parts. That's all. So it's more like factology and mocking of leftists, I think. Yeah, I mean, no, I mean, sure. I mean, this is one of the reasons that Deleuze always refused to talk about politics for a very long time because it didn't have good things to say about it's particularly political left um but yeah i don't think it solves the problem that ontological thinking as ontological thinking is transcendental it's about the limits of what we can say is or isn't like yes and how imminent

desire could be ontological just seems like a contradiction in terms uh what another thing to say and this is i mean put put uh delus aside and i know that this has come in race recent works on the human right uh to kind of uh reclaiming freud marx and nietzsche back into the fold of humanism right uh so we also have uh something uh of uh so there is this is essentially the thing for me here so so there are these immanental desires

right on the logical level and there are also immanental drives right in a freud sense uh and i I don't know whether this paper has been published or not, but you can actually listen to his YouTube for foreign objects, where he discusses his new essay, the human, Ray Bousier. And he still calls something like the science of drives you know, as something that's basically what you might call to be constraints this whole idea of the ideal or reason, almost criticals, almost rationalists or something like that.

But I just always wonder to myself, what is actually, again, coming back to Althusser thing. What is actually scientific about this? What is actually scientific about the loops, right? What is actually scientific about desiring machines and so on and so forth, right? So this obviously Freud, as Adolf Grunbaum has shown, is not actually trying, unlike Althusser, to reinvent the idea of science as a new systematicity of critique, right? Freud is actually far more common.

Freud wants to use scientific methodology in order to create a new system that is not fundamentally producing scientific results. You know, as long as you have scientific methodology in a canonical sense, You should be able to make a certain kind of system of sciences. And this is what Adolf Grunbaum shows that Popper was completely wrong with regard to Freud. Freud is not pseudoscientific. He's purely scientific. But the thing is that when he tries to talk about drives by way of scientific methodology, he comes to a certain sort of confusion that also can be said about desiring machines or ontological desires.

what do you mean exactly by drives? Do you mean motifs? Do you mean beliefs? Do you mean emotions? And depending on what you actually say as implicit motifs, implicit emotions, so on and so forth, then you have to really say that for example there is a specific motif for x to do this unconsciously so obviously when you are saying a motif there would be a motif as an act as an and as an object count 101 right there would be a content of the motif

and there would be a fundamentally mechanistic sense of motif as an unconscious process. Obviously, Freud wants to have both of them together because if it simply goes with the mechanistic sense of motif, implicit belief that makes me to do X unconsciously, he's nothing more than a glorified deterministic naturalistic scientist right that does not what Freud wants to be but if you actually go with the content of the motif

then you have to bring the idea that there would be a certain sort of judgment or adjudication to determine the content of the motif that why I did x versus y unconsciously. But it seems that Freud doesn't want to do that and he wants to establish his new science of drive precisely by bunching the contents of desire or motif with the act, the mechanistic causal act of desire itself. That doesn't go anywhere, really, the more you look at it. Yeah, just two final things,

and then we'll move on. I guess the first, just because Flicka brought up Kafka, to say that Kafka's story, the report to an academy, would be incredibly useful here about the lines of flight And not wanting to be human is a different problem, but I think the right way to approach this problem rather than not being human. And then the final is just a clarifying question, because it seems, I think I get Al-Putte's notion of science now, but just to make sure, I guess this sort of French concept of science is about a sort of theoretical practice or theoretical system that verifies its own principles, right? So like pure mathematics or theoretical physics.

And hence it can be an interpolation, Althusser. Simply, yeah, that's why Althusser essentially comes with this idea that science is an interpolation, right? It's, you know, a funny story that knock, knock. Who is behind the door? It's me. you don't even need to know what it is. You just open the goddamn door. And so the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism is on par with now. So, Arman, I know that you are just like dying

to ask a question and please do it. Thank you, sir. I was really just bad to ask the question. But also to make a kind of virginity version of what Akshat said about Bredotti very quick, and then I would ask my question. She has this idea of ethic for machines. It's a very strange idea because there is isn't it a core function of her system? And that is that we have this already established rule that X does this work.

This X in the Marxist system of thought must be treated kindly and justly. This x, which is an object subject, must free itself from the condition that it rests on, and so on and so on. So Bredotti abstracts this human that is the laborer for Marx, abstract it and puts the non-human laborer instead of it, as if there were just two singular terms that you can substitute for each other, and draw new inferences, if you want to say a Brandomian thing about it.

But anyway, this idea of ethics for machines that are going to have like 66 million jobs that humans have now in the next 15 years. This ethics for these new machines is based on this idea of of verification of labor. The laborer as the essence of a system that now just human is growing out and the non-human is coming in. I thought this grammatical fiction, the grammatical structure of thought is doing much work in her thoughts also with regard to human. It's supposed to be a genealogistic regard to human following Foucault. It is everything but that. But I don't

know Foucault very well. But I think the singular term human and also machine are very narrowly defined in her system. Anyway, that was supposed to be a shorter argument that I was going on. So just the last question about all Althusser and these two arguments of these two weeks that we are talking about. It seems to me that the question comes back to, again, a strategic question. and that is um can we hold that um our theoretical substructure let's put i know that that is not

what we want we want to do because um that is uh something like um uh something like a model theoretic uh structure but our two-step does it and so let's let's let's do it again we let's redo it and think about it and that's my question about the whole this this two-level structure because you have a superstructure that is made of rules and norms and all the good things and reasons and stuff. And then you have the supposedly basic structure. And the basic structure is the motivations, desires, something that's not necessarily just ideas or something like that. These two are working with each other. And it seems to polemic, it comes to this question that

that whether ideas can navigate, as you put it, can navigate the basis structure and navigate the production process, let's put it like that, or the other way around. Altucher holds that it is the other way around. And as Brasile puts it also, this is somehow the dialectic of suspicion to call Marx, Freud and Nietzsche also do this move. I suppose that you, with understanding rationalism or random people that talk about reasons,

try to do the other way around, by self-taught to say that no. Not me. Sorry? Not me. Not you? OK. Would that be a good mapping or a good thing to draw? Ask the question. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I would say that the picture is not, unfortunately, I wish it was as black and white as Brandon talks about it. I think that I have found myself in the sense that, no, we cannot actually go and navigate what you might call to be the superstructure of labor and production, right, in a Marxian sense.

I would say that, I don't know, Marx would have, I don't know what Marx would have said it. That's not my job to, at this point, to speculate. But I was, why precisely, because that also falls into a certain sort of what you might call to be, hot pragmatism, if we can say that, right? That you think that you can simply navigate such things under the asphyseus and aegis of reason. No, I don't think that that's true.

But if we take reason, not merely theoretical, not normative, but practically normative, and practically constructed right then yes we can navigate it but to navigate that sort of superstructure of fundamental what you might call to be labor relations production values and so on so forth in a Marxian sense, requires for you in order for you to understand them

it requires for you to actually intervene with them. And isn't it exactly what communism always tried to do, right? In the sense that you cannot simply understand the world to which you belong but you have to play with it such that you actually start to triangulate your position within it so there is no idea of navigation under navigation that comes from the top or a navigation that comes from the bottom

I would say that if there is a sort of navigation, it is essentially should come from a sort of understanding that you cannot unfathom such superstructural processes. without simply either constructing them or intervening them. And the meaning of that intervention is essentially what we call dialectical history. We are going to, of course, say that, you know, what the meaning of dialectical historical act is.

but reductively speaking, that's the only sort of, I would say, that's less shameful of a position. Less shameful of a position. Okay. My dear friends, let me, we are getting close. I just wanted to, okay. So, really I think one of the most important things that today we talked about is this idea of that fundationalization or extremization of negative anthropology.

that the roots of it in 20th century comes from actually two directions Heidegger and French Hegelians, Kojeff particularly. In a sense that man or the human can only be grasped in relation to what it is not, right? What it is not.

it looks simple and it seems as straightforward such a formulation but actually it is not precisely because that's exactly not what negative anthropology is in the sense that has been proposed by Kojev, Bataille and Foucault and others. The negative anthropology is not simply what you might call to be epistemological dialectical relation with what it is not. That would be magnificent. It would be a new, let's say for now, in a snide quotation mark

science. But that's not exactly what they are trying to do. They are actually trying to say that the relation of man or the human to what it is not is also tantamount to the pathos of man, the pathos of the human. So that negative anthropology just not actually is about what you are not. but it also comes built in with a series of conclusions already concluded about

the pathos of man that man as Kojev understood it is a fundamentally act of suicide in itself. Yeah? This is, of course, a very, again, kind of Heideggerian, pseudo-Heideggerian sort of position that man or the human always gives itself to nothing.

This is exactly what it says. Negative man who is given to himself in the nothing, who is not given to himself, who negates and annihilates himself. So negative anthropology in this sense is not fundamentally dialectical or secular. It comes with the baggage that this very question is posed under the rubric that man is a potential suicide, a potential suicide that extinguishes the world around it.

it is fundamentally a death that wears the mask of the human this is I would say that as we have seen it tangentially or not has been a certain sort of undercurrent motif in anti-humanism. It would be great to ask the questions of a possible negative anthropology.

What you are not. You know? So, if you are actually going to the tradition of post-humanism, we always ask ourselves what we are not. Some post-humanists, I think, do disagree about the significance of this question and the sort of consequences it comes from with, precisely because they understand that if this question is simply dialectical and neutral, that we are trying to, step by step,

concretely understand what human is by what it is not. Or does it actually carry a certain sort of fundamental pathos for anything that might be considered as an objective picture of the human, right? Naturally or otherwise, naturalistically or otherwise. I think there is a reason that there is a rift in the whole post-humanist discourse. and it can be also extended to

transhumanist discourse and so on and so forth. But it's actually a very interesting question. My idea is that yes, we should definitely have a negative anthropology, right? But a negative anthropology that is an instance of world making in a Nelson Goodman sense, in the sense that we create world versions around a framework or world which we call the human, right? And through these sort of world versions, which look like apertures, opened up the old world we inhabited, we progressively decide what was wrong with the old framework.

and can we reinvent some of its most persistent traits in our world and which of those traits should be discard that to me is an admirable task a fundamentally philosophical scientific task but as I had talked in the past few sessions and also today I think the moment that negative anthropology

from the outset becomes tantamount to a science for the patterns of the human and anything that is actually connected to it, it stops working. It actually ends up to create a mirror reversed image of the human at a very fundamental metaphysical train. And hence, we find ourselves dealing with the same sort of nasty, sticking, confusing problems,

which the task of critique was to dissipate, to destroy, to freeze the fog around the idea of man and shatters it into pieces. So, there are probably, I would say, that three origins, origins, three sorts of unique problems that have led us to embrace the sort of anti-humanism and post-critical post-humanism.

Of course, these questions shall not be taken at face value. They come in gradations, right? You can have a little bit of that, a little bit of this, but nevertheless, a mixture of them will definitely lead you to that sort of positions that we have been talking about. One, that there is nothing, absolutely nothing to the idea of the human other than language, culture, economy, society, economy before society, and so on and so forth.

we call these immanental questions. And once we say yes to that sort of question, that there is in fact nothing to the idea of the human other than its subsumption under language, economy, society, systems of institutions, so on and so forth, then why should we actually move on with the idea of the human? The human disappears in its entirety according to that tenet. Second one is that

what is exactly so we have been always one of the main tenets of the humanism is glorification or rather cherishments of the idea of subjectivity human subjectivity and we know from time of Kant the human subjectivity is objective right so a methodological immanental philosophy would require would require you to ask yourself

what are the limitations by that did not mean simply epistemological but ontological here because we are in the realm of methodological imminence where are the limitations that allow you to actually talk about human subjectivity because once you arrive at the territory of methodological eminence such positive constraints for you to draw a positive picture of human subjectivity

slowly start to disappear this is what we call the methodological question of the fundamental dependency of the human subject upon the fundamental constraints so even in Marx you know that there is an idea of labor there's idea of species being forms of life and all that great stuff they allow us to still have to preserve

a certain sort of idea of human subjectivity that can be called objective but if you actually go deeper into this realm of labor production values the fundamental materialist immanental level, you soon find yourself that such train doesn't allow you to create a positive image of human subjectivity anymore or agency. I mean, Niklan is a good example of that.

And the third one was the one that I mentioned, and I think is the most important one, that we shall rethink, rebuild, reconfigure anthropology or philosophical anthropology in a complete negative sense negative not only epistemological you know epistemological

negativity here is more like negative theology right and we actually try to answer the question of what is God by saying what is what god is not on an epistemological level but the but the point of negative on uh anthropology is not merely epistemological it's also evaluative uh processes at an immanental level at the level of in imminence At the level of the epistemological, you still can say something positive about what human is, right?

But if they are both combined, become one epistemological and evaluation at an immanent level, then unfortunately any sort of positive answer to the question of what the human is becomes a mere illusion risen from pure negativity in a quagiavian sense so these are three there is a fourth one but I cannot remember what it was. So these are the main three tenets that drive anti-humanism

and can be accounted for the rise of post-humanism. I think all of these three questions, if taken in morsels, in gradations, can be considered very critical questions. But the way that I see them as being wholly totalized questions, I think that they lead to a certain sort of biases, certain sort of dogmas that we invent essentially, ultimately,

the dogmas of humanism is simply overturned okay questions So Reza, with regards to this sort of essential negativity of the human, do you, I assume you mostly sort of put it in the terms of this kind of post-Heideggerian French tradition,

but do you think it can be thought in Platonic terms? That seems the most useful way to think of it to me and sort of Hegel as thinking that correctly in platonic terms? Is that clear? What you're trying to get me off guard about some of my own cherished ideas. Yes, unfortunately, that is, you can actually, as I said, you can use that sort of question very positively, helpfully, but then you become platonist, unfortunately. I don't have any problem with that but I need to say it I guess the way I see it

is Aristotle naturalizes Plato's idea of the good in terms of natural teleology Hegel updates this concept for the Kantian era of natural science Yeah, and devise causal, natural teleology of life forms and of sort of physical forces and matter from conceptually mediated teleology of beings who can engage in action. and so we the form of the good still operates in all this but we have to distinguish between the form of the good for for in a causal system and the form of the good in a conceptual system

and and plato plato is essentially for plato the form of the good is actually uh do you know what the form of the good is for plato it's actually a principle a principle that can only emanate from a mind a mind is that what will lead you to distinguish the difference between the two principles of the good in naturalistic sense materialist sense and in the conceptually mediated one hence ultimately it is yet undetermined what sorts of form of good Plato actually has in mind in the sense that there is some sort of form

of the good that allows you to actually distinguish between that which is conceptually mediated and that which is causal, right? Well, Plato requires for him to say that that principle, that principle, which is the good, is neither concepts as pragmas, the sort of concepts that we every day, in everyday life we use, right? Linguistic concepts or mathematical concepts,

not mathematical concepts, mathematical, right? Essentially the sort of concepts that mediate between the realm of sensory objects and those of forms. So he needs to have a sort of form of concepts, but we don't call it the concept to actually make a difference between concept mediated and causal stuff right and his answer would be these are just time general ideas that only belong to mind they are the practice of the mind itself in itself

that's that that form of the good is essentially our concepts which are not time bound they are time insensitive everything else moves around them everything is being objectively conditioned by them So it is, in a sense, coming back to Hegel, it's a very Hegelian sort of stuff, right? I mean, how many of you have read Karen Ong, Hegel's Concept of Life? It's a magnificent book, magnificent book. yeah no i mean i i think i i've listened to her give a sort of brief talk on it but it seems like

yeah she articulates what what could be understood as the sort of basic causal how how a life form as a form of sort of homeostasis in an organic physical system generates a sort of basic normativity that it needs to maintain itself uh and how from there you can start to think about how other forms of normativity could develop. In a Hegelian system, there is a definitive, no matter how much Hegelians try to put it, some Hegelians try to put it away or put it under the carpet, there is a definitive element of our Sotelianism in Hegel. Sure. Yeah, I think this is getting a bit out of my depth, but I think where it's useful for me and where I'm just sort of thinking the good as in order to think the good, we have to think what is not right.

That is essentially this negativity, right? And the way that for Plato or for Hegel, this is sort of generating us as purposive creatures that to be human is to think about what could be better. Absolutely. A negativity that does not merely unfold upon itself, but a negativity that generates. Yeah, this is why I love the story. What it is, right? I mean, in a sense, to be honest with you, it's a very trivial Parmenetian question. But it's sort of inescapable. I don't know. No, when I'm saying trivial, I mean it in the sense that it's oft repeated, but not fully understood.

But someone was speaking before about knowing when to stop a meeting and go ahead and do something, right? There's discussion, and then at some point you have to decide it's good enough. We know what to do, right? That in any, in simply like deciding to hold your attention to something and doing any kind of action at all that requires you to sort of modulate, modulate your attention on a thing and then decide I've done it enough. Yes, that comes with the idea that the form of the good, in fact, actually in that sort of sense as a principle of intelligence and intelligibility should instruct you to say that, look, guys, this is a moment that we have to

reconvene. Right? To find new distinctions and create a coordination and so on and so forth. The idea of the good, as I said, for something to be time general does not mean that it is beyond the scope of time sensitive matters but it is always in response to time sensitive matters that's what makes it good otherwise it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't it couldn't be the principle of the good right

Well, yeah. So I guess what why I think this could be helpful is that it like allows us to reframe the kind of tradition of anti-humanism, say, starting with Nietzsche, Heidegger, through French thought, as this kind of anti-Platonistic, we reject the idea of the good and instead we have to direct sort of our not good enough somewhere else. And for Heidegger, it's backward being, right? It's this, we're going back to the origin. We have to figure out how we got here so we can figure out our mistakes, our fallenness. Like this sort of negativity and finitude is still essential to doing any kind of thinking. But whereas for Plato or Hegel, it's the sort of purposiveness in these other,

in the sort of Nietzschean, post-Nietzschean tradition, it gets directed in this sort of backward direction. Does that make sense? Yes, I mean, in a sense, I mean, the question is simply kind of comes to this, that essentially we all trying to reframe the criteria and framing that we had with regard to the question of human being. be. We have just different sorts of methodologies. Not only that, if it was just a question of different methodologies, we would have actually solved the puzzle. But no, the fact that we

are in fact coming always on this pre-neal question that why we have actually to reframe the problem that is already a philosophical question that i don't think that either jalouse altusser or fucco can can answer to there's a a problem only can be answered by the source of people like plato or hagel even though it's still not uh fundamentally sufficient that's just you know that's a history of philosophy yeah

Akshat, you want to say something? My question, actually, is... My apologies. Am I pronouncing your name incorrectly? Is it Ashkat or Ashkot? It's Akshat. Akshat, Akshat, Akshat. So, yes. So my question is, it might as well be dismissed as a trivial question, because it maybe falls into the same category. And it's from a little earlier back in the seminar. So you've been talking about what philosophy can do and what it cannot do and what type

of questions are there around the framing of things and what is the right way to frame these things. And I think there are like many philosophers who would precisely describe the discipline in this way. Whereas the task of philosophy is to find the right questions to ask and then see where we are. But like in the context of where we were earlier in seminar let's say there are all of these middle eastern thinkers there's sadek hidayat there's hassan blasem there is nagib mehfuz who was stabbed because of like his politics there is there are many thinkers there's manto in india so uh with respect to all of these thinkers and this

like uh ongoing critique with respect to what you mentioned uh about that african author uh d decolonizing Africa. So this whole problem within post-colonial thought where these identity groups of the privileged, privileged identity groups in third world countries claim an oppressed identity with the use of the post-colonial, even though let's say in Rwanda, there are like two separate systems. doesn't i actually do that oh i i think that happens quite a lot and that's the point is that he you know uh is is a total beliesner he actually uh doesn't have any problem with colonialism

like uh no right give me orientalism cake and i will eat it and actually have a glass of wine after that. Wine with it, right. So like one example, which everyone is going to hate me for is Gayatri Spivak. So she talks about the subaltern, but the subaltern of her own country despises her. And the reason for that is she talks about the liberation of the subaltern and she has made a career out of it, but her ideas are inaccessible in many ways to the subaltern itself. So, yeah, I mean, you see, this is, this is, I wouldn't say that this is essentially

the problem of what we might call to be people who are coming from the oppressed, and yet they are using the discourse of the oppressor in a subrosa sort of way. Spivak isn't oppressed though. No, no, no, no. I mean, no, I'm saying using the discourse of the oppressed. I would say that this is unfortunately the problem of intellectualism in the Middle East that we do not have or in the subaltern or global sub, we do not have a source of harmonic intellectualism that is totally proud of its origin and does not

need to be western anymore yes exactly so that is what i think but like what my then my question after all of this is in seeing philosophy as a discipline is the ontological political Is there any point in asking this question? And is there any point in looking at new systems and let's situate speculative realism, accelerationism, and all of these new systems within that question, like the politics of the ontological, is this not a political question that philosophy can answer and maybe even does. This is a fundamentally biased answer that I'm going to tell you.

I think that without philosophy, you can't do shit. Literally, you can't. Whether you are an engineer, a technician, or a great scientist, no. In fact, everything that has been done was by way of the ethos of philosophical inquiry. And I would say that philosophy is not actually historically exclusive to the West. No rationalism, no enlightenment, right? Sure, I actually want to say something quite controversial here by saying that, yes, unfortunately, philosophy as we know it.

namely the concrete consciousness of thinking about thinking is unfortunately Greek. No. Better to actually live with it. That sort of self-concrete systematic self-conscious and systematic sort of reflection upon the nature of philosophy came from Greek. But no matter, I mean, there is like, what, like a thousand years of Indo-Iranic, Arabic, and African people who have actually searched into, looked into this sort of stuff, right?

and they were the one who began the very process of enlightenment. Without them, European enlightenment wouldn't have been a thing. Absolutely not. The idea of reason would have not been a thing. I mean, this is why I'm saying that it's always condescending to hear that enlightenment is a western uh product and whoever even if you are a middle eastern indian coming from bengal coming from the north africa and so on so forth you are essentially uh just like a what you might call to be a

doing the bids for the westerners but absolutely that's not true So historically, it is only the idea of enlightenment was not primed or even ready for its flourishing without the sort of stuff, systematic sort of inquiries and political sacrifices that came with it within these regions. but yes philosophy unfortunately even though i said that no one can actually do shit without philosophy philosophy whether you like it or not is conjoined like a twin like conjoined twins with politics this does not mean that they are the same

But unfortunately, sooner or later, the conjoined twins, one has philosophy and one has politics, one embodies politics, one embodies philosophy, you have to have certain kind of coordination in order to actually walk on your feet. But, like, just one small thing I'll say and then I'll mute myself. so like what you said about essentially goes back to thinkers like Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, right? Avichaina Averos. Sure. Right and this whole tradition of exchange essentially of Aristotle of translation that happened there but like what about older systems let's say the Chinese

traditions or old old Confucianists right you see that has that I completely agree with you that yes absolutely all Confucians and you can actually find that sort of thought processes and even Indian systems if you're familiar with them of course yeah like there were there were a lot of unorthodox Indian systems, which thought about epistemology and metaphysics in the sense that the Greeks did. So I think there are like many traditions. I'm very unfamiliar with Africa. I'll be very honest with the entire continent. I don't know animals. There must

be Ethiopians. Yes. Yeah. The thing is that to me, I don't know exactly what my answer is on this situation. For example, I'm quite familiar with the whole, basically, progression of Chinese philosophy since the time of the, you know, a thousand wars, right, between legalist school and Confucian school and so on and so forth, to basically contemporary China, where basically new Confucianists go and settle in Taiwan against the Maoist regime. It is, my answer to that is that

I have seen, at least with Chinese philosophy, that the Chinese philosophy has what Michel Foucault would have called a way of life, right, but not as pure reflection upon reflection, pure systematic, pure reflection upon reflection. I have never seen it in early Chinese philosophy. Reflection upon reflection is actually quite a very different sort of stuff. But then you actually see from 17th century, for example, no Confucianism

transition to new Confucianism in contemporary China. And then, yes, you see that it actually adopts that sort of systematicity of reflecting upon your reflecting upon things, right? But then you also notice that it is actually being fundamentally informed by Greek philosophy at this point. So that's why I do not know. I cannot fully either deny it or say that yes that's things yeah of course everyone can I mean

there are so many you know for example even the Greeks among their cynics ancient cynics had people from Escaitia, you know, the nomads of the steppes. Anarchaisis was one of them. Anarchaisis was famous among the Greeks as the most sincere philosopher of legal, of legalism and social justice. But he wasn't actually a philosopher in a Greek sense, right? it precisely because he did not have a systemist, systematicity that goes into that sort of

thinking, but rather just exemplifying it, exemplifying it. Most likely that I would say that if it comes to idea of exemplification of philosophy, I would say that so many regions across the globe have had already philosophers before the greeks even understood what philosophy is but if it comes to the idea and defining philosophy as a systematicity then probably not thank you absolutely

My dear friends, before Rafael comes and ends our session, you have only one or two questions. Yeah, whoever wants, doesn't matter at this point. I have a question, maybe this is a rather long one. If anybody else has a... Federico, you go ahead. I'm just lurking around as always. No, Federico, it's fine. You ask a question. I was just thinking about platforms that are currently advertised as decentralized in essence and how this relates to the idea of negative anthropology.

Let's say starting from the negative and that eventually ends up with a reactionary or let's say fixed definition of the human. for example let's take cryptocurrency you know that eventually it talks about being decentralized as a system you know which reminds me as well like to the idea of Dorada with his famous essay of sign play and whatever where he also talks about a differentiated or decentralized system of knowledge where differences are put like in let's say put in a cosmos to say at least that eventually returns to the idea of uh the sign of the human you know the the trace of the

human that which is like in in absence defines itself once again stronger than ever and also like that happens as well with cryptocurrency in a certain sense and with uh i saw the conversation that people are having about urbit you know like urbit is like this decentralized platform that eventually goes back to the hierarchy of the human. Like these are, let's say you're supposedly a star or you have a planet, but this is hierarchically defined with what you own to your own name. And this happens as well with cryptocurrency. You have this asset to your own name that is inscribed to your own name. That actually reminds me as well to something that the listen to talk about in anti-edipus about how the there is like this uh falling on

or registering of the process of this decentralized process in let's say in appearance to the figure of the despot so you eventually end up back to the figure of the human even if you try to struggle to go against like you define negatively against the human you just you eventually just like reroute yourself uh and even let's say if we contrast this idea of decentralization like why land for example likes uh enjoys the idea of decentralization uh you know what's beyond the screen what's beyond the flat line you know what's you know you can talk about uh decentralized electrical storms or whatever of information but at the end do you end up with ghosts that reaffirm the image of the human?

You know, be atrassing. Under a rubric of a new ideology, though. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, any sort of attempt, I would say, at what you might call to be dissolving agency, rational agency will result in reinventing it under a metaphysical, a metaphysically hardened ideology of the human. That unfortunately is true.

But I think that I find the whole idea of crypto system, decentralized finance, very appealing, but on humble grounds, not on that, you know, Bitcoin is a solution to a space and time. uh what i actually find it interesting precisely because it makes explicit the economic undergirding of certain sort of cultural and social products you can think about it in nft in uh voting systems proof of mistake and so on and so forth

Look, I think that some of these implicit, I wouldn't say it's socioeconomic, but I would say that economical, social relations should have been made explicit earlier, such that we can actually understand what the nature of the problem is, right? reframing of the problem. I think that for me all idea of DeFi and crypto and stuff have the potential to allow us to reframe more accurately the nature of some of these problems

we have been encountering in classical Marxism and so on and so forth. And that's why I don't have, even though you know kind of a skeptic but I can realize the potentials and why not but yeah I mean the whole idea that decentralization is good by itself as I said any sort of that sort of ontological immanental attack on the human will always end up to create a transcendent image of man on a different level a level that is not in the sky because we can always conquer the skies

but it is under your feet in the whole realm of the ground right where you cannot actually touch it I think Felipe also has a question now but I unfortunately have to go I think we could try doing that thing Rafael suggested in which I stop the recording and pass the hosting rights to you if you want to let's only have one question and then we all go home okay hi it's a quick one uh thanks matthews and i'm sorry hello sir hi there um well so um

i was thinking after this week's reading and being reminded of the misuse of of terms like decent decentralization and uh what what else there was a third one but but principally complexity. This is a very brute question, but is it important to be reminded of the importance of a precisely defined concept of complexity to answer the fourth question of Kant's, what is the human? Should we also answer what is complexity?

uh refinements of questions uh by that i do not mean being pedantic about the weight of the questions but really simply understanding that what these questions are going to be questions of Right? Like, I mean, Kant, despite sometimes as a sloppiness, is actually quite, most of the times, is quite precise about the question of nominant. What the question of nominant is to be question of, right? And the same thing I would say with the question of complexity.

Yes, I do not want to say that you need to have a refined capacity of understanding the question of complexity. I mean, what sort of philosopher can actually put that sort of weight, pedantic weight on such questions? But it is really important to understand what, when we say complexity, what is this question? and most importantly, what sort of question it tries to be the question of. What does it expect, right? And in that moment, yes, then we have to rather conceptually refine complexity

and hence decentralization, precisely because such questions already have the baggage of certain sort of methodology, methods. and praxis that comes with them and we are if we do not refine such questions we often being such as sloppy animals uh carry some unsavory methodologies in order to solve some real problems or vice versa trying to apply problems to fundamentally confused questions or

set up methods that they come up with. Thanks. Love you. okay my dear friends time to go home wish you a great weekend we are going to convene oh who's going to present next week it would be Catherine Hayless and Donna Haraway more on the side of

rather than critical post-humanism in the sense of why the question of cyber or techne became part of critical post-humanism. So more on that sort of end of topic. So who's going to do that? I'm in the group of Haraway. I am as well. Yeah, I'm presenting Haraway too. Me four.

Who was the last one? Me. Oh, okay. Okay, excellent. I think that's it. I mean, as I said, this time, I think that we should actually a little bit move toward why is that cyber positivism of city plans or kind of of like a virtual cyber tech of Horway actually coming into being as an extension of post-humanism. Essentially, what is in cyber that makes it kind of like convergent upon the idea of the

critical policy in the lesson, right? Makes it possible. Okay. Love you all. Take care of yourself. Ciao. Bye. Thank you. Bye, Reza. Bye-bye.