Personally, I'm happy to accept this, you know, the Marxist account of alienation and the distinction between the two levels. I think that's really indispensable. And really, I think the attempt to give a positive valence to the notion of alienation in the context of the debates we've had about freedom and improvisation, etc., What it's really targeting is, I guess, arguably a kind of a pre-Marxian or romantic notion
of alienation. So in other words, it wouldn't be the Marxian notion of alienation at all. It would be perhaps a vulgar misinterpretation of what Marx called alienation in terms of this, you know, the idea that there is some kind of subjective kernel of humanity, which is then, you know, which needs to be recovered, which needs to be recovered and reappropriated. So in a way, it's really, what I think is interesting, so in a way, I'm perfectly happy, as I said, to try to, or actually I think, you know, the positive concept of the alienation
that we've tried to articulate can be rendered compatible with Marxian account. Once alienation is distinguished from the whole dialectics of appropriation and expropriation, is that the overcoming of alienation is not about recovering the restitution of a problem or the restitution of propriety. So I clearly think that the technical sense of alienation in Marx has nothing to do with this with this or has little or nothing to do with this metaphysical notion of propriety. So
I, although I haven't done it, I'm personally very interested in trying to reconcile the to in a way the claim that estrangement can be given a positive content, that estrangement is constitutive of what it means to be or what is characteristic or distinctive of the human in some non-essential sense. The idea that this necessary estrangement still requires
overcoming or dissolving the kinds of, you know, the mystificatory alienation that is operative in the commodity forms etc. So, maybe just to connect to some of the claims that the Seno Feminist Manifesto makes, which is a kind of recovering of the notion of universalism. And I wonder, is there any way, do they go hand in hand,
that maybe our capacity to understand our own restringement and alienated condition could be a way to think some form of universalism through our rational capacity. On the other hand, there is a lot of criticisms around universalism because of Eurocentric perspective or the totalizing qualities. So I know that you are concerned with this issue, so if you could touch upon this.
So you're asking about the link between this, the attempt to think or to understand alienation as a positive enabling condition and the link with universalism. I mean, that's already there, I guess, even in Marx with the sense that unlike other creatures, humans have the, precisely because of their social being, have the capacity to remake
themselves. they are not defined by any kind of natural or pre-given ontological determination so that this is just a firm that there's a kind of I'm sorry about this technical We hope to fix it as soon as possible.
Just give us a second. I'm very sorry. We hope to really fix it as soon as possible. If you can bear with us, it would be great. It will be just a second. Please accept my apologies for this. It's certainly not our intention. It's a technical problem that we hope to solve very soon. Hello, Ray.
Hello, Ray. There was this... I apologize, it was probably the connection of my end actually. Okay, no worries. Okay, so you were talking about the social capacity for humans in difference to other animals through, I guess, yeah. Yes, and I guess simply that the thought would be that there's what it means to be human isn't already given or isn't determined in advance and
precisely because of the intrinsically social character of human existence and because history, the historicity of social existence entails that there's going to be that the nature, the kinds of determinations that enter into being human are going to undergo constant transformation through time. And this is tied to the notion of universalism, I guess. That's, you know, other creatures are characterized by an essence which is a specific difference.
and brothers they have a specific kind of beaten which is whose difference other other beings can be specified in advance you know the difference the ways in which humans differ from other creatures is not specific it's not a specific difference it's another kind of difference as some philosophers have put it and that's tied to universalism well that's tied to some kind of notion either of the generic or the universal but i'll use the term generic which in a way makes a lot of sense and which is perhaps
perhaps more useful than the term universal, if the term, because people can always claim anything that lays claim to universality is always actually a particularity, a specificity that's masquerading as something universal but I still think that the term the generosity
of the universal is something that ought to be affirmed and that ought to be maintained as a viable concept despite the obvious, the illegitimate proclamations or appropriations of the universal by, whether it's by Europeans or males or any other kind of specific being that lays claim to universality, which is obviously illegitimate and wrong. but in a way the denunciation itself okay when you denounce the imperialistic
universe of European culture you're doing it from a vantage point already recognizes this as a particularity in a way this is a point that hateful made long time ago is that because the notion of the particular because the concepts of universal and particular are bound up together to denounce the specificity particularity of a culture or a way of life or a way of thinking is always to to pre-suppose
some doctrine of universality that has not yet been specific, has not yet been given positive content. So in other words, the very denunciation of Eurocentrism as colonialism or whatever is a kind of universalism. It's a kind of disavowed universalism. Because otherwise, you wouldn't even be able to denounce this this presumptive or imperialistic universalism as illegitimate, as a kind of, as a power
as an illegitimate paragraph by a particular set of vested interests. Okay, so, and then maybe I'll just ask the last question and then I'll open it for the people in the room. So how... There is a question that I have been asking you for a number of years, and it is how do you conceive the notion of the subject, of subjectivity, how we come from this generic type of understanding then how it can be subjectified, how can we produce a subject out of this
generic understanding of the human. Because for Marx the concept of the subject is capital in the sense that it is what moves us and we become the object in the way that we objectify our level within that. But then how do we basically become a subject? Okay, well, in a way, I guess in a classical Marxian framework, it would be this is what this alienation is about, or the overcoming of alienation. it's about this objectification about not misrecognizing yourself as an object but
recovering your agency and your power your constitutive subjectivity as an agent as a self-determining agent I guess this is you know this is what the or at least the potential for that recovery is associated with the proletariat in the classical conception. So now, well now, obviously, if capital of this self-moving, is the only veritable subject left, this self-moving power, this autonomous self-regulating agency,
the problem then would be what rival agency could be discovered to challenge it but of course I don't think that capital is a subject and clearly that is that's the kind of allure of capital is to you know I mean the mystification is precisely the process through which you are led to attribute agency and self-determination to what is nothing but an extremely complicated objective mechanism and it's a mechanism that
depends upon human practical activities and human attitudes and beliefs so in a way I'm quite I mean I think I mean the you know traditional Marxist on this part and I think that the not the agency of capital is just is entirely you know constituted by estranged or alienated human self-relation I think that's all the capital is and I think it's possible to describe and explain you know the mechanisms through which this this estrangement this mystification are
produced and really I think this I mean just also there's a lot to say about subjectivity but I think that subjectivity is a kind of self-relation It's a kind of self-relation which in a way is very difficult to situate in the objective domain. So in a way, I think philosophers like people like, this is something obviously that people like Zizek have emphasized, but I think the way in which this self-relation is characterized is, you know, can change the
way in which you understand how it can be realized. So this is why I think that it's how we think, how we conceive of ourselves and our effective circumstances makes a decisive difference to our practical capacities, to what it is we can actually do. And I think understanding in a way a proper diagnosis of the mystification that leads us to misrecognize our own self-relation and take it to be the self-relation of an object is you know
the first step the indispensable preliminary towards the recovery or the reassertion of this subjective agent um so what does this i mean two things one is that i think that subjectivity is involved some kind of you know some kind of interpersonal or um you know trans individual relation in other words in order for a subject to be substantiated there has to be you know there has to be a relationship between the I and the we okay so there has to be some
relationship between the individual and the collective you know Hago has this is a kind of standard kind of figure components but then the issue is one about how we understand the conditions under which this the interpenetration of the individual and the collective is you know is realized and my own conviction is that it involves cognition is that you have to be able to to understand and and to know certain things about yourself and your relationship to your fellow beings
and to your objective socio-economic circumstances in order to be capable of acting as an agent or being an agent. So again, all this to say that agency is not simply a given fact or some kind of natural phenomenon. Agency, in a way, has to be constructed. It's a synthetic artist. And it involves both cognitive and practical capacities. So, in other words, I think lots of philosophers give you parts of the, or components of a
theory of agency, but I don't think that there is, you know, definitive or satisfactory theory of subjective agency currently available. So I think it's something that needs to be constructed, it needs to be developed. but it can only be developed one if you if you recognize if one acknowledges the different dimensions that have to come into play in order for something like subjective yet achieved it's something that has to be achieved it's something it's not, you know, we're not we're not already
subjects. Hi, in your recent essay entitled That Which Is Not, you claim that there's a fundamental link between thought and negativity. And you say that this connection is based on the essential normativity of rational thought.
I was just wondering if you could expand on what you claim is the essential negativity of conceptual thought. Okay, yeah, that essay, it's not so recent, but I think some things, you know, I've clarified certain things which I think I was confused about in that essay. And one is that the link, you know, the link between normality and negativity, norms are tied to the rules, but rules, have a very peculiar ontological status, which is to say that rules are not things that exist,
that positively exist in any ordinary sense in which things can be said to positively exist. So in a way this whole, the normative or rule-governed dimension of rationality is something that cannot be positively characterized in an object-bound ontology. In other words, if your conception of what it means for something to be is to be an object or a substance, or what Heidegger called something that is present at hand, then it's difficult, if not impossible,
to conceive of the being of something like a norm or a rule. But obviously, a lot of, I mean, the most interesting, you know, of the 20th century Europeans also has been this kind of, this critique of the identification of being with substance on the one hand, but also being with presence or being with actuality. And in this sense this means that there's more to being than what is ever actual or whatever is objectively at any kind of given time.
So that we have to think, we have to enlarge our conceptual capacities to understand the ways in which things can be said to. And in this regard, so I think that the rules in a way that are constitutive of rationality are tied to processes, to processes that unfold in space and time. And that's, so that's, in a way, one part of the answer to the question is to say that the link between rationality and negativity
is that rationality can't be understood in terms of is objectively present or any positive characteristic or empirically recognizable characteristic of creatures such as homo sapiens. But the other side of negativity or the other kind of facets of the negative is this, in a way, this positive sense of negation is that which supersedes or dissolves positive characterisation. So if rationality involves a kind of self-relation,
it means that our ability to... What makes us rational is our ability to understand ourselves both in our difference from, the subject recognizes its difference from the object, but it also understands its difference, it's different from its set-up, the fact that it cannot, it misrecognizes itself if it tries to give a positive characterization of its own essence or nature. Which is why I think rationality is tied to time and to something. Rationality is not something that is, it's not a norm or a standard that is actualized at any given historical moment.
it's something that needs, that unfolds or unravels through time. And it needs time to be realized. And I think, and this is actually, this is what I take Hegel to have been saying, and this is why I think Hegel actually already, that Hegel's kind of account of the link between rationality and you know the labor of the negative is absolutely kind of crucial so that's something I'm very interested in kind of in green reinvestigating from this this kind of accounts of this account of the nature
rationality which understands concepts as rules and there's more I mean yes there's lots of things that to be said here because I know that this inception has been this kind of let's say this in post-salargin or grandomian conception of rationality as something that is rule government has also been criticized by certain Hegelians who think that it's a kind of, it's a unnecessarily inflationary account of what Hegel means by spirit. And that's something I'm interested in, that's something
I'm kind of working on right now but but I think that the I don't I think that you know the friends of Brandon's account of Hago is unsatisfactory in certain regards and that you know there things that in a way that he leaves out of his account but I think the danger of simply rejecting that I've had is simply retreating to an Aristotelian Hegel, to a conception, an interpretation of Hegel which is simply a kind of Aristotle-African, which ultimately means a kind of a theological,
or a theologized conception of rationality as part of the outer nature. And I wanted to say that reason is unnatural and reason can't be naturalized because of the interdependence between conceptual resources and what it means for something to be natural. Both terms of the relationship are constantly undergoing transformation. Okay, and somebody else has a question? Or is it not in you? Somebody else? Okay, so, yeah, let's come here. Maybe this is the last one. And then we go. Okay, hey.
So you were saying that, not to rephrase what you were saying, but that the process from I to we is a cognitive process. So I'm wondering, in kind of discourse around communization and self-abolition, which in some sense entails xenofeminist projects, how you see that transition being made from a we that recognizes an I within the we to a we that's more self-abolitionary, if you can say that. Does that make sense? a we that is more self abolitionist self abolitionist I don't know where the I doesn't make sense in terms of the we
ok I mean I'll try to answer I mean look in a way I mean I think this for Hegel there's a can be made between the I and the self. And this is, you know, I think Lacan makes this distinction and I think it's a distinction that is arguably also prefigured in Hegel. And the point is that it's the self that is the problem. The self is always a kind of fictitious identification. The self is always
the I misrecognizes itself as a self as a self that has a set of autobiographical and kind of biological determinations of characteristics so I think it's the self that's a problem here the I understood as the the point the point of enunciation or the point from which an assertion unfolds I think is transitive with the we in so far as you understand that the you know every already in German ideals when can't enable there's a clear there's an impersonality of the
eye okay it's the you know it's can says it's the the eye that he or she or it the thing that thinks. And the thing that thinks is this anonymous, impersonal function that is collectively instantiated. So the I as the thinking, as the point of subjectivation or the point where thinking unfolds is, in a way, can be instantiated in a community so that anyone can see I and any you know any member
of that collectivity can identify or rather can recognize its equivalence with every other so the point is to get in order to have this equivalence between the impersonality of the I and the collectivity of the we. So to be able to fuse together impersonality and sociality. And that means that what needs to be abolished is the self as the kind of
whatever the ideological whatever came to ideal or to go misrecognition for prevents you from achieving you know the transition from I to be back again because then the self involves some kind of identification identification in terms of culture in terms of language in terms of biology or psychology or whatever you want I think that that's the term that needs to be liquidated so I don't think so I understand that this kind of problematic of self abolition I think it's it is a self that has to be abolished the abolition of the cell
should facilitate the fusion Ray, we cannot hear you. You have self-disappeared. I don't know if it was in purpose or not, but maybe it was self-valinated, which is coming together and we become we now. Can you hear me? Yeah, hi. Okay. So, yeah, you were at the peak, and maybe we thought it was a performative gesture on your side to self-ablish yourself, or...
So where did it cut out, or what point did it cut out? Anybody? Fusion. Fusion. On Fusion. Yes, I mean, so... The... the problematic of self-abolition, as I understand it, means yes, it is the self that has to be abolished, but the self has to be abolished as what prevents in a way the transitivity between the I and the we, or the fusion of the I and the we. That's how I would kind of
understand the problem of self-abolition. Okay, so I guess we have to go on with the night, unless somebody has like a really, really special need for asking a question, otherwise we go on. Okay, there is somebody who wants to ask a question in desperate need to go ahead. Yeah, please go ahead. All right, so as you gather, we're press the time, so you might want to just be brief. So I'm wondering how we are to make sense of the prophets that have appeared, warning us over the rise of artificial intelligence. Is this, in fact, a coded warning over humans?
Because as far as I can see, the rise of artificial general intelligence is something to be important. So you're asking me what I think about these warnings or how I think what the proper response to them is? How would it make sense of that in relation to questions of intelligence and inhumans? Because they would seem to be warning us against this, whereas in fact this project, your project would be saying the opposite. Okay, let me try and answer. I think, well clearly, I think, you know, being frightened of something is a very poor position to be in.
And so that these, I don't think artificial intelligence is anything to be frightened of. But these, you know, the kind of, you know, these warnings, you know, these kind of apocalyptic prognosis about the dangers it presents. I mean, I think, what I think they're symptomatic of the fact that we can't, what's missing is an understanding of what, I guess, of the link between intelligence and social reality, or the link between, you know, cognitive capacities and social systems.
Now, it looks like human cognitive capacities or human intelligence is tied to... I mean, plausible empirical evidence just suggests that the ramping up of our cognitive capacities was tied to certain pro-transferments. Okay, but obviously, you know, the artificial intelligence, you know, general artificial intelligence, that's a kind of a characterization of intelligence whose link to sociality is not evident.
evidence or it seems that it's not it doesn't seem to be necessarily tied to as far as I know it's not tied to any account of the link between there's nothing inherently social about it, it doesn't seem to depend upon any kind of social structure or social system so two things although I think that the distinction between what is called intelligence intelligence is a kind of generalized problem on the one hand and what philosophers call sapience which is rationality
has to be clarified and I think it has to be clarified so as to understand the conditions under which artificial intelligence would not be threat but would be the development of this intelligence would be something that would be tied to our own self-transformation. So in other words it's because really the development of artificial intelligence is unfolding in conditions of well to go back to the, you know, of alienation, of conditions where we don't quite understand
what intelligence is for, what intelligence can do, and what, how intelligence can, you know, transform our own possibilities of existence, that you know, intelligence is understood, this artificial intelligence is understood as a threat to human you know to human existence and which I think is a symptom of a you know a very in a lamentable state of affairs basically so I think you know once the link between intelligence and social sapience is clarified then then you
know kind of machine intelligence would be the development of machine intelligence would be fully congruent to developments of collective collective cognitive capacity or collective social intelligence so so yes research and the development of artificial intelligence is to be affirmed but it can't simply be the conditions under which it's being developed are so tight are trying to a set of very peculiar and kind of and you know frankly pathological social circumstances. And that's why it's perceived as either as something exciting if one is
a kind of a kind of an apocalyptic exposition or as something that is terribly threatening for standards humanism so I think that that is just a once again that's a false dichotomy or something that should be seen to be a false dichotomy there's nothing about the human that is inherently refractory to intelligence or vice versa I think that the perception that there is it's either intelligence or humanity I think there's a terrible enlightenment of
our current kind of you know Islamic conversations Okay, on that note thanks so much for being with us and unfortunately we have to keep going with this evening which hopefully will be something special. Yeah, thanks so much, Ray. Really, really appreciate it. Sorry about the