...of space exploration as simultaneously being a conceptual limit positioned against the overgrowing lineage of planetary myopias and at the same time a true rationalist collective form of construction. Now, we know that in fact, you know, even mentioning something like space exploration brings the worst of both neoliberals and, you know, kitsch-marxist reactions as a pure fantasy, as something that is a vain enterprise. Now, the question is, why do you think that exactly this kind of, these modes of action and understanding,
which are implicit in the hypothetical vector of orientation, bring these kind of primal fears in this kind of political project? Is it just a fruit of an acute myopia? Or do they really harbor some sort of a fundamental political edge? So just, I mean, the political edge of, you mean of the kind of neoliberal, you know, appropriation of this, of the possibility, technological feasibility of human enhancement. It's partly, I mean, yes and no.
I mean, look, on one level, it's clear that the kind of the ideological justification is the claim that, you know, these technologies of enhancement are simply continuing, or like the human supplement to processes of selection that are already operative in the biological realm. So you get the metaphysics of the markets, the idea that free markets are this metaphysically ineluctable structure. Nature itself is just a bunch of markets. all life is competition, competition over resources. So therefore, social competition and the kind of the ideal of competition kind of enshrined in the play of market forces
is simply the kind of recapitulating a metaphysical fact. This is just the way the world is. So then the claim is that, you know, if we can, now we're in a position to intervene in the kinds of resources that are available in the, at the human, at the level of human competition. And, of course, who's going to have access? Who's going to enhance themselves? You know, well, the people with, you know, vast amounts of money. All this research is being funded by, I mean, it's banal to, I mean, it's not an illuminating factor. It's all being funded by governments, by corporations, by, you know, neoliberal think tanks. Now, so there's two, one can either kind of say that human enhanced, this technology is itself politically contaminated.
In other words, the desire to manipulate and control or to re-engineer is already politically objectionable. okay but if you do that then you face a problem well you say well look we've been doing this for a long time okay we've been you know engineering ourselves you know more or less with you know albeit kind of uh you know inefficiently for several millennia now so where do you draw the line at what point does or you know our kind of you know uh our refashioning become you know politically objectionable. So in other words, I think that the point is, you know, to insist that the technology itself is not innately evil. It's obviously being developed for, you know,
it's development has been kind of, it's the profit motive, okay? It's just people wanting to kind of, you know, make more money. But that's, so, and that's the only politics that kind of, you know, the profit motive is, well, at least not the only, but kind of, you know, the overriding political factor here. So whether it deserves to be called political or not, but it's clear that simply kind of denouncing and pathologizing these new technologies is, I think it's a very, I think it's a kind of, it's a reprehensible position because you're just disempowering yourself. Someone's going to be doing this stuff. So you either engage with it and try to kind of say,
well, is it possible to appropriate it? Could it be kind of repurposed and refashioned for emancipatory ends? Or is this kind of logic of reengineering itself pathological? I want to suggest that it isn't, and it ought to be repurposed and refashioned. for emancipatory ends. And everything I've talked about here, and I realize that, you know, I haven't said anything. Well, the points, it's important to get the abstract critique out of the way before you can kind of set out the kind of the concrete practical conditions, it seems to me. Because otherwise it's easy to kind of cut this off
at the knees through this kind of Heideggerian critique. I don't know if I answered all your questions. I would like to go back to a question of legitimacy of reason. For if all savages are equally valid, then what would make one savagery more equal than the others? Sorry, if what are all... You said that all savages are indiscernible equal. At least you alluded to a certain doxa that... All savagery is... Ah, okay. All savagery is yes.
So what would make one of them, that is reason, more equal than the others? I mean, what would validate it as a legitimate philosophical project? And at least it seems for me that the current doxa is that it couldn't or it is not celebrated as one that could be philosophically privileged. And in your question, I would like to ask that the reasons for it that we could bring to it should be purely philosophical rather than practically or politically validated as
a project of emancipation or any other political reason. Okay, I'll try and answer it. Correct me if I'm not answering your question. I'll try and answer it. To say that not all savagery, not all savageries, that's the term, you know, savage and brutal, that's Ballard's term for describing kind of progress. The claim that not all savageries are equal is simply the claim that there's, you can use norms to say, we've known since Freud that reason is animated by drives. The drive to dominate, aggression. There are all sorts of libidinal impulses that fuel even highly abstract intellectual activity.
Okay. Now, but that's not an indictment of that activity. The fact that conceptual rationality can be, is libidinally invested and kind of, you know, inflected by these drives is not a kind of, you know, doesn't disqualify it. Unless you think that drives are innately reprehensible. And why would you believe that? Why would you not discriminate between desirable sublimated drives? So let's say that the desire to kind of, you know, if conceptualizing means dominating, okay, well, there's some things, you know, it's good to dominate diseases and germs and polio, okay? You don't want to let those things, you know, be in whatever way they might happen to want to be. So that's, it's as simple as that.
I'm saying that, you know, and I, you know, I'm not, you know, I don't want to have a kind of, you know, I think that psychoanalysis and Freud in particular is perfectly kind of, is kind of an annex of this rational project. It's a reason self-reflection, reason trying to understand its own irrational or kind of pathological residues. But that's, that's good. I mean, that allows you to understand and maybe to identify possible distortions generated by these unconscious factors. But that, again, when I say about the need to integrate contingency, There's nothing, you know, contingency should neither be fetishized as some kind of metaphysical absolute,
nor should it be simply kind of viewed as something, you know, as a pathological contaminant. The point is to kind of, you know, appropriate contingency and let it do its work in a way that can be, that is execrable and that, you know, furthers the resources of understanding. So, otherwise, if you say that all savagery is just savagery, well, and then you say that, you know, if you go down, you know, then you're going down the Nietzschean route, you've got genealogical critique, and you say that, well, even the instincts of morality is itself driven by, you know, cruelty, resentment, you know, all these things. But Nietzsche's point is that that's not, you know, you can't, you know, denounce moralism coherently, okay? You can't give a
moral critique of morality, okay? You can't say that reason is bad because it's all about kind of domination unless you have resources to explain why, you know, domination is bad that are independent of reason. So this is what, you know, I'm trying to kind of say when I say that the savagery and brutality of progress and of cognitive progress is something that needs to be described and explained, not denounced and calumniated. So my question is if Marx is part of this project, how are we going to liberate Marx
from this tradition of post-war Western Marxism, which you somehow refer to as... Reza, you refer to it as kitsch Marxism, or like folk Marxism, people use it. Or how are we going to do that? Well, the point wouldn't be to denounce or dismiss that. There's a complicated history, and this is work I've only... It's a long-term project. This is something I'm interested in working through. it involves a kind of engagement with that tradition. I mean, there are reasons, and there are very complicated historical reasons why Western Marxism developed the way it did. And, you know,
at the time, you know, if you take a book like Dialectical Enlightenment, which obviously were this kind of critique of this identification of rationality with domination is kind of articulated. That seemed to be kind of, you know, kind of a historically warranted critique. People who, you know, defendants of that book will say, well, when they were writing, you know, in 19, you know, in the middle of the Second World War, you know, the historical conditions were such as to kind of, you know, make that a very kind of necessary and timely analysis. Then unfortunately, but unfortunately, it wasn't rectified, or at least it seems that it's been taken up and its contingent historical kind of articulation
has not led people to try to rectify its thesis. They've been absolutized and they're simply kind of accepted as just verities about what's wrong with reason. So I think it can be done, but I think there's a huge... I think Marx's work itself is this vast, incredibly vast, complicated edifice whose relationship to philosophy I'm interested in kind of elaborating. elaborating, but it seems to me that there are kind of, you know, there's a kind of Western Marxism which becomes just kind of, you know, which, you know, the opposition between kind
of, you know, philosophy and critical theory is complicated because of the philosophical contradictions that begin to kind of, you know, vitiate the project of critical theory and the claim that, you know. But I'm not saying no, I'm not junking. I don't want to kind of simply denounce all that stuff. It's very important. But it has been, there's a kind of a cartoon version of it which is very kind of pernicious. The problem isn't so much as sort of like the Marxists sort of like rejecting progress or rejecting thinking about future but to outsource this to bad people. I'm just simplifying it, right? So it's like the technology of capital or even science can keep imagining the future