Humanism & Its Discontents

Instructor: Reza Negarestani Date & Time: Oct 22, 29 Nov 5, 12, 19, Dec 3, 10, 17 10:30 to 13 ET

DESCRIPTION: From intellectuals who proudly identify themselves as Kitsch Marxists, to critical theorists who are willing to endorse an uncritical materialist thesis in order to distance themselves from all strains of humanism, conservative or not, to scientists who find reprieve for their questionable political alliances in their cozy accounts of nature, and finally to philosophers who feel the need to sacrifice a little bit of their uncompromising thoughts in favor of being accepted by their academic and political allies, the intellectual landscape we are living in is, by all accounts, bleak. The so-called post-pandemic era has not even begun, but considering the sheer lack of theoretical and practical will and imagination that has gone into combating it, it is safe to say that we have not seen anything yet. The indiscriminate assault on the concept of the human has led us to an impasse where the emancipatory left increasingly displays the characteristics of an impoverished street activism that cannot even combat the anti-vaxxer crowd. While some assume that we should enrich our thoughts with a little bit of contingency or some ineffable outside component here and there, the ambition of this seminar is to revive the unexplored movement within the concept of the human towards its rational inhuman, that is to say, its historically critical ends. A slection of texts which will be presented and read in the Seminar includes Louis Althusser’s The Humanist Controversy, Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman knowledge, N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Peter Wolfendale’s Reformatting Homo Sapiens and Rationalist Inhumanism and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.

IMAGE: Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.