On the Scissiparity of Geist:
Reason & its Outside

Instructor: J.-P Caron Date & Time: June 28, July 5, 12, 19 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: In his 2020 article “Geist and Ge-Stell: Beyond the Cyber-Nihilist Convergence of Intelligence,” Hilan Bensusan conjectures the possibility of what he calls a scissiparity of Geist. Coming from the framework sketched in his “Cosmopolitical Parties in the Post-Human Age” (2020/1). Bensusan fleshes out in “Geist and Ge-Stell” the tenets of what he calls a nihilist position, understood in a Heideggerian fashion as the result of Ge-stell, positionality, the understanding of the world as a standing reserve for a command to be seized- the “unworlding of the Earth”. (Bensusan, p. 95)

Thought of in that sense, modern science amounts to a form of nihilism for Bensusan, one that encounters its zenith in Reza Negarestani’s conception of Geist- or Reason- as its own artifact, entailing the simultaneous artificialization of itself and the world, as Reason strives for the expansion of intelligibility. Against what Bensusan reads as a convergent form of Reason, taken to be implicit in Negarestani’s conception, the argument from the Scissiparity of Geist make plausible a divergent form of Reason, whereby different forms of Geister separate and become unintelligible for each other. As Bensusan says, “Geist-B cannot have any content from the point of view of Geist-A because there is no pairing of commands that could be sanctioned by the community of Geist-A. In other words, from the point of view of Geist-A, those commanded by Geist-B are obeying to no command whatsoever even if there is a regularity that can be detected.” The guarantor of this possibility for Bensusan is what he deems the phenomenological character of Reason that characterizes the inhumanist understanding of rule-following: for him, according to the inhumanist, there is no reality of rule-following beyond our ability to grasp it. Therefore, the defense of an externalism of rules comes hand in hand with the idea of scissiparity.

While this is a particular solution to the problem, one may recognize within this piece of debate a way to encapsulate and parse out a number of contemporary theoretical positions. While Bensusan himself is trying to defend a form of perspectivism from his argument, it is possible to recognize in it Roden’s disconnection thesis that conjectures that an entity, while being a descendant of what Roden calls a Wide Human, may cease to belong to Wide Human as a result of technical alteration; as it is possible to recognize in it the form of the Outside in accelerationism- split between unconditional and left accelerations, with competing conceptions of reason/intelligence that might be read off Bensusan’s argument.

This Seminar presents the argument, propose a short history of this kind of argument in the guise of the “radical translation/interpretation schemes” that have been proposed in analytic philosophy (Dummett, Quine, Davidson, etc), and stage a confrontation between the different concepts of reason that are embedded in the aforementioned positions.

Session 1: Geist und Geister
We present some elements of the understanding of Geist by Negarestani, and of its critique by Bensusan.

Session 2: On Radical Translation
We revisit some radical translation/interpretation schemes with an eye into understanding Bensusan’s argument within a specific history of analytic philosophy.

Session 3: Perspectivism and Speculation.
We bring back the discussion to the present time, with an approach to Bensusan’s Indexicalist position as an example of perspectivism and to David Roden’s “Disconnection thesis” regarding the form of the posthuman to come. Both positions mobilize forms of opacity to reason in different ways, relating to the radical interpretation schemes visited in Session 2.

Session 4: On Reason and Perspective.
We bring back the concept of Reason or Geist, by attempting to defend an account of logicity compatible with the perspectival takings-as that inform Negarestani’s critics.

 

IMAGE: Stefanie Allen, Imagined Environments, 2020.

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