From Technological Humanity to Bio-technical Existence can be framed as a metaphysics of the present. It starts from the current epoch, an era increasingly marked not only by technology but also by technics in the most general sense, and asks how this affects human existence. The book asks what is called technics, what is called humanity, how these relate to one another, and how changes in these notions oblige us to revise the philosophical notion of existence. It investigates how the idea of technological humanity--of technology as an extension and instrument of the human--is discovered and deconstructed by Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, the book presents a new idea of bio-technical existence, one that underlies these philosophers' works without being fully elaborated. This idea--of technics as a condition of humanity that humans share with other living and technical beings--is the author's own philosophical proposition and the final result of the book.
Author(s): Susanna Lindberg
Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Publisher: SUNY Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 356
City: Albany
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. What Is the Human Being?
Anthropotechnics
Overcoming Humanity
Humanity and the Subject of Philosophy
Technical Humanity?
Chapter 2. What Is Called Technics?
Antique Techne tou biou
Modern Machines and Instruments
Contemporary Information Technologies and Biotechnologies
Many Layers of Technics
Chapter 3. The Originary Technicity of the Human Being
Philosophical Anthropology: On Natural Artifice
Martin Heidegger: Inhabiting the World of Technics
Technics and Nothingness
Chapter 4. De/constructing Humanity
Michel Foucault: Technics of Governing Human Life
Subjection and Subjectivation
Technics of Subjection
Self-Technics
Sexuality and the Fold
Transition: Discipline and Technology
Derrida: Technics and Humanity as Terms
Prosthetics
Writing, on Khora
Life as Text and Autoimmunization
Faith in Tele-Technology
Haunting Dasein
After Foucault and Derrida: Technological Existence and the Question of Total Digitalization
Chapter 5. Humanity and Inhumanity of Technical Communities
Bernard Stiegler
Whose Invention?
What?
Who?
Today
From Foucault to Agamben: Apparatus and Use
The Problem Field Left by Heidegger and Foucault
Agamben’s Political Ontology
Apparatus and Use
Stiegler or Agamben?
Chapter 6. From Technological Humanity to Bio-technics
Notes
Bibliography
Index
