︎ God with Machine: Subtracting the Human

September 23, 2022

Drawing on the history of the fictional artificial being, we will address the paradox which this history makes apparent and which can be formulated in the following two ways:

The human being is the being that wants to be human.

The human being is the being that does not want to be human.

The coincidence of wanting and not wanting to be human is characteristic of the human so that the human is inescapably transhuman: a restless quadrangle comprising the animal, the robot, and the god.

With reference to Agamben, it might be claimed that the contemporary anthropological machine, though inactive in the tragic and metaphysical mode of differentiation from the animal, operates in the comic and/or uncanny mode of reduplication with the robot. Will the human be subtracted into the machine, and what will remain of the human then? Novels, films, and videogames will guide us in this quest, which might also throw some light on the geopolitical repercussions of the humanism/antihumanism debates in 20th century philosophy.

(Miglena Nikolchina)