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The Technology Series - Fifth Session
by: robertoc
||| InC Seminars |||
Tuesday 24th of February
4-6pm | Room 226 Education Building
Goldsmiths, University of London
Technology Series
This lecture will focus on the third essay from Heidegger's
Four Seminars, Le Thor 1969.
"Biophysics and Critical Thought: Heidegger on Cybernetics" by Aécio Amaral
In a seminar delivered in September 1969, Martin Heidegger settles a new topology for the question of being as a counterpart to the overcoming of modern science by what he names biophysics. It entails a set of reconsiderations about the question concerning technology, given the political significance one is to confer upon the appliance of cybernetics and computer language to the domain of biology. Biophysics amounts to a novel stage of the technological mastery over nature, one in which the human may be planned like any other artefact. Accordingly, the human itself is now orderable, put into readiness for consumption and replaceability. My aim is to present the way whereby one, based on this train of argument, might conceive of the current recombinant technologies as a significant unfolding of the intertwining between capitalism and metaphysics. Heidegger’s analysis is ruled by the centrality of the play of enframing [Ge-stell] and enowning [Ereignis] for the question concerning being and technology. Within this play, what is at stake is the human ability to act as the placeholder of being. As an alternative to the forgetfulness of being retained by biophysics, the task of critical thought then demands both an understanding of the motif of letting as the horizon for being, and of the excess contained in the idea of finitude as gift.
Posted on: Friday February 20 2009 ______________________________________
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