David Roden: Nietzschean Hyperagents
Sunday, December 1st, at 10 am Pacific Time
Meeting Link: (coming soon)
Using Stefan Sorgner’s Nietzschean transhumanism and Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche as a foundation to develop the idea of a posthumanist ethics informed by an immanent process ontology, I essay an inhumanist reading of the temporality of technical ontogenesis via a critique of the account of time in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. Secondly, I introduce the idea of an Unbounded Speculative Posthumanism that rejects transcendental constraints on subjectivity and agency. Within Unbounded Posthumanism the idea of the Will to Power is replaced by a subtractive Xenophilia, a drive for pure difference. Posthuman ethics is replaced by a perverse counter-ethics and boundless experimentations using schematic bodily variants or “Biomorphs.” By considering a radicalised form of technological self-overcoming at which every aspect of an agent’s substrate is rendered amenable to technical alteration, Unbounded Posthumanism marks a transition from “merely plastic” agents, like us, to hyperplastic agents (Hyperagents) for which no form or functions need be stable over time. Finally, I consider the strong objections to Hyperagency based on computational complexity and the qualified and limited counter-objections to the claim that Hyperagency is computationally intractable.
Keywords: hyperagency, speculative posthumanism, critical posthumanism, Nietzsche, Deleuze
Readings:
Deleuze, G. 1968. Difference and Repetition.
Deleuze, G. 1962. Nietzsche and Philosophy.
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