“Seeing appearances as the shortcomings of a prior state of true being is indeed boring, I agree.” Warmed by the drinks, I’m warming to my theme. “Let’s work the surfaces, change the signs, fashion the possibility of a kind of being to come! We are not fallen imitations of cisters. We are prototypes of the bio-hacked beings to come! We add to the range of things that humans already edit about their bodies. We do it with the latest techniques, the latest information, in all fields. We are among the avant-garde of possible future humans. What if a world existed that could answer to the desires of our bodies?”

Günther Anders (1902–92) is undoubtedly one of the most interesting, ignored, oppositional, radical, and nearly forgotten philosophers of the twentieth century. Having grown up in Germany, Anders (whose real name was Stern) and his wife Hannah Arendt had to flee the country in 1933. Via Paris, now divorced, Anders came to the United States, where he never really found his place; red-baiting and propaganda against the left made it difficult for him to find a job. In 1950 he decided to return…

Cosmist thinkers founded the “organization of world-transformation”—an organization that was meant to encompass all the types of humanity’s creative activity, all spheres of its theoretical and practical application—on the creative principle found in art. Art opens before humanity an opportunity to move away from the present instrumental, technical progress, which acts upon nature only from outside, by use of mechanisms and machines, to a new, mature type of progress that would be organic, that would transform and spiritualize the world through a living, non-mediated touch.
 

Cosmists regard progress not as a goal or an end in itself, but rather as a necessary sacrifice that is an integral part of humanity’s struggle to survive and evolve. Real development, they believe, can only begin after humanity triumphs over death and learns how to resurrect the dead. This vision suggests that the future becomes the reconstruction or restoration of the past, and the arrow of time bites its own tail.

For cosmism and communism, emancipation is a practice of ascent, or anagogia—a project of virtue. Instead of resistance to evil, there is a fervent assertion of virtue. This does not mean that such assertions always go smoothly.

Like all the formal logic and universal language systems that followed, Llull’s Ars is highly reductive and compressive in its makeup, comprising a set of basic truths designed so that any process can be broken down to a series of fundamental operational steps. This mandated processing of only-one-thing-at-a-time has constrained every computer since, no matter how powerful. The spatial reduction it delivers is not simply a response to archival exigencies but also key to reactivating knowledge.

“Omnia videre, multa dissimulare, pauca corrigere.” In Habemus papam (the best movie by this director, in my opinion), Nanni Moretti portrays the impotence of human beings facing the immensity of historical suffering. God is nowhere in the movie, and the new elected Pope, played by Michel Piccoli, feels unable to express with words the unimaginable chaos of reality in the absence of God. Moretti’s genius in this case foretold a drama that actually unfolded in the Church of Rome…

There is something about the word “corruption” that says so much about what it describes. Corruption. Say it like you were striking a key on a piano to hear the note. Corruption. Corruption. Now try the keys next to it. Interruption. Disruption. Rupture. Rumpus. Rumpere is Latin for tear, split, break. You hear the violence of the act in the sharp “p” and “t” that kill off the “u” right after it resonates. As in shut “up.” R-up-t-ure. R-ap-t-ure does the same. It’s derived from rapere,…

A quintessential aspect of aesthetic modernism in the nineteenth century is that it produced not only a body of artworks and a profusion of – isms , but also a body of institutions and a template of practices that, unlike the art itself, were accepted almost without protest by the European and American art public. 1 As early as the late nineteenth century, the field of exhibition-making also had isolated examples of figures similar to the independent curator of contemporary art—although, of…

Nationalism is not just in Hungary’s backyard, it is in every corner of the house from the basement to the roof. It gets inside with the air and has completely soaked through the orifices of the building: the front door, the windows, the chimney, the front yard. For this reason, Kriszta Nagy, a Hungarian painter who exhibited her work last spring at Godot Gallery in Budapest, feels she has no other option than to paint the leader of Hungary on bedsheets and tablecloths. She explains the…

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my “faithful slave,” as you call yourself! —Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace 1 Both the history of the present and psychoanalysis teach us that at…