Seminars & Lectures

Talk: Why Preserve the Name ‘Human’ by Keti Chukhrov

Friday, Jun 13, 2014
7:30pm -> 9:30pm
Ashkal Alwan

Ruminations about the universe, cosmic space, and the radical evolution of post-human society in a planetary environment are traditionally conditioned by dispensing of the finiteness of human nature and the human mind. To ally oneself to the dimension of cosmology implies transcending the limits of human existence, and connecting with the realia that exceed what has so far been titled as human. To acquire higher intelligence or supreme ecological sensitivity, one has to attain the dimension of the alien, of the abstract machines of post-capitalism, of the accelerative streams of global potentialities of production, of the trans-historical cosmological matter.

However, in works by Russian cosmists, or later in the theories of Russian avant-garde about new humanity, it was precisely the cosmological and the noospheric sublation of natural, social or civil conditions of human existence that was considered to be human per se. The question then would be the following: why was it that the notion of “human” had to be kept intact in the various futurological theories of historical socialism?