What do you think?
Rate this book
Hegel in a Wired Brain
In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel, Slavoj Žižek gives us a reading of the philosophical giant that changes our way of thinking about our new posthuman era. No ordinary study of Hegel, Hegel in a Wired Brain investigates what he might have had to say about the idea of the 'wired brain' – what happens when a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine emerges. Žižek explores the phenomenon of a wired brain effect , and what might happen when we can share our thoughts directly with others. He hones in on the key question of how it shapes our experience and status as 'free' individuals and asks what it means to be human when a machine can read our minds.
With characteristic verve and enjoyment of the unexpected, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in now, shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian.
With characteristic verve and enjoyment of the unexpected, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in now, shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian.
201 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2020
About the author
Slavoj Žižek
588 books6,626 followersSlavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
February 10, 2024
Eine spannende Auseinandersetzung mit dem nächsten evolutionären Schritt in der Menschheitsgeschichte: Die direkte neuronale Vernetzung, d.h. die Zusammenschaltung von Gehirnen (bzw. Gehirn+Computer) zu einem kollektiven Bewusstsein. Das klingt noch nach Science-Fiction, könnte aber in nicht allzu ferner Zukunft tatsächlich Realität werden. Erste konkrete Forschungs- und Entwicklungsarbeiten laufen bereits, u.a. engagiert sich Elon Musk mit seinem Projekt Neuralink sehr stark auf diesem Gebiet. Die Frage ist, was ein solches Kollektivbewusstsein für Auswirkungen auf unsere Selbstwahrnehmung als Menschen hat? Was könnten wir gewinnen, was verlieren? Bleibt im Raum der geteilten Erfahrungen noch etwas vom individuellen Subjekt bewahrt oder bedeutet der Eintritt in die Singularität den Verlust unserer Persönlichkeit? Werden wir für die Maschine (der große Andere) völlig transparent sein? Slavoj Žižeks kritische Analyse dieser drohenden Utopie ist sehr lesenswert, wenn auch in Teilen schwer verständlich. Der Buchtitel ist dabei leicht irreführend, insofern er die Betonung auf Hegel legt. Dabei stützt sich Žižek gleichermaßen auf die Psychoanalyse von Lacan, wie auf die Philosophie von Hegel. Ein Problem für mich war Žižeks Hang zur Abschweifung. Ist man gerade noch mit dem lacanschen Unbewussten beschäftigt, sieht man sich plötzlich mit dem Thema Geschlechtsidentität konfrontiert, um gleich darauf bei Greta Thunberg und der Klimakatastrophe zu landen. Das ist mir oft ein bisschen zu erratisch gewesen. Trotzdem halte ich das Buch für eines der interessanteren unter den Neuerscheinungen im Hegel-Jubiläumsjahr. Statt der Biografie des Philosophen, rückt Žižek Hegels Denken und dessen praktischen Nutzen für die Bewertung zukünftiger Entwicklungen in den Fokus.
September 25, 2023
But do we live in a dystopian time or do we rather live in a time of dystopian fantasies?
Slavoj instead of approaching the implications of mind to mind technology gives us a half dozen essays about communication/epistemology, emancipatory politics, the Unconscious and the distinctions between genius and apostles. His approach lies between the disparate approaches. I found this an engaging strategy. The book is predicated on the question as to why we should consider Hegel regarding The Singularity when the concept of neural networks occurred well over a century after that great German Idealist? Well, as to be expected, Lacan appears nearly as often as Hegel and it is certainly worth the ride. Sidebars on Trump and Trans Identity are interesting and likely warrant their own salvoes of essays.
Slavoj instead of approaching the implications of mind to mind technology gives us a half dozen essays about communication/epistemology, emancipatory politics, the Unconscious and the distinctions between genius and apostles. His approach lies between the disparate approaches. I found this an engaging strategy. The book is predicated on the question as to why we should consider Hegel regarding The Singularity when the concept of neural networks occurred well over a century after that great German Idealist? Well, as to be expected, Lacan appears nearly as often as Hegel and it is certainly worth the ride. Sidebars on Trump and Trans Identity are interesting and likely warrant their own salvoes of essays.
May 29, 2020
Hegel in a Wired Brain from Slavoj Zizek is another journey into the seemingly already wired brain of Zizek, though with a different meaning.
After seeing several videos and one talk in person where he presented many of these ideas over the past year or two, it is great to finally have the book to read. And it does not disappoint. His brain seems to work faster than he can sometimes articulate so his talks can often require multiple repetitions to catch all he is saying. Once you have connected all the dots he connects, he usually makes more sense than not. I don't always agree but I always appreciate the challenges he presents to my ways of thinking.
I'm not going to go on for paragraphs paraphrasing the book for you, that really serves little purpose since it is in the arguments he makes and not strictly the quotable phrases where the book has its value. His use of Hegel is enlightening even in places where I don't quite read Hegel the same way, but at no point do I think he crossed that line from a different understanding to an intentional misunderstanding to serve his argument.
Because Zizek touches on so many ideas and disciplines there are a multitude of ways into the text, and likely just as many takeaways. Certainly his references to singularity throughout and the concluding argument are the larger areas that everyone will takeaway. One area I was especially interested in was his discussion of internal and external communication. Whether having some type of direct connection between brains, between people, would actually bypass the limits of language. I tend to fall on the side that believes it won't make communication as clear as those who believe it will. Zizek highlights the strengths and drawbacks of positions while always making his own views readily apparent.
I highly recommend this for readers interested in where we are going with AI and direct connections whether through implants or some as yet unknown method. This will also be of interest to those with an interest in Hegel and philosophical thought in general. Both for the ideas presented and as an example of how to use a previous thinker's ideas to build upon. Zizek's writing is accessible and his explanations of how he is using Hegel, and others, does help to open the readership up to more readers. That said, some familiarity with Hegel at a minimum will enhance your understanding of the arguments. But for Zizek's big picture it isn't necessary to have a thorough understanding of Hegel. Much like those science books that have a lot of advanced math and theory but are presented in as jargon-free a manner as possible. Scientists get a lot from them but non-scientists can also make sense of the bigger arguments without fully grasping the nuances.
As a brief aside, there are several videos on YouTube where Zizek discusses these ideas and a search for Zizek Hegel in a Wired Brain should bring them up. They won't replace the book but they may help to make some ideas clearer, especially for those who like aural learning.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
After seeing several videos and one talk in person where he presented many of these ideas over the past year or two, it is great to finally have the book to read. And it does not disappoint. His brain seems to work faster than he can sometimes articulate so his talks can often require multiple repetitions to catch all he is saying. Once you have connected all the dots he connects, he usually makes more sense than not. I don't always agree but I always appreciate the challenges he presents to my ways of thinking.
I'm not going to go on for paragraphs paraphrasing the book for you, that really serves little purpose since it is in the arguments he makes and not strictly the quotable phrases where the book has its value. His use of Hegel is enlightening even in places where I don't quite read Hegel the same way, but at no point do I think he crossed that line from a different understanding to an intentional misunderstanding to serve his argument.
Because Zizek touches on so many ideas and disciplines there are a multitude of ways into the text, and likely just as many takeaways. Certainly his references to singularity throughout and the concluding argument are the larger areas that everyone will takeaway. One area I was especially interested in was his discussion of internal and external communication. Whether having some type of direct connection between brains, between people, would actually bypass the limits of language. I tend to fall on the side that believes it won't make communication as clear as those who believe it will. Zizek highlights the strengths and drawbacks of positions while always making his own views readily apparent.
I highly recommend this for readers interested in where we are going with AI and direct connections whether through implants or some as yet unknown method. This will also be of interest to those with an interest in Hegel and philosophical thought in general. Both for the ideas presented and as an example of how to use a previous thinker's ideas to build upon. Zizek's writing is accessible and his explanations of how he is using Hegel, and others, does help to open the readership up to more readers. That said, some familiarity with Hegel at a minimum will enhance your understanding of the arguments. But for Zizek's big picture it isn't necessary to have a thorough understanding of Hegel. Much like those science books that have a lot of advanced math and theory but are presented in as jargon-free a manner as possible. Scientists get a lot from them but non-scientists can also make sense of the bigger arguments without fully grasping the nuances.
As a brief aside, there are several videos on YouTube where Zizek discusses these ideas and a search for Zizek Hegel in a Wired Brain should bring them up. They won't replace the book but they may help to make some ideas clearer, especially for those who like aural learning.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
April 24, 2023
In Hegel in a Wired Brain, Slavoj Zizek applies Hegelian phenomenology to contemporary culture and technology, revealing the profound effects that the wired brain has on the subject. As Zizek argues, the wired brain creates a new form of addiction, as individuals become dependent on the constant flow of information and stimuli from the digital world. Yet at the same time, the wired brain also creates a new form of slavery, as individuals are subjected to constant surveillance and control by technology, leading to a new kind of totalitarianism. Zizek warns that the advent of Elon Musk's Neuralink technology could exacerbate these tendencies, allowing for even greater control over ourselves. Yet despite these dangers, Zizek also sees potential for the wired brain to create new forms of community and shared experience, breaking down traditional boundaries and creating a more inclusive society.
April 16, 2021
Slavoj Zizek legt einen Text vor, der nur scheitern kann. In einer wahrlich ungeheuerlichen Geste versucht Zizek sich an der Rolle eines Nostradamus der kommenden total digitalisierten Welt. Hier hilft es nicht, dass der Autor sich und die Lesenden auf Tritt und Schritt daran erinnert, dass man ja nicht in die Zukunft schauen kann, dass er also im Grunde gar nicht weiß, wovon er spricht, und ja, nicht einmal, wie er frank und frei zugibt, die technologischen Details begreift, noch die Mittel dazu besitzt, sie begreifen zu lernen.
Rhapsodisch dekliniert er Lacan und Hegel in Verbund mit Marx durch die gegenwärtige Zukunft (die, die wir uns einbilden, eintreten könnte), notwendigerweise ohne Kenntnis der zukünftigen Gegenwart (die wir einfach nicht kennen, weil sie noch nicht eingetreten ist). Geradezu wagemutig entblößt er seine Taktik, von Dingen zu sprechen, die er nicht kennt, über Prozesse zu urteilen, die ihn nichts angehen, über Entscheidungen zu fabulieren, die ihn nicht betreffen. Nein, Zizek betrifft alles. Leider aber nur in seiner Entscheidung als entleerte Abstraktion einer politischen Emanzipation das Wort zu reden, von der weit und breit keine Spur zu sehen ist, und von der wir, ich weiß nicht was, uns alles und nichts erhoffen können.
Es berührt eigentümlich, dass Zizek als ausgewiesener historischer Materialist die einfachsten Umstände ignoriert, um eine Art psychoanalytischer Tour de Force über die Lesenden ausschütten zu können – auch in einer völlig vernetzten Welt müssen Menschen essen, sich waschen, trinken, d.h. in körperlichen Wechselwirkungen mit Umwelten treten, so dass eine völlig virtualisierte Existenz nicht nur eine schlechte Abstraktion nach Hegel bleibt, sondern eine ärgerliche Fiktion. Selbstredend weiß dies Zizek alles, aber da die Konsequenz, daraus zu ziehen, hieße zu schweigen, oder wirklich in das Feld der künstlichen Intelligenz einzusteigen, geht er nonchalant darüber hinweg und faselt vom Ewigalten.
Das Ewigalte jedoch ist interessant, und wer noch nichts von Zizek gelesen hat, wird auf seine Kosten kommen. Das Buch selbst aber als Stellungnahme zur digitalen Revolution, visioniert von Elon Musk, von der Singularität im Sinne von Ray Kurzweil, muss als gescheitert angesehen werden. Die Stellungnahme ist keine. Sie ist ein verzweifelter Versuch, um die Arbeit des Begriffs herumzukommen. Die Arbeit des Begriffs, wie Zizek als Hegelianer wissen sollte und weiß, besteht in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem historischen Material – dem aber geht Zizek aus dem Weg. Statt dessen redet er über Beckett, Greta Thunberg, schwadroniert über „Matrix“, Alfred Hitchcock, Glory Holes und Trump.
Als Improvisation zu ertragen, aber nicht unter diesem Vorzeichen. Ärgerlich als Projekt. Gut nur als Gedankenanstöße, was es heißt, wenn alle die Gedanken von allen lesen könnten. Hervorragend ist und bleibt Zizek in der Interpretation von Lacan und Hegel und Marx. Also lieber „Weniger als Nichts“ lesen oder „Sex und das verfehlte Absolute“. Beides lesenswerte Bücher.
Rhapsodisch dekliniert er Lacan und Hegel in Verbund mit Marx durch die gegenwärtige Zukunft (die, die wir uns einbilden, eintreten könnte), notwendigerweise ohne Kenntnis der zukünftigen Gegenwart (die wir einfach nicht kennen, weil sie noch nicht eingetreten ist). Geradezu wagemutig entblößt er seine Taktik, von Dingen zu sprechen, die er nicht kennt, über Prozesse zu urteilen, die ihn nichts angehen, über Entscheidungen zu fabulieren, die ihn nicht betreffen. Nein, Zizek betrifft alles. Leider aber nur in seiner Entscheidung als entleerte Abstraktion einer politischen Emanzipation das Wort zu reden, von der weit und breit keine Spur zu sehen ist, und von der wir, ich weiß nicht was, uns alles und nichts erhoffen können.
Es berührt eigentümlich, dass Zizek als ausgewiesener historischer Materialist die einfachsten Umstände ignoriert, um eine Art psychoanalytischer Tour de Force über die Lesenden ausschütten zu können – auch in einer völlig vernetzten Welt müssen Menschen essen, sich waschen, trinken, d.h. in körperlichen Wechselwirkungen mit Umwelten treten, so dass eine völlig virtualisierte Existenz nicht nur eine schlechte Abstraktion nach Hegel bleibt, sondern eine ärgerliche Fiktion. Selbstredend weiß dies Zizek alles, aber da die Konsequenz, daraus zu ziehen, hieße zu schweigen, oder wirklich in das Feld der künstlichen Intelligenz einzusteigen, geht er nonchalant darüber hinweg und faselt vom Ewigalten.
Das Ewigalte jedoch ist interessant, und wer noch nichts von Zizek gelesen hat, wird auf seine Kosten kommen. Das Buch selbst aber als Stellungnahme zur digitalen Revolution, visioniert von Elon Musk, von der Singularität im Sinne von Ray Kurzweil, muss als gescheitert angesehen werden. Die Stellungnahme ist keine. Sie ist ein verzweifelter Versuch, um die Arbeit des Begriffs herumzukommen. Die Arbeit des Begriffs, wie Zizek als Hegelianer wissen sollte und weiß, besteht in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem historischen Material – dem aber geht Zizek aus dem Weg. Statt dessen redet er über Beckett, Greta Thunberg, schwadroniert über „Matrix“, Alfred Hitchcock, Glory Holes und Trump.
Als Improvisation zu ertragen, aber nicht unter diesem Vorzeichen. Ärgerlich als Projekt. Gut nur als Gedankenanstöße, was es heißt, wenn alle die Gedanken von allen lesen könnten. Hervorragend ist und bleibt Zizek in der Interpretation von Lacan und Hegel und Marx. Also lieber „Weniger als Nichts“ lesen oder „Sex und das verfehlte Absolute“. Beides lesenswerte Bücher.
August 13, 2021
In this Hegelo-Lacanian critique of Elon Musk's Neuralink project, Žižek presents the following problem to computer scientists: can A.I. distinguish between different symbolic concepts that are the same in a materialistic perspective?
This simple subjective problem is inspired by a famous film joke from Ninotchka (1939), that Žižek already introduced in many of his other books:
- "Can I get coffee without cream?"
The waiter answers:
- "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream, we only have milk,
so you only can get coffee without milk.’’
Can matrix algebra innovate such a thing or even "get it"?
As the cyberpunk and biopunk underground cultures accelerate in real life, with people having self-surgery to obtain magnetic-fingers or a sense-of-north in a knee, among other readily-available superpowers, it's obvious that we can easily alter perception and therefore expand the mind in a myriad of (if not infinite) ways.
Elon Musk's ideas of ending subjectivity and improving communication for humanity through hard-and-wetware symbiosis with internet-like-A.I. is however, problematic to say the least.
If you are skeptic of Silicon Valley's religious-esque tech-singularity, right-wing versions of Accelarationism on the political sphere, or Neuralink's long list of propositions (e.g. curing Alzheimer's in "the next few years" and eventually schizophrenia, etc.) you should really read this book. Human-and-machine merging will not be that straightforward, or good...
This simple subjective problem is inspired by a famous film joke from Ninotchka (1939), that Žižek already introduced in many of his other books:
- "Can I get coffee without cream?"
The waiter answers:
- "Sorry sir, we don’t have cream, we only have milk,
so you only can get coffee without milk.’’
Can matrix algebra innovate such a thing or even "get it"?
As the cyberpunk and biopunk underground cultures accelerate in real life, with people having self-surgery to obtain magnetic-fingers or a sense-of-north in a knee, among other readily-available superpowers, it's obvious that we can easily alter perception and therefore expand the mind in a myriad of (if not infinite) ways.
Elon Musk's ideas of ending subjectivity and improving communication for humanity through hard-and-wetware symbiosis with internet-like-A.I. is however, problematic to say the least.
If you are skeptic of Silicon Valley's religious-esque tech-singularity, right-wing versions of Accelarationism on the political sphere, or Neuralink's long list of propositions (e.g. curing Alzheimer's in "the next few years" and eventually schizophrenia, etc.) you should really read this book. Human-and-machine merging will not be that straightforward, or good...
January 17, 2021
Bei dem Titel von Slavoj Žižeks Buch „Hegel im verdrahteten Gehirn“ könnte man davon ausgehen, dass es sich bei dem Buch um eine Schrift handelt, die sich mit der Philosophie Hegels auseinandersetzt. Das ist nicht der ganz der Fall.
Žižek schaut in seinem Buch auf unsere Gegenwart und mögliche Zukunft. Die große Frage in „Hegel im verdrahteten Gehirn“ ist: Was würde mit uns passieren, wenn unsere Gehirne mit einem Computer und untereinander verbunden wären?
Selbstverständlich kann darüber nur spekulativ gesprochen werden.
So spekuliert Žižek darüber welche Auswirkungen eine solche Verdrahtung auf unser Liebesleben haben könnte, wenn mein Gegenüber direkt mit meinem Gehirn verbunden wäre. Was würde das dann für die Kommunikation bedeuten? Was wäre mit der nonverbalen Kommunikation? Gleiches gilt für unsere staatlichen Institutionen. Würden wir durch die Verdrahtung unserer Gehirne in einen Überwachungsstaat geraten, in dem die Polizei immer wüsste, wo wir sind und was wir machen?
Die vermutliche wichtigste Frage die Žižek stellt ist: Wer hätte die Kontrolle über den Computer, mit dem wir verbunden sind? Eine staatliche Organisation, ein Unternehmen oder gar eine Einzelperson?
So fern der Gedanke einer solchen Verdrahtung uns im Moment noch erscheinen mag, ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass so etwas in den nächsten 10 bis 20 Jahren Wirklichkeit wird nicht allzu unrealistisch. Allen voran arbeitet ein Unternehmen genau darauf hin: Neuralink, gegründet von Elon Musk.
Hegel spielt in diesem Buch aber natürlich doch eine Rolle, und zwar eine nicht ganz kleine. Anhand von Hegels Philosophie hangelt sich Žižek durch sein Buch. Wer jetzt aber glaubt, er müsse Hegels Philosophie kennen oder gar verstanden haben, um dieses Buch zu lesen, der irrt. Ich würde sogar so weit gehen zu sagen, dass dieses Buch auch ohne jemals den Namen Hegel gehört zu haben, trotzdem lesbar und verständlich ist. Zum Nachdenken regt das Buch, mit als auch ohne Hegel, an.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
Žižek schaut in seinem Buch auf unsere Gegenwart und mögliche Zukunft. Die große Frage in „Hegel im verdrahteten Gehirn“ ist: Was würde mit uns passieren, wenn unsere Gehirne mit einem Computer und untereinander verbunden wären?
Selbstverständlich kann darüber nur spekulativ gesprochen werden.
So spekuliert Žižek darüber welche Auswirkungen eine solche Verdrahtung auf unser Liebesleben haben könnte, wenn mein Gegenüber direkt mit meinem Gehirn verbunden wäre. Was würde das dann für die Kommunikation bedeuten? Was wäre mit der nonverbalen Kommunikation? Gleiches gilt für unsere staatlichen Institutionen. Würden wir durch die Verdrahtung unserer Gehirne in einen Überwachungsstaat geraten, in dem die Polizei immer wüsste, wo wir sind und was wir machen?
Die vermutliche wichtigste Frage die Žižek stellt ist: Wer hätte die Kontrolle über den Computer, mit dem wir verbunden sind? Eine staatliche Organisation, ein Unternehmen oder gar eine Einzelperson?
So fern der Gedanke einer solchen Verdrahtung uns im Moment noch erscheinen mag, ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass so etwas in den nächsten 10 bis 20 Jahren Wirklichkeit wird nicht allzu unrealistisch. Allen voran arbeitet ein Unternehmen genau darauf hin: Neuralink, gegründet von Elon Musk.
Hegel spielt in diesem Buch aber natürlich doch eine Rolle, und zwar eine nicht ganz kleine. Anhand von Hegels Philosophie hangelt sich Žižek durch sein Buch. Wer jetzt aber glaubt, er müsse Hegels Philosophie kennen oder gar verstanden haben, um dieses Buch zu lesen, der irrt. Ich würde sogar so weit gehen zu sagen, dass dieses Buch auch ohne jemals den Namen Hegel gehört zu haben, trotzdem lesbar und verständlich ist. Zum Nachdenken regt das Buch, mit als auch ohne Hegel, an.
Eine klare Leseempfehlung!
September 25, 2023
Zu viele Referenzen, die es (vor allem Laien) erschwert, einen Zusammenhang zu sehen. Grade wenn man zu viele Beispiele aus der Popkultur hernimmt, bewirkt man kein besseres Verständnis. Für Leute die vermeintliche Pioniere wie E. Musk als gute, intelligente Menschen sehen, ist das Buch sehr empfehlenswert. Grade Hegel und Lacan gibt Slavoj Žižek gut und passend zum Thema wieder. Das letzte, lange Apokalypse-Kapitel ist auch verwirrender als es beabsichtigt zu sein scheint.
An seine alten, wirklich sehr guten Bücher zur Philosophie und Psychoanalyse kommt es mitnichten ran. Er ist als Wissenschaftler deutlich besser gewesen.
Großes Plus: Die Kritik an Stalin, der UdSSR sowie deren Fans ist immer wieder gut, da gerade die Deutsche Linke eine zu romantische Vorstellung von hat.
An seine alten, wirklich sehr guten Bücher zur Philosophie und Psychoanalyse kommt es mitnichten ran. Er ist als Wissenschaftler deutlich besser gewesen.
Großes Plus: Die Kritik an Stalin, der UdSSR sowie deren Fans ist immer wieder gut, da gerade die Deutsche Linke eine zu romantische Vorstellung von hat.
June 1, 2021
I see you, Zizek. I found the differences from his Verso publications quite interesting. This was an English publication so he seems to be grappling with the general conservatism of all English people (all news services are owned by Rupert Murdoch in the UK besides the BBC). He slips in his Communism as much as possible but in a way to be more palatable to the less radical brits. Also he doesn’t assume you’ve read all the other books that came before so he sums up all his theories really nicely whereas in his verso publications he’ll just assume you’ve read and know what he is talking about. The most notable difference however is that in Verso (for an American audience) God is always capitalized and in this English publication god is not capitalized - I think this highlights the difference between European atheism and the US’ mostly disavowed connection to religion (god is dead in Europe but God is still quite alive in the US).
December 19, 2020
As far as Zizek goes, this is maybe the worst he can do. At his best, Zizek presents an ontology of psychoanalytic insights through the disjoints in his tapestry of jokes and anecdotes. In this book, nothing seeps through the cracks. We get a bizarre collection of virtually unrelated insights about two unrelated technological phenomena: Neuralink and the Singularity. 200 pages of a raging series of compulsive repetitions of his usual refrain, from Lacan to Hegel and back again, with no seeming connection between the concrete content of this jumps.
The central argument, drawn through Platonov's bibliography, with particular emphasis on his notion of "Тоска", is that the human subject involves irreducible negativity and tension, found in sexual desires, that disallows the unifying integration of the phantasy of the Singularity. Just as the transition from the early to the late Platonov involves the acceptance of sexuality -- although a very different sexuality -- within communism. However, even this argument, despite the fits of Hegelio-Lacan platitudes, is entirely unconvincing. Should we not, together with Platonov, keep our "aufhebung" -- for us the Singularity, for him communism? This is not a definitive argument, it simply raises the interesting question: "What might sexual desire in the Singularity look like?" It remains unanswered. Hell, it even remains unasked, we are simply lead to it. We are argued around it in circles.
The central argument, drawn through Platonov's bibliography, with particular emphasis on his notion of "Тоска", is that the human subject involves irreducible negativity and tension, found in sexual desires, that disallows the unifying integration of the phantasy of the Singularity. Just as the transition from the early to the late Platonov involves the acceptance of sexuality -- although a very different sexuality -- within communism. However, even this argument, despite the fits of Hegelio-Lacan platitudes, is entirely unconvincing. Should we not, together with Platonov, keep our "aufhebung" -- for us the Singularity, for him communism? This is not a definitive argument, it simply raises the interesting question: "What might sexual desire in the Singularity look like?" It remains unanswered. Hell, it even remains unasked, we are simply lead to it. We are argued around it in circles.
November 24, 2020
This is a very entertaining look at the modern idea of the Singularity, where human brains are wired together in some sort of network. Žižek examines this concept in the light of Hegel's thoughts on progress and human and collective consciousness, Marx's theories on society and history, and Lacan's psychoanalytic work.
It's occasionally dense, but Žižek really knows how to engage the reader with references to history, literature and pop culture.
It's occasionally dense, but Žižek really knows how to engage the reader with references to history, literature and pop culture.
February 1, 2021
In "Hegel in A Wired Brain" the philosopher Slavoj Žižek discusses how a future synthesis of humans with intelligent machines poses certain key philosophical, psychoanalytic and political questions. Just to make clear, this book is not a scientific exploration of advances in brain–computer interface (BCI). Rather, this text is primarily a discussion of how a future world of wired brains challenges our current philosophical and psychoanalytical understandings of what it means to be a human being. As with previous theoretical texts by Žižek, the philosopher chiefly refers to those theorists who continue to have an immense impact on his own thinking - namely Hegel, Marx and Lacan - as well as a range of contemporary thinkers.
In many ways, Žižek utilises the scenario of a future defined by BCI to discuss his own latest thinking on key theoretical questions. For example, in contrast to Marx and perhaps also Hegel, Žižek posits that an alienated condition is integral to being a human being. And he then argues that a certain state of alienation is to be cherished and must not be allowed to be negated within a future collective consciousness shaped by BCI. For Žižek, a wired brain therefore threatens the existence of the subject. The philosopher then asks us to protect that which is unique to being human - a being with a consciousness of its own self within reality and in relation to other separate conscious beings. This state of human consciousness acts to present a gap between an individual's self-identity and the material reality one is immersed in. Once that gap is transcended, say through BCI technology, then we are no longer human.
"Hegel in a Wired Brain" is not just for the well-read scholar, but also for those very new to the big ideas that interest Slavoj Žižek. As with any text by this contemporary philosopher, this book is not an easy read. Perhaps the best approach to successfully engaging with Žižek's writings is to see oneself as taking a ride on a rollercoaster of the mind. You will feel excited at times, as well as feeling completely discombobulated and wanting to get off this crazy ride with "the most dangerous philosopher of our time". But be assured, that if you do get to the end of this book, you will be armed to discuss the major political, philosophical and existential questions of our time.
In many ways, Žižek utilises the scenario of a future defined by BCI to discuss his own latest thinking on key theoretical questions. For example, in contrast to Marx and perhaps also Hegel, Žižek posits that an alienated condition is integral to being a human being. And he then argues that a certain state of alienation is to be cherished and must not be allowed to be negated within a future collective consciousness shaped by BCI. For Žižek, a wired brain therefore threatens the existence of the subject. The philosopher then asks us to protect that which is unique to being human - a being with a consciousness of its own self within reality and in relation to other separate conscious beings. This state of human consciousness acts to present a gap between an individual's self-identity and the material reality one is immersed in. Once that gap is transcended, say through BCI technology, then we are no longer human.
"Hegel in a Wired Brain" is not just for the well-read scholar, but also for those very new to the big ideas that interest Slavoj Žižek. As with any text by this contemporary philosopher, this book is not an easy read. Perhaps the best approach to successfully engaging with Žižek's writings is to see oneself as taking a ride on a rollercoaster of the mind. You will feel excited at times, as well as feeling completely discombobulated and wanting to get off this crazy ride with "the most dangerous philosopher of our time". But be assured, that if you do get to the end of this book, you will be armed to discuss the major political, philosophical and existential questions of our time.
October 7, 2023
Zizek sigue en forma, aunque repita varias de sus ya conocidas tesis, entrecruzando con profundidad el pensamiento marxiano, hegeliano y lacaniano. Entre las virtudes de este ensayo podrían citarse las siguientes:
1) Dialoga con novísimos lacanianos de izquierda como Todd McGowan y SamoTomsic, asumiendo sus tesis sobre la necesidad humana del sacrificio, pero señalando como la estrategia debe ser la de eliminar la promesa de infinito teleológico (i.e. satisfacciones futuras) y no sacrificar(se) a los "dioses del mal" (el goce capitalista del fetichismo mercantil).
2) Retoma varias veces las formulas de la sexuación (en la línea de Zupancik), pero de un modo bastante conciso e ilustrativo, llevándolo a las diversos modos de narrar la historia y de sacrificarse por "algo" (lógica fálica) o por nada...
3) Vuelve a matizar cuestiones tales como el inconsciente lacaniano (una tercera instancia, de virtualidad potencial, entre lo aparente y lo oculto), la alienación (que debe asumirse, y no considerarse separada de la desalienacion), el status de lo real lacaniano, la definición de sujeto como un punto vacío (no confundible con "la persona"), la ideología en nuce (las mentiras que nos contamos), el destino...
4) Vuelve a recordarnos que para cambiar el futuro y responsabilizarnos de nosotros mismos, paradójicamente lo que hay que cambiar es el Pasado. Una noción freudiana que retoma con fuerza aquí.
Para lectores de Zizek: No es su mejor libro (para eso tenemos "El sublime objeto...", "Visión de paralelaje...", "Sex and the failed...", etcétera...). Tampoco entra necesariamente dentro de sus accesibles opúsculos de divulgación (tipo "Seis ensayos sobre violencia" o "Como leer a Lacan".
Recuerda más a "Lachrimae rerum", a mitad entre la divulgación y los nudos filosóficos a los que nos tiene acostumbrados.
1) Dialoga con novísimos lacanianos de izquierda como Todd McGowan y SamoTomsic, asumiendo sus tesis sobre la necesidad humana del sacrificio, pero señalando como la estrategia debe ser la de eliminar la promesa de infinito teleológico (i.e. satisfacciones futuras) y no sacrificar(se) a los "dioses del mal" (el goce capitalista del fetichismo mercantil).
2) Retoma varias veces las formulas de la sexuación (en la línea de Zupancik), pero de un modo bastante conciso e ilustrativo, llevándolo a las diversos modos de narrar la historia y de sacrificarse por "algo" (lógica fálica) o por nada...
3) Vuelve a matizar cuestiones tales como el inconsciente lacaniano (una tercera instancia, de virtualidad potencial, entre lo aparente y lo oculto), la alienación (que debe asumirse, y no considerarse separada de la desalienacion), el status de lo real lacaniano, la definición de sujeto como un punto vacío (no confundible con "la persona"), la ideología en nuce (las mentiras que nos contamos), el destino...
4) Vuelve a recordarnos que para cambiar el futuro y responsabilizarnos de nosotros mismos, paradójicamente lo que hay que cambiar es el Pasado. Una noción freudiana que retoma con fuerza aquí.
Para lectores de Zizek: No es su mejor libro (para eso tenemos "El sublime objeto...", "Visión de paralelaje...", "Sex and the failed...", etcétera...). Tampoco entra necesariamente dentro de sus accesibles opúsculos de divulgación (tipo "Seis ensayos sobre violencia" o "Como leer a Lacan".
Recuerda más a "Lachrimae rerum", a mitad entre la divulgación y los nudos filosóficos a los que nos tiene acostumbrados.
October 1, 2021
È Zizek.
November 17, 2020
“In 2020, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hegel. Is Hegel just a historical curiosity or does his thought still address us?”
“The hypothesis of the present book is that, if, in some sense, the twentieth century was not Deleuzian, but Marxian, the twenty-first century will be Hegelian.”
“This claim cannot but appear as a display of madness – is, in our universe of quantum physics and evolutionary biology, of cognitive sciences and digitalization, of global capitalism and totalitarianism, Hegel not simply out?”
“The Hegelian “Absolute Knowing” does not imply that Hegel “knew it all,” it stands precisely for the realization of an unsurpassable limit”
“the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”
“That’s why Hegel’s thought stands for a radical opening towards the future: there is in Hegel no eschatology, no image of the bright (or dark) future towards which our epoch tends”
“Our wager is here the exact opposite of this “obvious” platitude: precisely as totally “out of date,” Hegel’s thought provides unique lenses to perceive the prospects and threats of our time”
“What it means is to act as a true post-Hegelian: to take Hegel not as a conclusion but as a starting point and ask: how would our present state of things appear from this starting point?”
“But which Hegel am I referring to here”
“Our wager is here the exact opposite of this “obvious” platitude: precisely as totally “out of date,” Hegel’s thought provides unique lenses to perceive the prospects and threats of our time”
“Spinoza is arguably the pinnacle of realist ontology: there is substantial reality out there, and we can get to know it through our reason, dispelling the veil of illusions”
“What Hegel does here is to posit that there is no reality in-itself beyond phenomena, which does not mean that all that there is is the interplay of phenomena. The phenomenal world is marked by the bar of impossibility, but beyond this bar there is nothing, no other world, no positive reality, so we are not returning to pre-Kantian realism; it is just that what for Kant is the limitation of our knowledge, the impossibility to reach the thing-in-itself, is inscribed into this thing itself”
“There are a couple of candidates for this rupture which makes Hegel no longer our contemporary, beginning with the post-Hegelian turn of Schelling, Kierkegaard and Marx, but this turn can be easily accounted for in the terms of an immanent reversal of the German Idealist topic”
“Cantor” stands for set theory, through self-relating procedures (empty set, set of sets), and compels us to admit an infinity of infinities”
“and “Goedel” for his two incompleteness theorems which demonstrate that – to simplify it to the utmost – an axiomatic system cannot demonstrate its own consistency since it necessarily generates statements which can neither be proved nor disproved by it.”
“We remain within the domain of reason, and this domain is deprived of its consistency from within: immanent inconsistencies of reason do not imply that there is some deeper reality which escapes reason; these inconsistencies are in some sense “the thing itself”
“The roots of all these inconsistencies are, of course, the paradoxes of self-relating, of a set becoming one of its own elements, of a set including an empty set as one of its sub-sets, as its own stand-in among its sub-sets”
“Do we not touch the real precisely when we succeed in erasing our subjective standpoint and perceive things “the way they really are,” independently of our subjective standpoint?”
“The lesson of both Hegel and Lacan is exactly the opposite: every vision of “objective reality” is already constituted through (transcendental) subjectivity, and we only touch the real when we include in the scope of our vision the cut-in-the-real of subjectivity itself”
“What all these cases share is the fact that to understand a statement, one has to identify its addressee. That’s why a detective needs a figure like Holmes’s Watson or Poirot’s Hastings, somebody who stands for the big Other in its aspect of the common sense, the gaze the murderer had in view when he committed the crime.”
“The Cantor/Goedel rupture thus renders impossible a consistent totality”
“At this point we notice the first strange fact in Livingston’s edifice, a surprising imbalance: although paradoxico-critical and generic are presented as two ways to deal with the new universe which renders consistent totality impossible, we get on the one side a multiplicity of very divergent thinkers and on the other one name alone, Badiou. The implication of this imbalance is clear: it demonstrates that the true topic of Livingston’s book is how to provide a proper paradoxico-critical answer to Badiou’s generic approach?”
“Do such paradoxes not lie at the very heart of every power edifice which has to impose itself in an illegitimate way and then retroactively legitimize its exercise of power?”
“First, the basic duality of the universe of thought that precedes the Cantor/Goedel rupture is for me not that between ontotheological and criteriological, but that between ontological (in the sense of realist universal ontology) and transcendental – between Spinoza and Kant, to give two exemplary names”
“the true rupture with this universe is enacted already by Hegel”
“reduced to subordinated moments of the One”
“let’s make a detour through Lacan”
“Badiou’s generic position is clearly “masculine”: we have the universal order of being (whose ontological structure is described in detail in Badiou’s work), and the exception of truth-events which can happen occasionally. The order of being is consistent and continuous, obeying strict ontological rules, allowing no self-referential paradoxes; it is a universe with no pre-established unity, a universe composed of multitudes of multitudes, of many worlds and many languages”
“miracles happen from time to time”
“eternity, a moment of stasis in the double sense of the term (fixation, freezing of the movement of life, and simultaneously disturbance, unrest, the rise of something that resists the regular flow of things)”
“its own exception, sustained by permanent violations of its own rules”
“In this way, we pass from the “masculine” to the “feminine” logic: instead of the universal order of Being disturbed by eventual exceptions, Being itself is branded by a basic impossibility, not-all.”
“In the Cantor-Goedel universe, one can get a consistent universality only if the One is excluded from it at the most basic level – One emerges in a second time, as the result of the operation of counting that constitutes out of the multitude a world”
“In politics, at the level of Being there is just a multiplicity of bodies and languages, or of “worlds” (cultures), so all we can get at this level is some kind of liberal multiculturalism and tolerance for irreducible difference, every project of imposing a universal Project that would unite all culture – like Communism – has to appear as an oppressive violent imposition”
“of course every One is undermined, failed, fractured by antagonisms and inconsistencies, but it is here from the beginning as the impossibility which opens up the space for multiplicity”
“This is what Hegel aims at by his notion of “concrete universality”: the enchainment of failures.”
“put it in a different way, the elementary move of concrete universality is to turn the exception to a universality into the element that grounds this universality itself”
“The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilize anti-Semitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: anti-Semitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless, and it is as if Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots … No wonder many conservative anti-Semites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel. However, the trouble with Jews today is that they are now trying to get roots in a place which for thousands of years was not theirs but inhabited by other people”
“what if Jews as the exception are a true stand-in for universality”
“our roots are a secondary phenomenon, an attempt to obfuscate our constitutive rootlessness?”
“But Hegel here takes a step further from what Livingston describes as the paradoxico-critical stance: for Hegel, the One of self-identity is not just always inconsistent, fractured, antagonistic, etc”
“identity itself is the assertion of radical (self-)difference”
“A rose is a rose” means that a rose is something more than all its features – there is some je ne sais quoi which makes it a rose, something “more in a rose than the rose itself.” As this last example indicates, we are also dealing here with what Lacan called objet petit a, the mysterious X beneath all its properties that makes an object what it is, that sustains its unique identity.”
“The minimal structure of identity (which is always self-identity since it is, as Hegel knew it, a category of reflection) is thus 1-1-a: a thing is itself in contrast with its determinate properties, and objet a is the unfathomable excess that sustains this identity.”
“it is not that Hegel subordinates inconsistencies and antagonisms to some higher unity; it is, on the contrary, that for Hegel identity, the unity of the One, is a form of”
“self-differentiation. Identity is difference brought to the extreme of self-relating”
“the unity of the One is the crack as such”
“Or, to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, power is its own transgression, grounded in violations of its own founding principles”
“Derrida, the ultimate paradoxico-critical thinker, likes to talk about deconstruction as an infinite pursuit of justice, and, in politics, about “democracy to come” (never already-here”
“Hegel is not a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation – not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal”
“The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror … Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from Orwell’s 1984 “freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery”
“Renouncing a critical stance does not imply renouncing social change, it just raises the stakes of this change”
“Documents and housing for all! Freedom of movement and residence!”
“we are dealing here with an abstract vision in the strict Hegelian sense: a vision which ignores the complex context of social totality”
“The problem cannot be solved at this level”
“true solution is to change the global economic system which produces immigrants”
“analysis of the immanent antagonism of the criticized phenomenon, with the focus on how our critical position itself participates in the phenomenon it criticizes.”
“The Hegelian lesson with regard to the attempt to change the world is thus desperately optimistic: such attempts never reach their goal, but through their repeated failure a new form of being can arise”
“all these processes do contribute to the subterranean weaving of the Spirit which might give birth to unpredictable new visions … or horrors.”
“It is our premise that Hegel’s outline of an inconsistent totality is the ultimate stand of thinking”
“it can only grasp the notional truth of an epoch when this epoch is approaching its end.”
“It is our further premise that the prospect of a wired brain (a direct link between our brain and a digital machine, what is popularly called “neuralink”) is the main indication of this threat, so the question is: what will happen with the human spirit, with our subjectivity, if something like the wired brain will effectively emerge”
“This book is therefore not a study of Hegel. What it tries to practice is a Hegelian approach.”
“how does our time look in the eyes of Hegel?”
“To practice a Hegelian approach means a couple of things”
“First, this book offers a philosophical analysis of the notion of the wired brain and its ideological extrapolation, the notion of Singularity”
“It focuses on one and only one key question: how will the phenomenon of a wired brain affect not only our self-experience of free human individuals, but also our very status of free human individuals?”
“This question will also compel us to clarify the notion of being-human itself: if we are effectively entering a post-human era, how does this fact allow us to perceive in a new way the essence of being-human?”
“Second, the Hegelian approach means that it would be meaningless to try to define in advance the notions of the wired brain and of Singularity, since it is the very task of this book to elaborate them”
“Wired brain” refers to a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine”
“Singularity” refers to the idea that, by way of directly sharing my thoughts and experiences with others (a machine which reads my mental processes can also transpose it to another mind), a domain of global shared mental experience will emerge which will function as a new form of divinity – my thoughts will be directly immersed in a global Thought of the universe itself”
“Among numerous reports, let us just mention AlterEgo, “a wearable silent speech output–input device developed by MIT Media Lab. The device is attached around the head, neck, and jawline and translates your brain speech center impulse input into words on a computer, without vocalization.”
“it’s not just reading your thoughts; you have to consciously decide to use it”
“At this level, lying is still possible: I just simply imagine wanting to say something that is not true, my speech muscles will move accordingly and the machine will “read” this deceitful speech intention of mine as a fact … However, one can easily imagine the step further making it possible for the machine to follow my line of thought without my consent or even my awareness of it – a clear dystopian prospect.”
“But do we really live in a dystopian time or do we rather live in a time of dystopian fantasies?”
“The sceptics’ view was best encapsulated in a recent debate in Seoul where an old gentleman (whose name escapes me) proposed a wonderful paradox: not only will Singularity not be as bad as predicted (we, humans, will retain our spirituality with all its ambiguities, beliefs without beliefs, references to absentials, etc.), but it also cannot happen”
“More than the idea of a wired brain, Kurzweil’s notion of Singularity relies on the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI)”
“We should not confuse this “posthuman” stance with the paradigmatically modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature – what we are witnessing today is an exemplary dialectical reversal: the slogan of today’s “posthuman” sciences is no longer domination, but surprise (contingent, nonplanned) emergence”
“how are we to explain that science became such a “risky” activity that, according to some top scientists, it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity”
“The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer’s apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice”
“The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to the list of preestablished tasks.”
“Is this weird tendency to actualize self-annihilation not a clear and unexpected form of what Freud called the death-drive”
“Nietzsche’s idea that we are the “last men” laying the ground for our own extinction and the arrival of a new Overman is thereby given a scientific-technological twist … However, due to our limitations we shall ignore in this book the topic of AI. Although AI and the wired brain are obviously interlinked, they are clearly distinct: AI can surpass us, humans, without drawing us into the space of shared experience, i.e., leaving our miserable brains to function the way they always have until now.”
“At this early stage of development, we can only speculate how the immersion in Singularity as the space of shared thoughts and experiences will be organized: how will the subject and/or the machine decide to get connected (or disconnected)? How will the scope of connection be decided? (How much of the machine’s knowledge will be accessible to me? In what way and with whom will I share experiences?) We should just bear in mind that all these are also questions of utmost political importance.”
“So, perhaps, the true threat to our being-human resides in the very narrow and misleading notion of being-human that Musk, Kurzweil and others automatically assume in their description of what is threatened by the wired brain”
“We oscillate all the time between these three dimensions: (1) inquiry into the structure of a wired brain, what its theoretical implications will be; (2) what it will mean for individuals to have their brains wired, how it will transform their (self-)experience; (3) and, last but not least, what will be the socio-political institutional implications of wired brains, what kind of new power relations wired brains will give birth to, how the vast digital network sustaining it will be organized and regulated”
“A well-informed observer cannot help but note that these same three dimensions are constitutive of every ideology – let’s take religion: a religion is (1) a system of beliefs elaborated by theology that contains answers to “big” questions about the ultimate nature of reality; (2) a complex network of intimate experiences of the divine dimension; and (3) an ideological apparatus, a set of institutions and material practices (rituals, etc.)”
“Back to Singularity, it comprises the same three dimensions: it offers a new account of humanity and its passage into post-humanity, even with a new theological dimension; it promises a new subjective experience of being immersed in a space of collective mind; but – the aspect that is regularly neglected – Singularity will also imply a vast network of machines embedded in our social relations of domination”
“To put it in brutally simplified terms: how will the (eventual) rise of Singularity affect capitalism and forms of social power?”
“The hypothesis of the present book is that, if, in some sense, the twentieth century was not Deleuzian, but Marxian, the twenty-first century will be Hegelian.”
“This claim cannot but appear as a display of madness – is, in our universe of quantum physics and evolutionary biology, of cognitive sciences and digitalization, of global capitalism and totalitarianism, Hegel not simply out?”
“The Hegelian “Absolute Knowing” does not imply that Hegel “knew it all,” it stands precisely for the realization of an unsurpassable limit”
“the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”
“That’s why Hegel’s thought stands for a radical opening towards the future: there is in Hegel no eschatology, no image of the bright (or dark) future towards which our epoch tends”
“Our wager is here the exact opposite of this “obvious” platitude: precisely as totally “out of date,” Hegel’s thought provides unique lenses to perceive the prospects and threats of our time”
“What it means is to act as a true post-Hegelian: to take Hegel not as a conclusion but as a starting point and ask: how would our present state of things appear from this starting point?”
“But which Hegel am I referring to here”
“Our wager is here the exact opposite of this “obvious” platitude: precisely as totally “out of date,” Hegel’s thought provides unique lenses to perceive the prospects and threats of our time”
“Spinoza is arguably the pinnacle of realist ontology: there is substantial reality out there, and we can get to know it through our reason, dispelling the veil of illusions”
“What Hegel does here is to posit that there is no reality in-itself beyond phenomena, which does not mean that all that there is is the interplay of phenomena. The phenomenal world is marked by the bar of impossibility, but beyond this bar there is nothing, no other world, no positive reality, so we are not returning to pre-Kantian realism; it is just that what for Kant is the limitation of our knowledge, the impossibility to reach the thing-in-itself, is inscribed into this thing itself”
“There are a couple of candidates for this rupture which makes Hegel no longer our contemporary, beginning with the post-Hegelian turn of Schelling, Kierkegaard and Marx, but this turn can be easily accounted for in the terms of an immanent reversal of the German Idealist topic”
“Cantor” stands for set theory, through self-relating procedures (empty set, set of sets), and compels us to admit an infinity of infinities”
“and “Goedel” for his two incompleteness theorems which demonstrate that – to simplify it to the utmost – an axiomatic system cannot demonstrate its own consistency since it necessarily generates statements which can neither be proved nor disproved by it.”
“We remain within the domain of reason, and this domain is deprived of its consistency from within: immanent inconsistencies of reason do not imply that there is some deeper reality which escapes reason; these inconsistencies are in some sense “the thing itself”
“The roots of all these inconsistencies are, of course, the paradoxes of self-relating, of a set becoming one of its own elements, of a set including an empty set as one of its sub-sets, as its own stand-in among its sub-sets”
“Do we not touch the real precisely when we succeed in erasing our subjective standpoint and perceive things “the way they really are,” independently of our subjective standpoint?”
“The lesson of both Hegel and Lacan is exactly the opposite: every vision of “objective reality” is already constituted through (transcendental) subjectivity, and we only touch the real when we include in the scope of our vision the cut-in-the-real of subjectivity itself”
“What all these cases share is the fact that to understand a statement, one has to identify its addressee. That’s why a detective needs a figure like Holmes’s Watson or Poirot’s Hastings, somebody who stands for the big Other in its aspect of the common sense, the gaze the murderer had in view when he committed the crime.”
“The Cantor/Goedel rupture thus renders impossible a consistent totality”
“At this point we notice the first strange fact in Livingston’s edifice, a surprising imbalance: although paradoxico-critical and generic are presented as two ways to deal with the new universe which renders consistent totality impossible, we get on the one side a multiplicity of very divergent thinkers and on the other one name alone, Badiou. The implication of this imbalance is clear: it demonstrates that the true topic of Livingston’s book is how to provide a proper paradoxico-critical answer to Badiou’s generic approach?”
“Do such paradoxes not lie at the very heart of every power edifice which has to impose itself in an illegitimate way and then retroactively legitimize its exercise of power?”
“First, the basic duality of the universe of thought that precedes the Cantor/Goedel rupture is for me not that between ontotheological and criteriological, but that between ontological (in the sense of realist universal ontology) and transcendental – between Spinoza and Kant, to give two exemplary names”
“the true rupture with this universe is enacted already by Hegel”
“reduced to subordinated moments of the One”
“let’s make a detour through Lacan”
“Badiou’s generic position is clearly “masculine”: we have the universal order of being (whose ontological structure is described in detail in Badiou’s work), and the exception of truth-events which can happen occasionally. The order of being is consistent and continuous, obeying strict ontological rules, allowing no self-referential paradoxes; it is a universe with no pre-established unity, a universe composed of multitudes of multitudes, of many worlds and many languages”
“miracles happen from time to time”
“eternity, a moment of stasis in the double sense of the term (fixation, freezing of the movement of life, and simultaneously disturbance, unrest, the rise of something that resists the regular flow of things)”
“its own exception, sustained by permanent violations of its own rules”
“In this way, we pass from the “masculine” to the “feminine” logic: instead of the universal order of Being disturbed by eventual exceptions, Being itself is branded by a basic impossibility, not-all.”
“In the Cantor-Goedel universe, one can get a consistent universality only if the One is excluded from it at the most basic level – One emerges in a second time, as the result of the operation of counting that constitutes out of the multitude a world”
“In politics, at the level of Being there is just a multiplicity of bodies and languages, or of “worlds” (cultures), so all we can get at this level is some kind of liberal multiculturalism and tolerance for irreducible difference, every project of imposing a universal Project that would unite all culture – like Communism – has to appear as an oppressive violent imposition”
“of course every One is undermined, failed, fractured by antagonisms and inconsistencies, but it is here from the beginning as the impossibility which opens up the space for multiplicity”
“This is what Hegel aims at by his notion of “concrete universality”: the enchainment of failures.”
“put it in a different way, the elementary move of concrete universality is to turn the exception to a universality into the element that grounds this universality itself”
“The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilize anti-Semitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: anti-Semitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless, and it is as if Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots … No wonder many conservative anti-Semites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel. However, the trouble with Jews today is that they are now trying to get roots in a place which for thousands of years was not theirs but inhabited by other people”
“what if Jews as the exception are a true stand-in for universality”
“our roots are a secondary phenomenon, an attempt to obfuscate our constitutive rootlessness?”
“But Hegel here takes a step further from what Livingston describes as the paradoxico-critical stance: for Hegel, the One of self-identity is not just always inconsistent, fractured, antagonistic, etc”
“identity itself is the assertion of radical (self-)difference”
“A rose is a rose” means that a rose is something more than all its features – there is some je ne sais quoi which makes it a rose, something “more in a rose than the rose itself.” As this last example indicates, we are also dealing here with what Lacan called objet petit a, the mysterious X beneath all its properties that makes an object what it is, that sustains its unique identity.”
“The minimal structure of identity (which is always self-identity since it is, as Hegel knew it, a category of reflection) is thus 1-1-a: a thing is itself in contrast with its determinate properties, and objet a is the unfathomable excess that sustains this identity.”
“it is not that Hegel subordinates inconsistencies and antagonisms to some higher unity; it is, on the contrary, that for Hegel identity, the unity of the One, is a form of”
“self-differentiation. Identity is difference brought to the extreme of self-relating”
“the unity of the One is the crack as such”
“Or, to put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, power is its own transgression, grounded in violations of its own founding principles”
“Derrida, the ultimate paradoxico-critical thinker, likes to talk about deconstruction as an infinite pursuit of justice, and, in politics, about “democracy to come” (never already-here”
“Hegel is not a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation – not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal”
“The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror … Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from Orwell’s 1984 “freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery”
“Renouncing a critical stance does not imply renouncing social change, it just raises the stakes of this change”
“Documents and housing for all! Freedom of movement and residence!”
“we are dealing here with an abstract vision in the strict Hegelian sense: a vision which ignores the complex context of social totality”
“The problem cannot be solved at this level”
“true solution is to change the global economic system which produces immigrants”
“analysis of the immanent antagonism of the criticized phenomenon, with the focus on how our critical position itself participates in the phenomenon it criticizes.”
“The Hegelian lesson with regard to the attempt to change the world is thus desperately optimistic: such attempts never reach their goal, but through their repeated failure a new form of being can arise”
“all these processes do contribute to the subterranean weaving of the Spirit which might give birth to unpredictable new visions … or horrors.”
“It is our premise that Hegel’s outline of an inconsistent totality is the ultimate stand of thinking”
“it can only grasp the notional truth of an epoch when this epoch is approaching its end.”
“It is our further premise that the prospect of a wired brain (a direct link between our brain and a digital machine, what is popularly called “neuralink”) is the main indication of this threat, so the question is: what will happen with the human spirit, with our subjectivity, if something like the wired brain will effectively emerge”
“This book is therefore not a study of Hegel. What it tries to practice is a Hegelian approach.”
“how does our time look in the eyes of Hegel?”
“To practice a Hegelian approach means a couple of things”
“First, this book offers a philosophical analysis of the notion of the wired brain and its ideological extrapolation, the notion of Singularity”
“It focuses on one and only one key question: how will the phenomenon of a wired brain affect not only our self-experience of free human individuals, but also our very status of free human individuals?”
“This question will also compel us to clarify the notion of being-human itself: if we are effectively entering a post-human era, how does this fact allow us to perceive in a new way the essence of being-human?”
“Second, the Hegelian approach means that it would be meaningless to try to define in advance the notions of the wired brain and of Singularity, since it is the very task of this book to elaborate them”
“Wired brain” refers to a direct link between our mental processes and a digital machine”
“Singularity” refers to the idea that, by way of directly sharing my thoughts and experiences with others (a machine which reads my mental processes can also transpose it to another mind), a domain of global shared mental experience will emerge which will function as a new form of divinity – my thoughts will be directly immersed in a global Thought of the universe itself”
“Among numerous reports, let us just mention AlterEgo, “a wearable silent speech output–input device developed by MIT Media Lab. The device is attached around the head, neck, and jawline and translates your brain speech center impulse input into words on a computer, without vocalization.”
“it’s not just reading your thoughts; you have to consciously decide to use it”
“At this level, lying is still possible: I just simply imagine wanting to say something that is not true, my speech muscles will move accordingly and the machine will “read” this deceitful speech intention of mine as a fact … However, one can easily imagine the step further making it possible for the machine to follow my line of thought without my consent or even my awareness of it – a clear dystopian prospect.”
“But do we really live in a dystopian time or do we rather live in a time of dystopian fantasies?”
“The sceptics’ view was best encapsulated in a recent debate in Seoul where an old gentleman (whose name escapes me) proposed a wonderful paradox: not only will Singularity not be as bad as predicted (we, humans, will retain our spirituality with all its ambiguities, beliefs without beliefs, references to absentials, etc.), but it also cannot happen”
“More than the idea of a wired brain, Kurzweil’s notion of Singularity relies on the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI)”
“We should not confuse this “posthuman” stance with the paradigmatically modern belief in the possibility of total technological domination over nature – what we are witnessing today is an exemplary dialectical reversal: the slogan of today’s “posthuman” sciences is no longer domination, but surprise (contingent, nonplanned) emergence”
“how are we to explain that science became such a “risky” activity that, according to some top scientists, it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity”
“The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer’s apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice”
“The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creations will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to the list of preestablished tasks.”
“Is this weird tendency to actualize self-annihilation not a clear and unexpected form of what Freud called the death-drive”
“Nietzsche’s idea that we are the “last men” laying the ground for our own extinction and the arrival of a new Overman is thereby given a scientific-technological twist … However, due to our limitations we shall ignore in this book the topic of AI. Although AI and the wired brain are obviously interlinked, they are clearly distinct: AI can surpass us, humans, without drawing us into the space of shared experience, i.e., leaving our miserable brains to function the way they always have until now.”
“At this early stage of development, we can only speculate how the immersion in Singularity as the space of shared thoughts and experiences will be organized: how will the subject and/or the machine decide to get connected (or disconnected)? How will the scope of connection be decided? (How much of the machine’s knowledge will be accessible to me? In what way and with whom will I share experiences?) We should just bear in mind that all these are also questions of utmost political importance.”
“So, perhaps, the true threat to our being-human resides in the very narrow and misleading notion of being-human that Musk, Kurzweil and others automatically assume in their description of what is threatened by the wired brain”
“We oscillate all the time between these three dimensions: (1) inquiry into the structure of a wired brain, what its theoretical implications will be; (2) what it will mean for individuals to have their brains wired, how it will transform their (self-)experience; (3) and, last but not least, what will be the socio-political institutional implications of wired brains, what kind of new power relations wired brains will give birth to, how the vast digital network sustaining it will be organized and regulated”
“A well-informed observer cannot help but note that these same three dimensions are constitutive of every ideology – let’s take religion: a religion is (1) a system of beliefs elaborated by theology that contains answers to “big” questions about the ultimate nature of reality; (2) a complex network of intimate experiences of the divine dimension; and (3) an ideological apparatus, a set of institutions and material practices (rituals, etc.)”
“Back to Singularity, it comprises the same three dimensions: it offers a new account of humanity and its passage into post-humanity, even with a new theological dimension; it promises a new subjective experience of being immersed in a space of collective mind; but – the aspect that is regularly neglected – Singularity will also imply a vast network of machines embedded in our social relations of domination”
“To put it in brutally simplified terms: how will the (eventual) rise of Singularity affect capitalism and forms of social power?”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 26, 2020
The book has an intruiging premise. However, it is hard to follow through the many deliberations (most of which seem offtopic).
The author's definition of singularity conflicts with the definition of Singularity by Kurzweil (which is quoted on p61), and the author does not offer any source for his own understanding of the term.
Another terminological question arises when Žižek uses "neuralink" - not "wired brains", "brain-computer interfaces", "neural implants". The (fairly frequent) references to Elon Musk are partly misleading: whether Musk envisages a "communism-type" permanent Singularity in Žižek's understanding remains doubtful. This touches on my main criticism on the book: Žižek hinges his book on the assumption of a hive-mind-like collective (like Mass Effect's Geth). While I find this notion and his subsequent discussion (esp. with regard to the Soviet bio-cosmism) fascinating, I am critical if this what Musk et al. and (ultimately) humankind will realize. My prognisis is a rather "temporary" "consentual telepathy" (as Musk himself phrased it). We might be permanently connected to our BCI-device but that does not necessarily entail a permanent participation in a collective hive-mind. Afterall, we don't spend every moment of everyday with the devices currently available. This possible future is not quite touched, albeit some of Žižek's deliberations are applicable, e.g. the function of language (another part that enriched my previous thinking).
To sum up: the book consists of many interesting ideas and theories, yet the central narrative remains only sporadically explored. Many pages read like general thoughts on various philosophers (a guideline: is this sentence necessary to support the central thesis/theses? well...), capitalism, etc. The book appears pseudointellectual (with regard to the many ideas explored) and superficial (relating to the central topic). It's still three stars because I cannot deny how much I enjoyed reading it anyway. Žižek is a fascinating philosopher nevertheless.
The author's definition of singularity conflicts with the definition of Singularity by Kurzweil (which is quoted on p61), and the author does not offer any source for his own understanding of the term.
Another terminological question arises when Žižek uses "neuralink" - not "wired brains", "brain-computer interfaces", "neural implants". The (fairly frequent) references to Elon Musk are partly misleading: whether Musk envisages a "communism-type" permanent Singularity in Žižek's understanding remains doubtful. This touches on my main criticism on the book: Žižek hinges his book on the assumption of a hive-mind-like collective (like Mass Effect's Geth). While I find this notion and his subsequent discussion (esp. with regard to the Soviet bio-cosmism) fascinating, I am critical if this what Musk et al. and (ultimately) humankind will realize. My prognisis is a rather "temporary" "consentual telepathy" (as Musk himself phrased it). We might be permanently connected to our BCI-device but that does not necessarily entail a permanent participation in a collective hive-mind. Afterall, we don't spend every moment of everyday with the devices currently available. This possible future is not quite touched, albeit some of Žižek's deliberations are applicable, e.g. the function of language (another part that enriched my previous thinking).
To sum up: the book consists of many interesting ideas and theories, yet the central narrative remains only sporadically explored. Many pages read like general thoughts on various philosophers (a guideline: is this sentence necessary to support the central thesis/theses? well...), capitalism, etc. The book appears pseudointellectual (with regard to the many ideas explored) and superficial (relating to the central topic). It's still three stars because I cannot deny how much I enjoyed reading it anyway. Žižek is a fascinating philosopher nevertheless.
July 20, 2020
Brave attempt at grasping the radical implications for Subjectivity, with the coming technological revolution of brain-machine interfaces (BMI's), done through an Hegelian-Lacanian lens.
The one-sided Theosis view by the likes of Kurzweil and Tegmark was long overdue to be challenged intellectually. Discourse on BMI's and merging with the Matrix-like Singularity, has the implicit perspective of human self-deification, e.g. that we are well on our way to be like omniscient, omnipotent and omniprescent gods. Zizek is radically more pessimistic than this. Sometimes.
The subject is incredibly complex and difficult to make language for, but I think Zizek did a great job of delineating various arguments. My lacking understanding of Hegel and Lacan nesserecily means I'm missing the depth of the points he's making, but his thoughts on the relationship between the Cartesian ego and the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious I found especially interesting, in context of machine merging.
As we understand BMI's so far, we should be capable of directly transmitting at least thoughts, and maybe experiences, directly to other people. In other words, both input and output to and from the brain. What happens with the unconscious part of ourselves in such a scenario? And so on and so forth..
Zizek clearly sees that this coming event will be absolutely civilisation-shattering, and may well be the end of history. Who knows what the post-human era will exactly be like, but Hegel in a wired brain definitely helps sharpening the discussion.
The one-sided Theosis view by the likes of Kurzweil and Tegmark was long overdue to be challenged intellectually. Discourse on BMI's and merging with the Matrix-like Singularity, has the implicit perspective of human self-deification, e.g. that we are well on our way to be like omniscient, omnipotent and omniprescent gods. Zizek is radically more pessimistic than this. Sometimes.
The subject is incredibly complex and difficult to make language for, but I think Zizek did a great job of delineating various arguments. My lacking understanding of Hegel and Lacan nesserecily means I'm missing the depth of the points he's making, but his thoughts on the relationship between the Cartesian ego and the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious I found especially interesting, in context of machine merging.
As we understand BMI's so far, we should be capable of directly transmitting at least thoughts, and maybe experiences, directly to other people. In other words, both input and output to and from the brain. What happens with the unconscious part of ourselves in such a scenario? And so on and so forth..
Zizek clearly sees that this coming event will be absolutely civilisation-shattering, and may well be the end of history. Who knows what the post-human era will exactly be like, but Hegel in a wired brain definitely helps sharpening the discussion.
July 7, 2020
I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review from Netgalley.
Unless you're familiar with reading philosophical papers or philosophy text, I highly suggest you skip this one. If you're familiar with the way philosophical reading can sometimes be, this presents some very interesting premises and a good discussion. However, there are some sections I do question the method of execution in explanation. Overall, this was a well researched and clearly delineated discussion.
Unless you're familiar with reading philosophical papers or philosophy text, I highly suggest you skip this one. If you're familiar with the way philosophical reading can sometimes be, this presents some very interesting premises and a good discussion. However, there are some sections I do question the method of execution in explanation. Overall, this was a well researched and clearly delineated discussion.
August 26, 2020
Here’s a link to a discussion about the book with Zizek https://youtu.be/b6Nr9OrqJks
March 19, 2024
Tbh I started reading this after seeing "Elon Musk Ruined My Sex Life", which is an excerpt from this book that was republished in light of the first Neuralink patient news this year.
This book is sometimes readable and sometimes challenging. At its most difficult, Zizek spirals into perilously abstract and obtuse speculations about precisely how the Singularity will destabilize our notion of subject and object. Immediately arises the question of whether the Singularity is a topic worth analyzing this deeply given how hypothetical it is, but this question is secondary to the question of whether the imminence of the Singularity is already affecting us in the present. I think it probably is.
Zizek deftly weaves in and out of theology, political commentary, and metaphysics, and the overwhelming experience of reading this book is feeling as if one is either too dumb or Zizek too unhinged. Both are probably true.
To me the Singularity represents a crisis of unification, that the ongoing fracture of our world cannot continue if only because technological advancements like Neuralink and AI, or even climate change, will expose the most devastating consequences of this fracture anyway. But this book more importantly satisfied my own discomfort with the prospect of the Singularity, of what it could possibly mean for my subjective experience of the world and other people. Because, ultimately the Singularity is a fantasy of love. We dream of union with some idealized beloved towards some promise of self-contained completion. Love as such is destructive and painful as much as it is pleasurable, and I'm led to believe that the Singularity is a consequential moment where pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, resolve into an ambiguous superposition of pure sensation. I think I once feared the end of suffering because it seemed to mean the end of joy, but the end of suffering is the persistence of a new kind of suffering and perhaps thus births a new kind of joy, which I believe is what Zizek suggests when he describes the Singularity as the "loss of a loss."
The arrival of the Singularity is inevitable, so the only thing I can control is my orientation towards it. And I await it eagerly.
This book is sometimes readable and sometimes challenging. At its most difficult, Zizek spirals into perilously abstract and obtuse speculations about precisely how the Singularity will destabilize our notion of subject and object. Immediately arises the question of whether the Singularity is a topic worth analyzing this deeply given how hypothetical it is, but this question is secondary to the question of whether the imminence of the Singularity is already affecting us in the present. I think it probably is.
Zizek deftly weaves in and out of theology, political commentary, and metaphysics, and the overwhelming experience of reading this book is feeling as if one is either too dumb or Zizek too unhinged. Both are probably true.
To me the Singularity represents a crisis of unification, that the ongoing fracture of our world cannot continue if only because technological advancements like Neuralink and AI, or even climate change, will expose the most devastating consequences of this fracture anyway. But this book more importantly satisfied my own discomfort with the prospect of the Singularity, of what it could possibly mean for my subjective experience of the world and other people. Because, ultimately the Singularity is a fantasy of love. We dream of union with some idealized beloved towards some promise of self-contained completion. Love as such is destructive and painful as much as it is pleasurable, and I'm led to believe that the Singularity is a consequential moment where pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, resolve into an ambiguous superposition of pure sensation. I think I once feared the end of suffering because it seemed to mean the end of joy, but the end of suffering is the persistence of a new kind of suffering and perhaps thus births a new kind of joy, which I believe is what Zizek suggests when he describes the Singularity as the "loss of a loss."
The arrival of the Singularity is inevitable, so the only thing I can control is my orientation towards it. And I await it eagerly.
September 11, 2023
En este libro Slavoj Žižek analiza la posibilidad real del surgimiento de la "singularidad", es decir, la creación de una interconexión directa entre los cerebros humanos mediante alguna maquina, tal como lo plantea la compañía Neuralink de Elon Musk. Las implicaciones de este tipo de tecnología lo hace principalmente utilizando la filosofía de Hegel, mostrando su relevancia actual; aunque recurre ampliamente a Lacan.
La estructura del libro es atípica, pues trata de seguir el modelo de E.L. Doctorow, Vida de los poetas: seis cuentos y una novela. Seis cuentos dispares y una novela corta. Así el libro se divide en 7 capítulos que va tratando distintos aspectos y preguntas relevantes sobre las consecuencias de la singularidad sobre el sujeto y la sociedad, entremezclados con otros temas como un estado policial, los fallos del socialismo, etc. Y termina con un ensayo largo, divido en 4 secciones en donde trata e cómo la singularidad sería un tipo de apocalipsis para lo humano, al alterar al sujeto tal como lo conocemos hoy día, por lo que se crearía un futuro posthumano.
La singularidad de acuerdo a sus proponentes permitiría una comunicación inmediata con todos y con las maquinas, solucionando los problemas del lenguaje, conocimiento y de relaciones con la realidad. Incluso abriendo las posibilidades de sobre pasar la muerte.
Žižek como tal no apoya la idea, pero no la descalifica de manera inmediata. A lo largo del libro se dedica a analizar sus consecuencias y su balance no es positivo. La comunicación directa de pensamientos tendría impactos directos en la formación de la subjetividad (teorizada por el psicoanálisis), no eliminaría el inconsciente, Es decir, no sería una panacea y su surgimiento traerá nuevas contradicciones, nuevas formas de dominación y manipulación en el sujeto y la humanidad.
Libro recomendado para reflexionar sobre la tecnología desde la filosofía hegeliana y el psicoanálisis lacaniano. Así como para los interesados en las posibilidades emancipadoras de la tecnología.
La estructura del libro es atípica, pues trata de seguir el modelo de E.L. Doctorow, Vida de los poetas: seis cuentos y una novela. Seis cuentos dispares y una novela corta. Así el libro se divide en 7 capítulos que va tratando distintos aspectos y preguntas relevantes sobre las consecuencias de la singularidad sobre el sujeto y la sociedad, entremezclados con otros temas como un estado policial, los fallos del socialismo, etc. Y termina con un ensayo largo, divido en 4 secciones en donde trata e cómo la singularidad sería un tipo de apocalipsis para lo humano, al alterar al sujeto tal como lo conocemos hoy día, por lo que se crearía un futuro posthumano.
La singularidad de acuerdo a sus proponentes permitiría una comunicación inmediata con todos y con las maquinas, solucionando los problemas del lenguaje, conocimiento y de relaciones con la realidad. Incluso abriendo las posibilidades de sobre pasar la muerte.
Žižek como tal no apoya la idea, pero no la descalifica de manera inmediata. A lo largo del libro se dedica a analizar sus consecuencias y su balance no es positivo. La comunicación directa de pensamientos tendría impactos directos en la formación de la subjetividad (teorizada por el psicoanálisis), no eliminaría el inconsciente, Es decir, no sería una panacea y su surgimiento traerá nuevas contradicciones, nuevas formas de dominación y manipulación en el sujeto y la humanidad.
Libro recomendado para reflexionar sobre la tecnología desde la filosofía hegeliana y el psicoanálisis lacaniano. Así como para los interesados en las posibilidades emancipadoras de la tecnología.
October 8, 2023
Creo que este libro surge específicamente de la idea del neuralink , que pretende conectar nuestros procesos mentales y una máquina digital.
La forma en que Hegel ve el pensamiento humano conectado, unos con otros y por otra parte el espíritu humano, según Hegel, es un proceso que sucede a través de la interacción con el mundo exterior.
Analiza cómo las máquinas digitales están transforman nuestros pensamientos y nuestra relación con la realidad .
Nuestra conectividad digital puede conducir a una nueva forma de singularidad. La singularidad es un momento en el que todos los individuos se unen en un único sujeto.
Žižek argumenta que la conectividad digital nos presenta un desafío para repensar nuestra relación con el mundo. Debemos aprender a usar las máquinas digitales para conectarnos con los demás de una manera que sea beneficiosa para todos.
Las ideas conceptos y relaciones que hace Zizek entre el pensamiento de Hegel, la conectividad digital que nos ha invadido los últimos decenios, y la posibilidad de una interacción directa entre cerebros Y entre cerebro y máquina hace este libro y las ideas planteadas un ejercicio interesante.
Aunque para ser realistas, este suceso podría ser un paradigma fundamental para nuestra relación con el mundo, el lenguaje, la realidad y las máquinas.
Seguramente la película de la Matrix se volverá una
Visión superficial y tal vez ingenua de la realidad.
La forma en que Hegel ve el pensamiento humano conectado, unos con otros y por otra parte el espíritu humano, según Hegel, es un proceso que sucede a través de la interacción con el mundo exterior.
Analiza cómo las máquinas digitales están transforman nuestros pensamientos y nuestra relación con la realidad .
Nuestra conectividad digital puede conducir a una nueva forma de singularidad. La singularidad es un momento en el que todos los individuos se unen en un único sujeto.
Žižek argumenta que la conectividad digital nos presenta un desafío para repensar nuestra relación con el mundo. Debemos aprender a usar las máquinas digitales para conectarnos con los demás de una manera que sea beneficiosa para todos.
Las ideas conceptos y relaciones que hace Zizek entre el pensamiento de Hegel, la conectividad digital que nos ha invadido los últimos decenios, y la posibilidad de una interacción directa entre cerebros Y entre cerebro y máquina hace este libro y las ideas planteadas un ejercicio interesante.
Aunque para ser realistas, este suceso podría ser un paradigma fundamental para nuestra relación con el mundo, el lenguaje, la realidad y las máquinas.
Seguramente la película de la Matrix se volverá una
Visión superficial y tal vez ingenua de la realidad.
July 31, 2020
JoZizek writes in the intro that he'll only cycle round his object in each chapter. The whole book of course drives towards it and I learn a lot. It can read as a polical intervention in Silicon Valley ideology to concretely problemize their manifest misconceptions about sigularity, and the potential consequences on who we are.
The "failures" to caputure this object open many novel spaces for further discussion, via a varied range of approaches and problem spaces.
What I find more interesting is the subterranean debate - pitting Deleuze and Spinoza against Hegel to develop a substantive critique of Right Accelerationism.
There is no final knockdown or synthesis . He is just saying here are some questions that I think warrant us taking this seriously. They're disparate but helpful and might offer a good start.
The "failures" to caputure this object open many novel spaces for further discussion, via a varied range of approaches and problem spaces.
What I find more interesting is the subterranean debate - pitting Deleuze and Spinoza against Hegel to develop a substantive critique of Right Accelerationism.
There is no final knockdown or synthesis . He is just saying here are some questions that I think warrant us taking this seriously. They're disparate but helpful and might offer a good start.
January 19, 2024
Hegel y el cerebro conectado tratan cuestiones filosóficas sobre qué será el proyecto humano al llegar esta tecnología. Un libro interesante si el lector viene con el contexto adecuado. Es un libro corto pero pesado. Esto es común en libros del mismo autor, que trata al lector como si tuviera todo el contexto sobre el tema. Aun así encontrarás preguntas interesantes que te harán reflexionar sobre el cerebro conectado (singularidad).
March 27, 2024
wielowątkowe, filozoficzne spojrzenie na rozwój technologii i potencjalne stworzenie sieci wspólnej świadomości ludzkiej za pośrednictwem chipów Neuralink. chociaż autor w uwagach wprowadzających ostrzega przed fragmentaryzacją i pozornym niepowiązaniem wątków w książce, chwilami można pogubić się w jego toku rozumowania. może to czyni książkę nawet ciekawszą. +1 za znaną i lubianą u Žižka satyrę i nawiązania do popkultury
September 8, 2020
Zizek links Doc Martin with Musks startup Neurolink which is more brilliant than the startup itself
June 3, 2021
He's done it again
July 4, 2021
Zizek, Hegel ve Lacan hakkında konuşmak için bu sefer Elon Musk'ı bahane etmiş :)
August 31, 2021
a real meanderer
September 7, 2021
at least he acknowledges that its pop philosophy
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews