Patrick Gamez

In this article, I engage with contemporary posthuman theories that aim to expand “life” beyond the merely organic. This theoretical move is often motivated by ethical or political concerns. I argue, instead, that we should remove life from our ontologies. I motivate this view first by tracing the instability and ambiguity of the concept in the life sciences before discussing the unfortunate eugenic consequences of centering an ethics or politics around life. I conclude by noting what work remains to be done to fully flesh out an eliminativist, postvital orientation in posthumanist philosophy, but maintain that both contemporary political and ethical theory and contemporary biology can do without life.

I present an account of nihilism, following Foucault and Nietzsche, as a sort of colonization of our thinking by a religious form of normativity, grounded in our submission to truth as correspondence, in the idea that the facts themselves could be binding upon us. I then present Brassier’s radicalization of nihilism and showed how it remains subservient to this religious ideal of truth. I argue, further, that far than showing how a commitment to Enlightenment reason and science demands a cold metaphysics of death, in dismissing the irreducibly plural ways in which what is determines thought, Brassier’s attempt to secure a fit between thought and disenchanted world suggests that the view is an expression of the unliveable condition of nihilism, rather than its proof. Finally, I present a form of naturalism that makes legitimate claim to the legacy of Enlightenment, drawing from French historical epistemology, and dispenses with the problems animating Brassier’s nihilism by radically transforming the concept of truth and how we relate to it.

In this paper, I provide the outlines of an alternative metaphilosophical orientation for Continental philosophy, namely, a form of scientific naturalism that has proximate roots in the work of Bachelard and Althusser. I describe this orientation as an “alternative” insofar as it provides a framework for doing justice to some of the motivations behind the recent revival of metaphysics in Continental philosophy, in particular its ecological-ethical motivations. In the second section of the paper, I demonstrate how ecological-ethical issues motivate new metaphysicians like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Graham Harman to impute to objects real features of agency. I also try to show how their commitments lead to deep ambiguities in their metaphysical projects. In the final section, I outline a type of scientific naturalism in Continental philosophy that parallels the sort of naturalism championed by Quine, both conceptually and historically, and suggest that it might serve our ecological-ethical purposes better.

The core contention of this book is that, when viewed through the lens of contemporary posthuman theory, contemporary uses of AI under platform capitalism not only undermine our sense of the “human” but also our frameworks for conceptualizing ourselves as “subjects” or “selves” at all. This radical conclusion raises issues forces us to reckon with a new, disorienting horizon for critical thought at the intersection of technology and politics. This book demonstrates that two major streams of posthuman thought—namely, accelerationism and Prometheanism—can be interpreted as attempts to liberate our desires from our reason or our rationality from our all-too-human desire, each through the offloading of various tasks to emerging technologies. But, Patrick Gamez argues, the rise of opaque, unexplainable machine learning algorithms to predict and shape our behaviour undermines the common-sense models of mind through which we ultimately make sense of both the human and the posthuman.

In this chapter I introduce and contextualize Promethean posthumanism, pointing out its contrasts with transhumanism and resonances with other philosophical orientations, such as Bernard Stiegler’s phenomenological pharmacology of technology. I identify the political or ethical heart of Prometheanism as a rejection of any “given” limits to the (post)human. Rather than seeing ethical or political limits as given, Prometheans are committed to the construction of rational technologies—indeed, of reason as a technology—that can provide us with normative guidance. I suggest that this may in fact lead to a profound normative disorientation (though I do not defend any philosophy of the given, and in later chapters will suggest that profound normative disorientation is our lot).

In this final chapter, I summarize the results of our exploration of Prometheanism, gesturing at the bleak, directionless posthumanism that I think would be the result of taking the history of AI, and its continuity with the project of neoliberal, cybernetic self-governance. I once again (briefly) contrast my work here with that of Bernard Stiegler, before suggesting that recent work on the concept of “the face” might intimate something of the faceless future of the post/human, in a world in which it makes more sense to think of AI as minded than ourselves.

In this chapter, I discuss how the ideas that led to contemporary AI, in the form of neural networks, has been wrapped up in the intertwined histories of cybernetics and neoliberalism. I argue that while it is intelligible that technologies be “autonomous” in some sense, that autonomy may simply amplify and intensify the cybernetic, neoliberal project of self-regulated social control. Platform capitalism constitutes the next stage in this project, and in moving beyond the need to identify and manipulate the desires of rational, self-interested agents, may ultimately reveal that there never were any to begin with. As a form of (self-)knowledge, platform capitalism indicates that there may be no self to be known.

In this chapter I explore the distinctively Sellarsian cast of Promethean posthumanism, and how Sellars’ naturalist rationalism provides thinkers like Brassier, Negarestani, Wolfendale, and Christias with a way of thinking beyond Land’s accelerationism. I explain how they make use of Sellars’ distinction between the “manifest” and “scientific images” to articulate a technological “space of reasons” that would allow for the expansion of the manifest image far beyond the bodily and cognitive limitations of the human. I go on to explore the tensions between reductionism and eliminativism about the mind that this view brings with it, before explaining how, like Land, the Prometheans seem committed to the construction of an alien, inhuman, artificial intelligence.

In this first chapter I introduce the basic aims of the text, before exploring the thermodynamic and informational themes of Asimov’s “The Last Question.” Accelerationism and Prometheanism have always been informed by the tropes of science fiction, and I argue here that the themes of reducing entropy and the transcendence of artificial intelligence, with their roots in the fledgling post-war science of cybernetics, inform both of these posthuman projects. I discuss the statistical mechanical interpretation of the Second Law of thermodynamics, and its connections to information theory, as well as Maxwell’s Demon, taking some time to emphasize that classical Shannon information is a non-semantic measure of probability.

In this chapter, I explain the work of Nick Land, the father of “accelerationism,” a nihilistic and hypercapitalistic form of philosophical posthumanism developed through Land’s readings of Jean-François Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari in the 1990s. I interpret Land’s thesis that capitalism is a primitive form of artificial intelligence “invading from the future” as fundamentally outsourcing our cognitive tasks in order to unleash desire from the limits of our all-too-human psychology and physiology. I then show how Land’s turn to deeply reactionary politics in the twenty-first century is continuous with this project, and that Prometheans inherit from Land some central philosophical commitments.

In this paper, I present a Foucauldian reflection on our datafied present. Following others, I characterize this present as a condition of “digital capitalism” and proceed to explore whether and how digital conditions present an important change of episteme and, accordingly, an importantly different mode of subjectivity. I answer both of these concerns affirmatively. In the process, I engage with Colin Koopman’s recent work on infopower and argue that, despite changes in episteme and modes of subjectivity, the digital capitalist present is continuous with biopolitics as Foucault understood it, though it does raise serious worries about the possibility of transgressive resistance.

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth.

In this article I want to argue that Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution was neither romantic fascist atavism nor does it presage any sort of transformation of his thought. Indeed, Foucault’s investigations of neoliberalism and subsequent work on spirituality, truth-telling and ethics are fully continuous with his critical genealogy of power. This is an important point, as we shall see, insofar as Foucault’s journalism on the Iranian Revolution occurs in the midst of his Collège de France lectures on biopolitics and governmentality. Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Revolution might indicate, albeit very indirectly, directions for thought that might resist neoliberalism. I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a very specific telling of the ‘history of truth’, emphasizing a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling and transformation through struggle and ordeal, as opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power. The ‘political spirituality’ Foucault wit...

The goal of this paper is to set out the structure and order of Leibniz’s discussion of the so-called “static shift,” in his correspondence in Clarke. The immediate point of this exercise is to determine precisely how Leibniz puts to use his two famous principles – the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and the Principleof Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) – in constructing, and defending his relational view of space, while providing a refutation of Absolute Space. In specific, it is to set out an interpretation of this argument contrary to the generally accepted one – here represented by Chernoff – about the use of the PII.

Virtue ethics seems to be a promising moral theory for understanding and interpreting the development and behavior of artificial moral agents. Virtuous artificial agents would blur traditional distinctions between different sorts of moral machines and could make a claim to membership in the moral community. Accordingly, we investigate the “machine question” by studying whether virtue or vice can be attributed to artificial intelligence; that is, are people willing to judge machines as possessing moral character? An experiment describes situations where either human or AI agents engage in virtuous or vicious behavior and experiment participants then judge their level of virtue or vice. The scenarios represent different virtue ethics domains of truth, justice, fear, wealth, and honor. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that moral attributions are weakened for AIs compared to humans, and the reasoning and explanations for the attributions are varied and more complex. On “relational” views of membership in the moral community, virtuous machines would indeed be included, even if they are indeed weakened. Hence, while our moral relationships with artificial agents may be of the same types, they may yet remain substantively different than our relationships to human beings.