2024-25 Speaker Series
Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.
Upcoming speaker:
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
1:30 p.m. EST
Stevenson Hall 3165
David Roden
"Nietzschean Hyperagents"
Stefan Sorgner has argued (2009) that there is a convergence between the ethics of transhumanist enhancement and the promise of Nietzsche’s Overhuman, a new form of agent able to affirm life without transcendent values. The convergence is partial because there would be no transcendent yardstick by which the transition from the Human to Overhuman ‘perspectives’ could be determined. Thus, Sorgner argues, the kind of transhumanism that Nietzsche informs is not rationalist transhumanism.
This objection to rationalist transhumanism can be pumped up if we consider taking technological enhancement to the limit at which every aspect of an agent’s substrate is rendered amenable to technical alteration. This marks a transition from ‘merely plastic’ agents, like us, to hyperplastic agents (Hyperagents) for which no functions are stable over time.
It can be argued that a hyperagent would lack ‘fillers’ for the roles of intentions, beliefs, experiences of folk psychology, or perspectives, for that matter. Consequently, a hyperagent would be uninterpretable for humans (Roden 2022). Thus, the itinerary of transhuman enhancement may seem to lead to a black ‘event horizon’ beyond which it is unclear whether the results of radical enhancement to agents are still even agents.
This supports Sorgner against the Rationalist Transhumanists. But the supplement is perhaps too strong. The emergence of hyperagents, I argue, would eliminate nihilism by eliminating nihilists (or any recognizable moral agent) replacing them with ‘post-agents’ beyond human comprehension. This implies, pace Sorgner, that Nietzsche’s prospectus for overcoming nihilism or overcoming the reactive forces of the human cannot be achieved through radical technological enhancement.
I will evaluate this argument. Is the idea of the Hyperagent anything more than a conceptually incoherent thought experiment. Is it so problematic that we can safely exclude the idea from the very-long-run horizon of posthuman possibility? Even if it is not a broken backed philosophical posit, what difference does Hyperagency make to a plausible posthuman ethics? Does it, like the Cyborg before it, promise an ontological resolution for our alienated relation to technology?
Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube
Past Speakers:
Dr. Alenka Zupančič
The Logic of Fantasy
May 3, 2024
Dr. Mariana Ortega
Carnal Light and Border Crossing, Sensing a Photographic Archive of Feeling Brown
November 6, 2023
Gabriel Rockhill
Ideology, Art & Class Struggle
October 5, 2023
Rocío Zambrana
Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long 17th Century
April 3, 2023
Alia Al-Saji
Making the Colonial Past Hesitate: Fanon, amputation, and a politics of refusal
March 13, 2023
