Читать книгу The Radical Singularity. Essay on Singular Phenomena онлайн

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Modernity is to Postmodernity what the phantom limb is to the body. We amputated Modernity because we no longer needed that unbearable residue of History, but for some reason, we still secretly feel its presence (or absence). We still perceive sensations deriving from the missing limb, which somehow remains connected to the body and continues to function with it virtually. We are still in the postoperative period, the operation being the zero degree of rupture and liberation. Hence, even its own term, Postmodernity, evidences that we are in an era that does not even define itself for what it is but rather for what it ceased to be (hence its prefix «post», that is, everything that comes after Modernity, but it goes not have its own definition or noun and acts as a prosthesis or cancer metastasis). We no longer know what to do with the corpse of Modernity. Nor do we know if Modernity is the ghost that haunts us, or if we are the phantasmagoric spectre of Modernity’s death.

It is also no coincidence that our current time is the Digital Age. Even the screens themselves are secretly always reflecting our ghostly image, our holographic clone from the cybernetic afterlife. The hologram is not a shadow, a portrait or a spirit. The hologram is the radiation of the subject that disintegrates due to technique, it is a light and artificial clone that is pixelated on the computer screen. The most interesting thing about this virtual double is that it is always there, but we never manage to see it because of the light whitening of the screen. Our own image is erased in front of us. Only the ghostly clone of virtual reality survives. We are visible to the machine but holograms to ourselves. Perhaps this was the function of technology: to remind us of our own disappearance; and it is precisely because the machine has replaced the human being that we try to become machines (so as not to lose ourselves in oblivion).