Читать книгу The Radical Singularity. Essay on Singular Phenomena онлайн

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Everything «post» is today crossed by the «trans». Postmodernity seems to be a transition, a dead time between Modernity (already concluded) and Posthumanism (or disappearance); it is a time of disintegration of one form towards a new stage. Postmodernity is «trans» in the sense that it rejects its origin and exceeds its nature; it is radical transmutation and the transfiguration of Modernity, not to mention transparency and transience. It is the era of transeconomics, transpolitics, transaesthetics, transsexuality and transhumanism; all of them are categories of the liberated par excellence, new forms in which all signs are released, intermingled, confused, undifferentiated, and ultimately, they are indifferent (since there are no longer rules of meaning or combination).

The world alone does not have a meaning. It is the ideas in the minds of men that, through Reason, are found in the ideas of the world. Without its ideas, the world (and everything) disorders. Modernity was a process of historical rationalisation (Weber), a new way of understanding, structuring and signifying the world (and the place of the human being in that world). For the first time, there was no longer a human being in the image and likeness of God but rather a world in the image and likeness of the human being. Doubt went from being the cause of heresy to the root of existence and specifically to being the origin of knowledge. The shock of the «methodical doubt» (which would shake several domes and altars) was not sceptical-destructive but epistemic-constructive because its purpose was to achieve indubitable evidence. If, in the Renaissance, the light of the sun had become the centre of the Solar System, than in the Enlightenment, the light of Reason had become the centre of Modernity. Reason animated the movement of the modern spirit that had just been born, and that soon would spread to all areas of Western culture. The Lights of the 18th century sought to reconstruct a form of interpretation and generation of history, not only in the philosophical and scientific fields but also in economics, politics, aesthetics – in short, in all the organs that constitute the totality of the human being. The spirit of Modernity was the expression of a radical optimism towards the world and the human being through which the meta-narratives of societies would be written. From Cartesian certainty to the dialectical movement of the Hegelian absolute, consciousness was the basis of the subject, which would become the genesis of the production of meaning (Hegelian philosophy being the consummation and absolutisation of the subject through historical dialectics). Postmodernity puts an end to meaning itself in favour of a generalised simulation that puts an end to the dialectic of meaning. We no longer know what our representation of the world is. Down with the enlightened imperialism of Reason, the strike of truth and progress, the great stories, and the monolith of Modernity! This is the toast of Postmodernity.