Читать книгу The Radical Singularity. Essay on Singular Phenomena онлайн

8 страница из 19

A humanity without a past is lost since it has no traces to return or advance to; a humanity without a future exchanges progress for excrescence and is ultimately paralysed in its own disorder.

Previously, we looked back on history to find something of respect or to recycle; today, only for revisionism: the de-fossilisation of history is done to finish it off via the vertigo of the impossibility of producing it (as there is no vision, there is revision). There is a kind of generalised revisionism, especially against the Age of Enlightenment, which leads intellectuals (such as Habermas or Pinker) to come to its defence since it has become a historical event in danger of extinction, an already fossilised inheritance that, in addition to being defended, must also be proven. Since Nietzsche, it has become not only be necessary to unearth it and finish it off but also to reduce it to «instrumental reason» or, worse still, to elevate it to the category of myth. At this rate, one day we will wonder if Rousseau ever existed or if there was someone named Newton; all of them mythical characters in a cultural tale. We are forcibly convinced that neither Modernity nor progress really existed, that the Dark Ages were not so dark, that the Enlightenment was not so bright, that it was utopian but that it marked the beginning of the murder of God. The religious neoconservatives accuse it of secularisation, individualisation, corruption and hedonism (which is nothing more than their own historical resentment at the banishment of God’s authority). There is total and fatal amnesia, which will leave us no choice but to rename Postmodernity or rewrite the history manuals. We erase humanism from history with revisionism, and humans, with robots, whereupon humans remain suspended in an intermediate stage between fossils and machines.