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Machine and Sovereignty: Preface

Machine and Sovereignty
Preface
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Preface
  8. Introduction: For a Planetary Thinking
    1. §1. On the Planetary Condition
    2. §2. Planetary Thinking as Political Epistemologies
    3. §3. Search for a Planetary Politics beyond the Nation-State
    4. §4. Toward a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus of the Planetary
  9. 1. World Spirit as Planetary Thinking
    1. §5. Individuation of the Spirit as Historical Process
    2. §6. World Spirit as Planetary Thinking and the Place of Reason in History
    3. §7. Freedom as the Drive of the Transitions of Political Forms
    4. §8. Recursivity of Reason and Freedom in the Modern State
  10. 2. The Organism of the State and Its Limit
    1. §9. Spirit and the Organic Becoming of the Externalized
    2. §10. Organism of the State versus Organism of the Animal
    3. §11. The Impasse from the State to Planetary Freedom
  11. 3. From Noetic Reflection to Planetary Reflection
    1. §12. Noetic Reflection: Consciousness and Life
    2. §13. Bioeconomical Reflection: Georgescu-Roegen Reads Hegel
    3. §14. Cybernetic Reflection: Toward the Consciousness of Machines
    4. §15. Noospheric Reflection: In Search of a Planetary Freedom?
  12. 4. Mechanism, Organism, or Decisionism
    1. §16. From Political Theology to Political Epistemology
    2. §17. Machine and Organism in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes
    3. §18. Political Epistemology in Hobbes’s Leviathan
    4. §19. Catholicism and the Logic of Complexio Oppositorum
    5. §20. The Death of Hegel and the Triumph of Political Vitalism
  13. 5. Nomos of the Digital Earth
    1. §21. First Deconstruction on the Contingency of Sovereignty
    2. §22. Second Deconstruction on the Contingency of Friend and Enemy
    3. §23. Sovereignty and the Elementary Philosophy of Space
    4. §24. Großräume as Post-Static Political Form and the Problem of Pluralism
    5. §25. Giving Colonialism, New Großräume, and Digital Sovereignty
  14. 6. An Organology of Wars
    1. §26. The Disproportion of Organs and the Hubris of Wars
    2. §27. From a Cybernetics of Freedom to an Organology of Differences
    3. §28. The Conflict of Tendencies and the Recurrence of Mysticism
    4. §29. The Dynamics of the Technical Tendency and Technical Fact
    5. §30. On the Organological Relation between Technology and Democracy
    6. §31. Biodiversity, Noodiversity, and Technodiversity
  15. 7. Toward an Epistemological Diplomacy
    1. §32. Acceleration, Automation, and the Prosthetic Future
    2. §33. Universality Seen from the Perspective of Technodiversity
    3. §34. Sovereignty Seen from the Perspective of Technodiversity
    4. §35. Technodiversity Analyzed via an Anatomy of Technical Objects
    5. §36. Technodiversity as Epistemological Diplomacy
  16. Notes
  17. Bibliography
  18. Index
  19. Author Biography

Preface

In August 2022, I invited Professor Carl Mitcham to deliver the Bernard Stiegler memorial lecture; Carl asked if it would be possible to develop a Tractatus Politco-Technologicus after Leo Strauss. This question was driven by the belief that Strauss did not explicitly address the question of technology in his political philosophy and that philosophy of technology hasn’t yet engaged with political philosophy in a profound way. Today, it has become both inevitable and necessary to take technology into consideration in political philosophy; however, this relationship has yet to be thoroughly examined and comprehensively contemplated. Coincidently, I had been working on a similar project since I finished the manuscript of Recursivity and Contingency in summer 2018. I was tempted to explore the implication of the epistemological questions raised in the book in political thought, especially in view of the process of technological planetarization. However, due to various reasons, I was not ready to pursue the project right after Recursivity and Contingency (2019). Therefore, the current work is preceded by Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), which I consider the second volume of Recursivity and Contingency. Machine and Sovereignty is the third and the last volume of this series that has taken me more than a decade. It will be also my initial response to Carl’s question.

A large part of this book was written during the Covid-19 pandemic when the geopolitical drift became overwhelming: the upsurge of nationalism and identity politics, the intensification of border control, the increasing tension of wars and the worsening climate crisis. These shocks were existential especially when I had just relocated from Europe to the unrestful Hong Kong. Reading Hegel and Schmitt became equally an uncanny experience: abstract concepts became not only concrete but also intimate, and at the same time intimidating and disturbing. The thinking of Hegel and Schmitt embody two modern political forms—the nation-state and the Großraum—and a future planetary thinking will have to surpass both. We will have to forcefully open new perspectives for planetary thinking and a new concept of history to come. In order to do so, one cannot avoid respecting them as philosophical adversaries, meticulously engaging with their thinking while seeking moments to break through and take leaps. Not being trained as a specialist in political and legal thought, this study was more than laborious; meanwhile, I had to develop my own method of reading the classics of political philosophy, which I term political epistemology. Political epistemology is central to the megamachine of Lewis Mumford, as it legitimates and guides the operation of the megamachine. It is our Ariadne’s thread for exploring the planetary. The first parts of this study endeavor to lay down the epistemological foundation of Hegel’s and Schmitt’s political thought and the two political forms they wanted to justify. The later part of the book elaborates on the agenda of technodiversity, a concept that I developed in Recursivity and Contingency. This historical-epistemological study is, however, far from being complete. Despite its obvious limitations, I hope that it can still provide some insights to conceive a planetary thinking capable of addressing some of the current impasses.

This project would not be possible without the support of various institutions: the City University of Hong Kong, especially Professor Richard William Allen from its School of Creative Media; the Hong Kong Research Grant Council, for its Social Sciences and Humanities Prestigious Fellowship (2023), which allowed me to take time off from teaching and focus on completing the book and sponsored this book to be open access; the Berggruen Institute’s support of my research on the planetary between 2021 and 2022.

I want to thank the following friends and colleagues who have engaged with this writing process. Pieter Lemmens and Anders Dunker have given feedback on several chapters. Colleagues from the Centre for Critical Thought and the Law School, University of Kent, including Jose Bellido, Alex Damianos, Maria Drakopoulou, Gian-Giacomo Fusco, Conor Heaney, Philipp Kender, and Connal Parsley, have organized reading groups to comment on various chapters and gave critical feedback regarding legal thought and international relations. Milan Stürmer spent more than a year with me reading Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts sentence by sentence every week online. I want to equally thank Pieter Martin from the University of Minnesota Press for finding this project a home, the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and Joel White for copyediting and commenting on the manuscript.

Yuk Hui

Summer 2024, Rotterdam/Tokyo

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The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges support for the open-access edition of this book from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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