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