Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity

by Slavoj Žižek

The progress of today’s sciences destroys the basic presuppositions of our everyday notion of reality. There are four main attitudes one can adopt towards this breakthrough. The first one is simply to insist on radical naturalism, i.e. to heroically pursue the logic of the scientific ‘disenchantment of reality’ whatever the cost, even if the very fundamental coordinates of our horizon of meaningful experience are thereby shattered. (In brain sciences, Patricia and Paul Churchland most radically opt for this attitude.) The second is to make a desperate attempt to move beneath or beyond the scientific approach into some presumably more original and authentic reading of the world (religion or other kinds of spirituality are the main candidates here) – as, ultimately, Heidegger does. The third and most hopeless approach is to try to forge some kind of New Age ‘synthesis’ between scientific Truth and the premodern world of Meaning: the claim is that new scientific results themselves (quantum physics, say) compel us to abandon materialism and point towards some new (Gnostic or Eastern) spirituality. Here is a standard version of this idea: The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.2 This line of reasoning stands for ideology at its wo...