2021, Vol.14, No.2

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

Since March 2020, many philosophers have written about the COVID-19 pandemic situation, including Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. The two have very close political positions, but their reactions to the situation have been very different. While Žižek sees the coronavirus pandemic as an important trigger for fundamental political change, Badiou argues that the current situation will not cause a revolution or endanger capitalism. We believe that the two philosophers’ different understandings of the concept of the other led to this difference of positions. Both philosophers have within three kinds of concepts of the other: the immanent and relative other, the transcendent and absolute other, and the immanent and absolute other. The crucial difference between Žižek and Badiou lies in the relationship between the two absolute others. In the case of Žižek, the immanent and absolute other, the object a, is the effect of, and is a part of, the transcendental and absolute other, the big other. In other words, the immanent and absolute other has a direct relationship with the transcendent and absolute other. In the case of Badiou, on the other hand, there is no direct relationship between infinity and void. For Žižek, COVID-19 is a big other in society, and thus can be an opportunity to reshape society. For Badiou, the pandemic cannot have any effect on the political situation, because the infinity has no direct relationship with the void.

This paper explicates Stiegler's critical diagnoses of digital information technology and his solutions to it, and examines their significance. Algorithmic governance and total automation are based on the concept of computability and information as amount of data. They capture the attention to life, resulting in the impoverishment of intellectual capacity and knowledge. Therapeutic work is required to restore the ability of knowledge so that creative activities utilizing technological automatism can be carried out. According to Stiegler, technological objects as exteriorized exosomatic hyper- material memory are pharmakon(poison/remedy). In order to transform the potential of the digital associated milieux as a poison to that as a remedy, and to derive non- automated capabilities from automated technology, we need to rethink the relationship between technology and knowledge from the perspective of sharing and inheriting knowledge and caring for life, not from the perspective of profit-seeking calculations.

This study focuses on the allegory of Anima machine that U-Ram Choe known as a kinetic artist has been making since 2000. I take a closer look at the Posthuman symptoms of the Anima machine. The kinetic element of his works is intended to symbolize the emergence and the self-organizaation in the living system. His mechanical living beings have the value of beauty that anthropocentrism does not allow non-humans. These aspects provide an opportunity to contemplate the posthuman sensitivity against the aesthetic based the dichotomy between humans and non-humans in which Man defined. Thus this paper is intended to verify that Anima machines function as the allegory of symbioses between humans and non-humans that displaces anthropocentrism. Furthermore, this study will be meaningful in that it reveals the reason why Choe has been examining the symbiotic relationship between humans and non-humans in the course of techno-futurism of Korean society since the 1990s.