This is the second of the interview series initiated by the PENTACLE team. The preparation, translation, and the revision of the questions are done collaboratively by Elçin Parçaoğlu, Başak Ağın, and Mehmet Ali Çelikel. Türkçe versiyon için buraya tıklayınız.
Dr. Yunus Tuncel is based in New York and teaches philosophy at The New School. He is one of the founding members of the NY Posthuman Research Group.
Dear Yunus, thank you for accepting our invitation for an interview with PENTACLE. When we look at your academic background, we see that you teach classes on power, spectacle, crime and punishment. In addition, your research interests cover agonism, eroticism, and the culture of the troubadours. You also mention on your website that the areas of culture where art, literature, and philosophy come together are your other interests. How do you think philosophical posthumanism connects all these areas?
Many of these topics have been at the center of philosophical discussion since the groundbreaking works that shaped postmodern and posthumanist thought. Let’s take spectacle; I have taught classes and a book on this topic. It is a major concern in Nietzsche and later in Debord and Lyotard, to name a few. With the rise of social media, it has gained another dimension and is much debated in posthumanism. Similarly with the topic of power, since Foucault we are faced with the question of power and how specific forms of power relations, along with discursive practices, shape institutions and their practices. Philosophical posthumanism cannot, and does not, evade the question of power. As for other topics, such as agonism which connects with sports, and eroticism, they are about bodily regimes. Since Nietzsche’s diagnosis of “ascetic idealism” and psychoanalysis, we are bound to explore the role of the body in human life. Posthumanism promotes this investigation in a multi-disciplinary way. As for the troubadours of Occitan, they are the pioneers of modern European literature and the sub-culture they created called “gai saber” is crucial to understand the nature of human love, not only for human relations but how we define the human and how we relate to our beings that are not human. The troubadours can be called the posthumanists of their times. I am currently working on a book on crime and punishment; I believe posthumanism would want to overcome the dominant feeling of guilt and the syndrome of crime and punishment, as envisioned by Foucault and many thinkers before him. And this book shall be posthumanistic in that sense.
You are one of the founders of the NY Posthuman Research Group. As a team, you hold seasonal summits in various universities. Invited speakers contribute to these meetings with different areas concerning posthumanism. What kind of impact do you think these meetings have on the latest posthuman studies?
NY Posthuman Research Group was founded by Francesca Ferrando, Kevin LaGrandeur and me in 2012; shortly after Farzad Mahootian and Jim McBride also joined us as organizers. Initially we organized small symposia but later started having one big conference. These events brought together many posthumanists from different countries and disciplines and had a big influence on exchanges among posthumanists and inspired others who joined these events. Artists also joined these events and there were performances and presentation of art works. Unfortunately, the pandemic ended these activities and now new activities and organizations are being formed to pursue posthumanist goals and studies. Some of the upcoming events that are being organized will be for the World Congress of Philosophy which will take place in Rome in August 2024.
As you know, the posthuman understanding sees the redefinition of the perception of the “human” as urgent. As an expert in philosophical posthumanism, how do you think this redefinition will contribute to the future understanding of “human”?
Yes, and there have been many conceptions of the human. One problem to tackle is the dualism between the human and non-human that we inherited and, related to it, the problem of anthropocentricity. And yet, another problem is logo-centricity and psycho-supremacy. The first one claims that we are superior because we are rational. The second one argues that only humans have souls, which makes them superior. All of these beliefs and philosophical positions are highly problematic for the life of our planet and our holistic existence as the guests of this planet. Philosophical posthumanism exposes these problems and their life-negating assumptions, as it sheds light on their possible overcomings. I do not think humanity will overcome these archaic and obsolete definitions any time soon, because they are grounded in very old beliefs. It must be kept in mind that anthropocentricity has roots in ancient humanity. Feeling superior in older times may have been coping mechanisms with the wild world. Later they became part of sophisticated theologies and ideologies. To overcome these old beliefs and to arrive at a new sensible understanding of human, which will allow humans to co-exist with other beings on this planet in reverence of the planet, will have its developmental stages. Posthumanism presents many ideas for such transformation.
In your article, “Arts in the Age of Posthumanism: Reflections on Stefan Lorenz Sorgner’s Philosophy of Posthuman Art,” you mention that Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, declares the Dionysian effect upon creativity and aesthetics. You also state that Dionysian means becoming one with nature. How do you elaborate on this matter? What is becoming with nature in a Dionysian way?
First, a few words on the Dionysian in Nietzsche. The Dionysian and the Apollonian are introduced as aesthetic principles in The Birth of Tragedy, but they also have metaphysical/cosmological underpinnings. The Apollonian has to do with the principle of individuation as opposed to the Dionysian which has to do with nothingness, the absence of individuated state. All beings are born, live and die. The first two can be explained with the Apollonian and the last with the Dionysian. Applied to human life, all things that have to do with my individuality is Apollonian and with my mortality and death Dionysian. The Dionysian is losing one’s self, seeing one’s self in the other, and being connected to all other beings. This is akin to what psychologists call ‘empathy’ but it is deeper, because Nietzsche sees the Dionysian not only as spiritual but also as visceral. The Dionysian is rooted in the deepest psycho-somatic registers of human existence. Unlike the mystics of previous ages, in Nietzsche this ecstasy is very much this-worldly and physical. Since the primary subject of this book is arts and aesthetics, Nietzsche presents them as art impulses. Although Nietzsche associates the Dionysian with musical arts and the Apollonian with visual arts in this book, he sees the simplicity of this dualism later on. It is better to say that all arts, all creative process function with both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In fact, postmodern and posthumanist art recognize this position and we see both of them in their chiasmatic and agonistic union in many contemporary art works.
You edited Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or Enemy? as part of the series Nietzsche Now. How do you evaluate the essays in this book? How do the contributors take Nietzsche’s understanding of the transhumanist perspective? Or, is there any transhumanist understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy? What do you think?
I cannot evaluate each of the essays in this book, but can reflect on all of them. The idea of this anthology was to bring transhumanists together with Nietzsche scholars, and the anthology is split accordingly. There are transhumanists who read and incorporate Nietzsche’s ideas like Max More. And there are Nietzsche scholars who want to engage in close dialogue with transhumanists so as to confront together technology and its impact on human life and our planet. For instance, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner wants to establish more bridges between the two worlds. If I can elaborate further on the last question, yes, there are transhumanist understandings of Nietzsche, which focus on the overhuman and human evolution. Humans have been evolving since they first appeared and we are in a different stage of that evolution in which we are becoming posthumans or cyborgs. The posthuman that is shared by transhumanism and posthumanism should not be confused with the vision of posthumanism. All that the advance technology has produced, computers, AIs, and robots, are simply part of that evolution. There is no strict dualism between the human and the non-human, the material and the ideal or the non-material; we are all of them, we are organic and inorganic at the same time. We can be half organic and half machine. All of these will take us ultimately to becoming cyborgs. We will be strong and sovereign and ultimately immortal. Many of these transhumanist idea resonate with Nietzsche’s evolutionary overhuman. However, there are many mismatches also. For mismatches, we need to consider Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, his cyclical conception of time, and his ideas on the body and critique of ascetic idealism, not to mention his ideas on incremental transformation. Nothing is immortal in Nietzsche, for instance, not even gods. The desire to be immortal, free from the organic body, may be a futile attempt, another coping mechanism for suffering and death. It cannot be presented as a goal to attain. However, I must agree with Sorgner for his wish for a possible rapprochement. We need to bring transhumanists to a wider and a deeper confrontation with technology.
Thank you again for joining us for this interview.
I thank you for inviting me to this interview and wish much success to PENTACLE.
