The bull of Pasiphaë and the technique
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 8, 2024
In the myth of Pasiphaë, the woman who gets Daedalus to build her an artificial cow so that it can mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. Technique appears in this perspective as the apparatus through which man tries to reach — or reach again — animality. But this is just the risk that humanity is running today through technological hypertrophy. Artificial intelligence, to which technique seems to want to entrust its extreme outcome, seeks to produce an intelligence that, like animal instinct, works on its own, so to say, without the intervention of a thinking subject. It is the Daedalic cow through which human intelligence believes it can happily mate with the instinct of the bull, becoming or rebecoming animal. And it is not surprising that from this union a monstruous being is born, with a human body and a bull’s head, the Minotaur, who gets locked up in a labyrinth and fed on human flesh.
In technique — this is the thesis we intend to suggest — what is actually at issue is the relation between human and animal. Anthropogenesis, the becoming human of primate homo, is not, indeed, an event accomplished once and for all at a certain moment in chronology: it is a process still ongoing, in which man does not cease to become human and, at the same time, to remain animal. And if human nature is so difficult to define, this is just because it takes the form of an articulation between two heterogeneous and yet closely intertwined elements. Their assiduous implication is what we call history, in which all Western knowledge was involved since the beginning, from philosophy to grammar, from logic to science and, today, to cybernetics and information technology.
Human nature — it is well not to forget it — is not a given that may ever be acquired or fixed normatively according to one’s own will: it rather gives itself in a historical praxis, which — insamuch as it must distinguish and articulate together, inside and outside man, the living and the speaking, the human and the animal — can only be incessantly carried out and each time deferred and updated. This means that an essentially political problem is at stake in it, upon which the decision of what is human and what is not depends. The place of man is in this gap and tension between human and animal, language and life, nature and history. And if, like Pasiphaë, he forgets his own vital dwelling and tries to flatten one on the other the extremes between which he must remain tense, he will only be able to generate monsters and, with them, imprison himself in a labyrinth with no way out.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 8, 2024
In the myth of Pasiphaë, the woman who gets Daedalus to build her an artificial cow so that it can mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. Technique appears in this perspective as the apparatus through which man tries to reach — or reach again — animality. But this is just the risk that humanity is running today through technological hypertrophy. Artificial intelligence, to which technique seems to want to entrust its extreme outcome, seeks to produce an intelligence that, like animal instinct, works on its own, so to say, without the intervention of a thinking subject. It is the Daedalic cow through which human intelligence believes it can happily mate with the instinct of the bull, becoming or rebecoming animal. And it is not surprising that from this union a monstruous being is born, with a human body and a bull’s head, the Minotaur, who gets locked up in a labyrinth and fed on human flesh.
In technique — this is the thesis we intend to suggest — what is actually at issue is the relation between human and animal. Anthropogenesis, the becoming human of primate homo, is not, indeed, an event accomplished once and for all at a certain moment in chronology: it is a process still ongoing, in which man does not cease to become human and, at the same time, to remain animal. And if human nature is so difficult to define, this is just because it takes the form of an articulation between two heterogeneous and yet closely intertwined elements. Their assiduous implication is what we call history, in which all Western knowledge was involved since the beginning, from philosophy to grammar, from logic to science and, today, to cybernetics and information technology.
Human nature — it is well not to forget it — is not a given that may ever be acquired or fixed normatively according to one’s own will: it rather gives itself in a historical praxis, which — insamuch as it must distinguish and articulate together, inside and outside man, the living and the speaking, the human and the animal — can only be incessantly carried out and each time deferred and updated. This means that an essentially political problem is at stake in it, upon which the decision of what is human and what is not depends. The place of man is in this gap and tension between human and animal, language and life, nature and history. And if, like Pasiphaë, he forgets his own vital dwelling and tries to flatten one on the other the extremes between which he must remain tense, he will only be able to generate monsters and, with them, imprison himself in a labyrinth with no way out.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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