Giorgio Agamben: Pasiphae’s bull and technique

Jean Lemaire (1598-1659), Daedalus sculpting a wooden cow for Queen Pasiphae

In the myth of Pasiphae, the woman who has an artificial cow built by Daedalus in order to mate with a bull, it is legitimate to see a paradigm of technology. In this perspective, technology appears as the device through which man tries to attain – or re-attain – animality. But this is precisely the risk that humanity runs today through technological hypertrophy. Artificial intelligence, to which technology seems to want to entrust its extreme consequence, aims to produce an intelligence that, like animal instinct, functions by itself, so to speak, 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 becoming again, an animal. And it is not surprising that from this union a monstrous being is born, with a human body and a bull’s head, the Minotaur, who is locked in a labyrinth and fed with human flesh.

In technique – this is the thesis we intend to suggest – it is really about the relationship between the human and the animal. Anthropogenesis, the human becoming of the primate homo, is not, in fact, an event that takes place once and for all at a given moment in time: it is a continuous process, in which man does not cease to be human and, at the same time, to remain animal. And if human nature is so difficult to define, it is precisely because it takes the form of an articulation between two heterogeneous and yet closely intertwined elements. Its assiduous implication is what we call history, in which all Western knowledge, from philosophy to grammar, from logic to science and, today, to cybernetics and computer science, has been involved from the very beginning.

Human nature – it must not be forgotten – is not a datum that can be acquired or normatively fixed according to one’s own will: rather, it is given in a historical praxis, which – insofar as it has to distinguish and articulate together, inside and outside man, the living and the speaking, the human and the animal – cannot but be incessantly implemented and each time postponed and actualised. This means that an essentially political problem is at stake, in which the decision of what is human and what is not is at stake. Man’s place is in this gap and tension between the human and the animal, language and life, nature and history. And if, like Pasiphae, he forgets his own vital abode and tries to flatten the extremes between which he must remain tense, he will only generate monsters and, with them, imprison himself in a labyrinth with no way out.

July 8, 2024


Source: Quodlibet

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