Description
Writing in 1956 in The Obsolescence of the Human, Günther Anders defined a radical maxim that has passed almost entirely without commentary amidst the gradual uptake of his work: “own only such things whose inherent maxims you would will to be the maxims of your own actions”. With this rewriting of the Categorical Imperative, Anders’s text sought to translate back into the sensual realm the insufficiently sensed impacts that arise from our ever greater reliance on things and infrastructures that act on our behalf, while also seeming to show up this moral imperative as doomed from the start. In this paper I revisit Anders’s discussion of outsourced acts to align it to more recent attempts to translate our medial existence back into the realm of imperatives that seem intent on preserving our capacity to act, such as Yves Citton’s “Twelve Maxims of Attentional Ecosophy”. I argue that these attempts can help conceptualise the “anaesthetic” (i.e. numbing feelgood alleviation) that technological mediation can bestow, and thereby also help shift the notions of the “thinking and feeling I” they are seemingly addressed at.| Period | 21 Nov 2026 |
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| Event title | VECTORAL AGENTS: Digital technologies and (in)capacities to act: Symposium on techno-politics of (non)human agency |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Ljubljana, SloveniaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |