Response to Dr Richard Brons

Omschrijving

First of all, I would like to thank Dr Richard Brons for his review of my book Recursivity and Contingency (2019), as well as his introduction of my work in general to the Dutch speaking readers. This response doesn’t aim to defend against his readings but as an appreciation of his generosity of opening my work to a Lyotardian critique on the question of ethics, to which I am obliged to reply. Recursivity and Contingency is a project that started more than a decade ago and it has so far resulted in a trilogy, consisting of Art and Cosmotechnics (2021) dedicated to art/aesthetics and technology, and Machine and Sovereignty (2024) dedicated to political philosophy and technology. The trilogy has the aim to re-read the history of modern European philosophy as a history of epistemologies, with Kant as its most profound and systematic thinker. This interpretation, as I have so hoped, would allow us to understand the obsoleteness of certain concepts and disputes that are often recycled in the contemporary philosophical discourses, such as machine versus living being, mechanism versus organism, monarchy versus democracy and so on so forth. This project is in itself a deconstruction of these philosophical narratives in order to shed light the “paralogical” discourses that are yet to be made adequate to address the challenges in our time. This could be recognized as an ethical dimension of the project en gros, and it is more specifically expressed in what I call technodiversity. 
The concept of technodiversity originated from a project that I started much earlier, and it was explained in The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), a book that responds to Heidegger’s 1949/1953 Die Frage nach der Technik. If there is a relation between technodiversity and le différent, it is because technodiversity questions the so-called philosophy of technology which has been so far presented as a Western cannon. When we read treatises on philosophy of technology, we often come across an interpretation from Prometheus to Heidegger. This discourse undermines the non-European thoughts in the process of modernization, in which technology has been considered as universal and more and more homogenous. This is exactly what we are witnessing today, and that we need to challenge in order to renew and reinvent our philosophical concepts. In this sense, the Lyotardian différent, as an attempt to make intelligible the sufferance of injustice within the dominant legal or political framework, is already present since the beginning of this initiative and it calls for the reworking on the relation between philosophy and technology, instead of stopping at a postcolonial and historical critique.