Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking

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Developing a new political thought to address todays planetary crises

What is planetary thinking today Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms megamachines. The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegels political state and Schmitts Groraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.

Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

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Author Bio

Yuk Hui is professor of philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam and professor at City University of Hong Kong. He is author of Art and Cosmotechnics, Recursivity and Contingency, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, and On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minnesota, 2016).