The main themes and aims of this book are understanding aesthetics, contemporary art and the end of the avant-garde not from the traditional viewpoint of the metaphysics of the beautiful and the sublime but rather thru close connection to the techno-genesis of virtual worlds. This book tackles problems in contemporary art theory such as the body in space and time of digital technologies, along with other issues in visual studies and image science. Further intentions exhibit the fundamental reasons for the (...) disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm; art has no world for its "image". The author argues that the iconoclasm of contemporary art has severe consequences. This text appeals to philosophers of art and those interested in contemporary art theory. (shrink)

The paper establishes a correlation between nihilism and history from the premise of the end of metaphysics in the age of the technosphere. In presenting the genealogy of the postmodern turn in contemporary philosophical thinking, the author critically deals with Vattimo’s thesis that Heidegger’s notion of overcoming metaphysics is the key to understanding postmodernity. Despite its close proximity to Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is undeniable that the main notion must be derived from late Wittgenstein’s thinking, as Lyotard did in his (...) analysis of the “postmodern condition”. It is a notion of “language games” that introduces into consideration the relationship between the pragmatics of knowledge, the performativity of language and the event horizon. In this way, it will be shown that postmodernity cannot be any “new” epoch but rather a re-actualization of the condition determined by the rule of technoscience, cybernetics and plural patterns of culture in post-industrial society. Based on his previous analyses of this problem, collected in the books The Postmodern Game of the World, Identity Politics, The Posthuman Condition, and Technosphere I–V, the author believes that only extensive analysis and interpretation of Lyotard’s premises allows one to reach the right philosophical path to the answer to the question of the essence of nihilism in the face of Being, and the technosphere as computation, planning, and construction of the inhuman. In contemporary times, what is left of postmodernity is neither “telling stories” about the stylistic tendencies of the modern and neomodern, the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, nor, moreso, the conflict of the universality and particularity of society and culture. All that remains is the feature of the unwavering “fate” of this nihilism of the technosphere: from the postmodern condition to the posthuman condition, thought is confronted with the challenge of an event that goes beyond anything seen in the history of Western metaphysics. When the image precedes the language and the writing to speaking, we find ourselves in a closed circle of turns and reversals of metaphysics. It is time to step out of this “vicious circle” in which the living becomes non-living, the Being becomes the information, the system of objects replaces society, and the human-too-human with inhuman as such. (shrink)

In Deleuzeʼs studies on film, it is striking that the dismantled “essence” of metaphysics as an ontology is synthetically linked with a new approach not only to the movement of the concept, speaking in Hegelʼs language but also to the thinking as an event. That is even more true for the understanding of that which lasts in time and thus has the character of the thought-image. As the author points out in this article, Deleuze establishes this by turning the brain (...) into a screen, and the film from the sphere of the so-called reality becomes the virtual code of the world as an image. The difference between concept and image eliminates the difference between the image no longer preceding the term and the term no longer preceding the image. How crucial this turn will be to Deleuzeʼs notion of the cinema can be seen in the derivation of the concept of an event. The image and term correspond to the singularity of the event. The problem with comprehending Deleuzeʼs “images-ontology” shows that film cannot be reduced to the autonomous production of a cinematic way of thinking unless we have previously clarified what movement is and how it is created. In this paradigmatic case, a cinema cannot be viewed simply as a “visual code” of contemporary art. Its “essence” is revealed in that it enables the image-movement and image-time to synthetically realize the possibilities of the technosphere as computation, planning and construction. Eventually, the cinematic thinking advocated by Deleuze becomes a question of the possibility of film as a meta-film reaching a new level of philosophical consideration of what becomes and emerges with a new set of relations between Being and event. (shrink)

The author analyzes the politics of responsive interculturalism in Bernhard Waldenfels? thought, starting from the assumption that after Husserl?s phenomenology only two fundamental concepts - body and the Other - should be considered. In contemporary German?post-phenomenology? the first concept was systematically articulated by Hermann Schmitz, while the latter theme has been advanced in Waldenfels? works as the phenomenology of the alien, up until the end of Western metaphysics. In the two parts of the discussion, the author draws on his fundamental (...) hypothesis about aporias and paradoxes of interculturalism, since responsiveness and xenology cannot reach the positive definition of the concept of culture in the era of global entropy. The analysis, therefore, deals with the questions: what is the responsiveness of man in relation to the Other, including the different ways of his presence in the world; and whether the Other as alien and uncanny calls into question the basic assumption of phenomenology as such - the intentionality of consciousness? nema. (shrink)