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Notes
1CitationAnders, “Reflections on the H Bomb”, 154 [translation modified].
2 Ibid., 149.
3CitationAnders, Burning Conscience, 1. Anders outlines that ‘acting is today concealed as “working”’ to point out that ‘with this the ethicists to date have become obsolete overnight’. See CitationAnders, Endzeit und Zeitende, 72.
4 In the case of the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are implied here, the innumerable producers of and witnesses to the event are so removed, and the scale of the event so unimaginable, that the event remains abstract: ‘a city full of dead people remains a mere word to us’. See Anders, “H Bomb”, 152.
5 Ibid.,150.
6 Ibid.
7 Anders, Günther Anders antwortet, 60.
8 Anders, Endzeit, 96; 207; CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 42; 59.
9 See CitationDerrida, Of Grammatology,149.
10 See CitationDerrida, “Unforseeable Freedom”, 49; “Faith and Knowledge”, 43.
11 Anders, Endzeit, 88.
12 See CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”.
13CitationDerrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine”, 237–38.
14CitationDerrida, “Unforseeable Freedom”, 48.
15CitationHägglund, “The Radical Evil of Deconstruction”, 143.
16CitationAnders, “The Pathology of Freedom”, 279.
17 Ibid., 286: ‘It is the fact of the variation, and not the constancy of the variable, that defines the specifically human […]. The fact of not being fixed on any a priori material world, of not being settled on any world, of not having any foreseen determination, thus of being indeterminate, defines the human essentially’.
18 Ibid., 303.
19 Anders, Antiquiertheit, 311.
20 Ibid.
21 The present example is inspired by CitationHegel's “Who Thinks Abstractly?” in response to which CitationDerrida evokes the evil of abstraction in ‘Faith and Knowledge’. Hegel's text ends with a reflection on how an officer's uniform turns his subordinates into abstract beings: ‘Thus the common soldier is for the officer this abstractum of a beatable subject with whom a gentleman who has a uniform and port d'epée must trouble himself’. See Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”, 118.
22 Anders, Antiquiertheit, 268.
23 Ibid., 16.
24CitationAnders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2, 323; see also, 34–36.
25 Anders, Endzeit, 96.
26 The phrase ‘blindness to the apocalypse’ is the central term that orients Anders' reflection on the atom bomb and in his later works increasingly also the physical and spiritual effects of unbridled consumption.
27 Anders, Endzeit, 96.
28 For Anders' discussion of the term ‘naked apocalypse’ see Anders, Endzeit, 203ff. Derrida reminds us that those who deem nuclear war as the (ever abstract) subject of fiction miss that nuclear war is the ‘only possible referent’ of literature: as the ‘referent’ of literature is constantly suspended because it continues to shape the world it depicts, then only an absolute performative event – total nuclear war – can instate a referent that is not performative (and hence unalterably concrete): ‘the only referent that is absolutely real is thus of the scope or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity [i.e. all abstraction], would destroy the “movement of survival,” what I call “survivance,” at the very heart of life’. See CitationDerrida, “No Apocalypse”, 28–29.
29 Anders, Endzeit, 55. The permanence of technological invention is a constant focus of Anders' writings. See especially die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 & 2.
30 See Anders, Endzeit, 57–8: ‘Our epoch cannot end, it can only reach its demise’; and also, 93: ‘The possibility of our total liquidation through our own hands cannot come to an end – unless it ends in this ending itself’.
31 Anders, Antiquiertheit, 269.
32 Anders, Antiquiertheit, 269–70.
33 See Anders, Antiquiertheit, 290–94.
34 Anders, Endzeit, 112. What makes this professionalization particularly perilous for Anders is that this tendency conceals that, unlike labour, responsibility and morality are de facto indivisible, especially because the particular situations and circumstances to which “experts” respond are brought about by the cumulative effect of compartmentalised labour processes and modes of consumption. See Anders, Endzeit, 139ff.
35 Anders, Endzeit, 136.
36 Ibid.
37 Anders, Antiquiertheit, 273; 24. In the light of the shared allusion to the myth of Prometheus, Bernard Stiegler's definition of ‘originary technicity’ might be extended to succinctly summarise the philosophical anthropology that underpins Anders' project: ‘[t]he appearance of the human is the appearance of the technical. […] It is the tool, that is, tekhnē, that invents the human, not the human who invents the technological. Or again: the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool – by becoming exteriorized techno-logically’. See CitationStiegler, Technics and Time 1, 141.
38 See CitationDerrida, Of Grammatology, 147
39 Ibid., 205.
40 Ibid. These are words by Rousseau as cited by Derrida.
41 Martin Hägglund's reading of Derrida can offer further clarification here: ‘Derrida argues that faith – taking in trust – is constitutive of experience in general. […] Cosequently, the faith that sustains us, the trust [“in abstractions”], is necessarily open to being deceived’. See Hägglund “Radical Evil”, 132.
42 As Derrida puts this: ‘in the machine there is an excess in relation to the machine itself: at once the effect of a machination and something that eludes machinelike calculation’. See CitationDerrida, “Unforsseable Freedom”, 49.
43 See Derrida, Of Grammatology., 149.
44CitationDerrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs”, 244. Timothy Clark offers an urgent word of caution here as he highlights the ‘danger of turning deconstruction into a kind of non-essentialist anthropology’ because it is easily overlooked that neither term (technology / human) can act ‘as the anchor in relation to which the other can be understood’. ‘Technics’, then, as Clark explains, ‘itself is a concept’, albeit one that emphatically points to the limits of conceptualisation. See CitationClark, “Deconstruction and Technology”, 247.
45 Anders, Endzeit, 198.
46CitationDerrida, Of Grammatology, 147. Derrida is here responding to a passage from Rousseau which is worth giving in full: ‘“While the Author of nature has given children the active principle, He takes care that it shall do little harm by giving them small power to use it. But as soon as they can think of people as tools that they are responsible for activating, they use them to carry out their wishes and to supplement their own weakness. This is how they become tiresome, masterful, imperious, naughty, and unmanageable; a development which does not spring from a natural love of power, but one which gives it to them, for it does not need much experience to realise how pleasant it is to act through the hands of others and to move the world by simply moving the tongue”’.
47CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 55.
48 I am here citing from CitationMilesi, “Thinking (Through) the Desert”, 177.
49CitationDerrida, “Force of Law”, 237.
50CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 49.
51CitationDerrida, “Force of Law”, 243.
52 Ibid., 249. For a succinct, explanatory elaboration on Derrida's understanding of justice and its incommensurate relation to anything that ‘is’ see Derrida and Ferraris, “I have a Taste for the Secret”, 19–34.
53 Derrida discusses ‘the trial’ of the desert in the desert as part of a call for ‘a messianicity without messianism’. See “Faith and Knowledge”, esp., 54–60.
54 Hägglund, “Radical Evil”, 149–150.
55CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 56; Anders, Günther Anders antwortet, 152.
56 Neither may it be used as a pill that generates a guilty conscience because, as Derrida puts this, ‘[…]the serious, unsmiling mask of a declared bad conscience often exhibits only a supplementary ruse; for good conscience has, by definition, inexhaustible resources’. See CitationDerrida, Aporias, 20.
57CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 47.
58CitationHägglund, “Radical Evil”, 140.
59CitationDerrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, 43.
60 Anders, Endzeit, 199.
61 For a discussion on how the originary indeterminacy and worldlessness of the human are captured by mechanisms of power that create conditional and limited modes of existence, i.e. structures of ‘“not-being-admitted-to-the-world”’, see Anders, Mensch ohne Welt, xiiff.
62 Ibid., 124–25.
63 Ibid., 123 [English in the original].
64 Ibid., [English in the original].
65 Anders, Endzeit, 199.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christopher Müller
Christopher John Muüller is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. He teaches Critical Theory, American Literature, and Ancient Philosophy and Literature at Cardiff University and at the University of Bristol. The main themes his current research addresses are: the intersection of bodily feeling, ethics and agency; Emotion and literature; Poststructuralist and 20th century German thought; Phenomenology; the impact of technological change on human interaction and agency. He has published work on Heidegger and the question of Style, and is the author of Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (2015) a forthcoming monograph on Günther Anders which also includes the first English translation of Anders's essay ‘Promethean Shame’. Besides this, his main focus lies on the completion of the manuscript of Shame: Being Caught-out by Technology (working title), a monograph that conceives of shame as a passion rooted in the generative relationship between humanity and technology by drawing on Derrida, Heidegger, Nancy, Scheler, Stiegler and Anders (amongst others). Email: [email protected]