[-empyre-] Frédéric Neyrat : Resolution for Digital Futures

[Renate Ferro]

Digital Metaphor

Since the world has been encircled,
and the "true world" has become a "fable",
and the fable an "Integral Reality",
the earth became flat like an orange.

Integral Reality doesn't replace reality
but metaphor, as Baudrillard says.
Yet metaphor has never taken the sensible toward the intelligible,
because the sensible was always both insensible and sur-sensible,
less and more than sensible,
and the intelligible has always been pierced by the vanishing Good,
that interrupts the Ideas web
- interrupts and nothing more.

Thus metaphor is always "quasi-metaphor" (Derrida),
because being substracts itself on giving itself.

Thus Integral Reality is not the end of the splitting of the worlds,
rather its invisible continuance right in the midst of the immanents flux.

A question for the digital future: how to give body,
artistically, culturally, politically,
to the metaphors of a being faced with its fundamental disappearance,
its liberating retreat
and its foundational dissipation ?

What kind of metaphor while the substracted being is overexposed ?

We seek new metaphors,
digital metaphors able to take body and soul into the living fire.

Alerted to the rifts of being,
the art that follows will know how to invent a new reserve,
without letting free reign to the desert.


Frédéric Neyrat

Bio:  Frédéric Neyrat (France) is a  philosopher, 
a former Director at the College International de 
Philosophie in Paris, and a member of the 
Editorial Board of the inlfuential 
interdisciplinary French journal, Multitudes, 
currently in residence at the Society for the 
Humanities, Cornell University.  He has published 
books on political imaginary (Fantasme de la 
communauté absolue, 2002) ; the function of the 
images (L'image hors-l'image, 2003) ; the 
globalization and the postmodern condition 
(Surexposés, 2005) ; Heidegger (L'indemne. 
Heidegger et la destruction du monde, 2008) ; the 
relations between eco-politics, immuno-politics 
and bio-politics (Biopolitique des catastrophes, 
2008).  His next books will be Instructions pour 
une prise d'âmes. Artaud et l'envoûtement 
occidental (http://www.phocide.fr/neyrat.htm) and 
Le terrorisme (Larousse, march 2009).
-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University