Cosmos and Technology (Dasein’s Planetary Condition)

There is not one place in the universe where the disturbance of the so-called harmony is not flagrant at every moment.

- Louis-Auguste Blanqui.

Technologies, like words, are metaphors.

- Marshall McLuhan.

Abstract

In response to Yuk Hui’s essay “For a Cosmotechnical Event,” I argue that the cosmos can only be metaphysically apprehended through a deepening of its astrophysical understanding. This understanding makes the universe—and the Earth—a contingent, historical, and an-archic formation. Dasein is therefore under planetary condition, seeking to ensure that the Earth is finally able to recognize its strangeness. The technologies capable of accompanying an Earth traversed by the abyss of the universe should be able to express a resolutely a-modern, a-human, a-national, and ex-centric technique.