REL 450 | Technology, Enchantment, and Violence

The modern human is fully immersed in a seemingly immanent technological world. Although the instrumentalization of technology in forms of state and non-state violence in the modern era -- including war, colonialization, concentration camps, detention centers, IEDs, and so on -- cannot be denied or underestimated, the psychic violence and ontological deformation of the human through the technology of the quotidian remains undertheorized. The event, results and veiled contradictions of this quotidian technological capture remain largely mystified, unseen, and unexamined. The seminar will investigate aspects of advanced technology's impact on the modern and post-modern human, including the tendency toward the neutralization and depoliticization of society predicted and theorized by the political philosopher Carl Schmitt in the early twentieth century. Our investigation concludes with the question of possible modes of the ontotheological redemption of the human in a world of total technological instrumentalization. Key authors in our study include Carl Schmitt, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, and Byung-Chul Han.