A number of important thinkers have postulated the end of the human in our times. Apart from visions of an apocalypse resulting in an extinction of the human species, such ideas have included notions of genetic and/or technological mutations leading to new species and the development of psi powers leading to the advent of the superhuman. More fundamentally, some thinkers have seen our age as one in which the modern image of the human being is itself in transition, at a bifurcation point where a plurality of possibilities jostle for hegemonic determination.

Have we already become posthuman, an informationally determined cybernetic system, as N. Katherine Hayles suggests? Are we moving towards a singularity where man and machine fuse into Inteligence as sugested by Ray Kurzweil? Are we being invited to the unprecedented banquet of the Nietzschean overman? Is it the noosphere of Teilhard de Chardin that awaits us? Are we living laboratories for the Aurobindian superman? Is it the hour of the Second Coming? Or is it that of the messianic Other who is ever deferred, Derrida’s l’avenir which is always the unpredictable horizon which calls us?

This symposium will feature Makarand Paranjape (from India) in conversation with Jon Dorbolo, Rich Carlson and Debashish Banerji.

Debashish Banerji, Ph.D. is the Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles. He is an adjunct faculty member in Art History at the Pasadena City College, teaching courses on the history of Asian Art. He is a Research Fellow in the Department of Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. From 1991 to 2006, Banerji served as President of the East West Cultural Center, Los Angeles. Banerji has curated a number of exhibitions in Indian and Japanese art and is the author of two books, “The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore” (Sage, 2010) and “Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo” (DKPW and Nalanda International, 2012).

 

Richard Carlson is a writer/musician and the president of Pacific Weather Inc, a firm which monitors meteorological information at airports throughout the United States. His interests include all matters related to the relationship between technology and culture in our times and to Jazz, Poetry, Integral Yoga, Critical Theory, and Global Climate Change. He holds a Master of Arts degree from Antioch University, is one of the founders of the blog posthumandestinies and is among the contributors to the prestigious e-journal www.ctheory.net