Filosofický časopis (Dec 2023)
Catastrophic aftermath: the loss of sight as a process of becoming posthuman in contemporary audiovisual culture
Abstract
In contemporary audiovisual production (mainly the Apple TV series See), the theme of the loss of sight due to (environmental) catastrophe becomes a symptom for the analysis of the disintegration and revival of a world that has deterritorialized due to the exploitative demands of postmodern capitalism, thus de facto marking the end of the so-called Anthropocene era. If Western philosophy traditionally defines man as an animal possessing reason and at the same time an animal in which the different senses are in balance, the loss of sight and the respective post-apocalyptic environment in which survivors exist without the possibility of seeing, on the one hand, outlines a process that could seemingly be considered degenerative or decadent: without sight, man is not man and approaches the animal. On the other hand, however, the loss of this sense also articulates the hints of the renewal of a world that will be a posthuman world, in which the new norm and normative of life becomes life without sight as a new form of social, economic, habitual arrangement, in which sight is understood as something regressive, as something responsible for the almost complete destruction of humanity. This in itself brings about a transformation of the relationship between human and non-human actors, transformations in the flows of belief and desire, and ways of articulating life, which, following Deleuze, is actualized from virtual modulations and temporal variants of events. My perspective is therefore based on the philosophy of G. Deleuze and vitalism in general, and I intend to read the figure of the loss of sight as a kind of counter-actualization of the event: as an effort to negate the effects of catastrophe and at the same time to establish a new (life) form.
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