Günther Anders

Now available in English—one of the twentieth century’s most important works on the philosophy of technology With this first English translation of influential German philosopher GÜnther Anders’s 1956 masterpiece of critical theory, The Obsolescence of the Human, a new generation of readers can now engage with his prescient and haunting vision of a “world without us” dominated by technology. Looking at technological events such as the detonation of the nuclear bomb and the arrival of televisions in our living rooms, Anders advances a warning of what humanity looks like in a world where it has surrendered all agency. He outlines the new emotional landscapes that shape our relationship to increasingly capable technology, including Promethean shame, the human sense of unease our own superior technological innovations can instill. Confronting the growing gap between what we can collectively create and what we can individually comprehend, Anders speculates on the trajectory of a developing technological world that rapidly exceeds our ability to control or even foresee its negative consequences. The Obsolescence of the Human prefigures contemporary posthumanist discourse and is eerily predictive of current debates around automation, global warming, and artificial intelligence. Providing new ways to conceptualize the intersection of technology and emotion, it offers groundbreaking frameworks for future-oriented ethics. Radical in both its stylistic experimentation and its theoretical insights, this new translation presents a cautionary tale regarding the human capacity to usher in its own destruction. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Now available in English—one of the twentieth century’s most important works on the philosophy of technology With this first English translation of influential German philosopher GÜnther Anders’s 1956 masterpiece of critical theory, The Obsolescence of the Human, a new generation of readers can now engage with his prescient and haunting vision of a “world without us” dominated by technology. Looking at technological events such as the detonation of the nuclear bomb and the arrival of televisions in our living rooms, Anders advances a warning of what humanity looks like in a world where it has surrendered all agency. He outlines the new emotional landscapes that shape our relationship to increasingly capable technology, including Promethean shame, the human sense of unease our own superior technological innovations can instill. Confronting the growing gap between what we can collectively create and what we can individually comprehend, Anders speculates on the trajectory of a developing technological world that rapidly exceeds our ability to control or even foresee its negative consequences. The Obsolescence of the Human prefigures contemporary posthumanist discourse and is eerily predictive of current debates around automation, global warming, and artificial intelligence. Providing new ways to conceptualize the intersection of technology and emotion, it offers groundbreaking frameworks for future-oriented ethics. Radical in both its stylistic experimentation and its theoretical insights, this new translation presents a cautionary tale regarding the human capacity to usher in its own destruction. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

A juror at the Russell Tribunal, armed with firsthand knowledge of events in Vietnam and American politics, Gunther Anders wrote Visit Beautiful Vietnam in 1968, a scathing attack on the language and morality that justify any war of aggression, whether external or internal. One of the key ideas Anders tries to convey is that the Vietnam War inaugurates a series of wars of a new type, which should not be confused with previous ones. This new type of war is a war in which the superiority of the aggressor's armed force is such that the outcome of the conflict immediately appears hopeless for the aggressed. But it is not a question of integrating a new province into the empire; the formal sovereignty of the vassal must be maintained. The aim of aggression is to force the attacked to recognize a form of moral tutelage, that is to say, to agree to enter the aggressor's zone of political influence and, consequently, to accept the rules of the game governing economic exchanges within this zone, which naturally favor the dominant power: the attacked people are deemed to be defending themselves against an external enemy or freeing themselves from a dictatorship, moving towards democracy under the wise advice of... their aggressor. Visit beautiful Vietnam, which had never been translated into French, is undoubtedly the most underestimated work of its author, which is a great shame because it is one of his best, one of the most finely crafted, beneath the exterior of apparent disorder; the nastiest certainly, and it is often wickedly funny.

Die Tagebücher des Schriftstellers und Philosophen Günther Anders (1902-1992) zählen zu den bedeutendsten literarischen Journalen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine zahlreichen, Jahrzehnte übergreifenden Notizen, von ihm selbst nie zu einem geschlossenen Werk zusammengestellt, sondern bruchstückhaft in verschiedenen seiner Bücher zitiert (so auch in seinem Hauptwerk Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen): Hier werden sie nun erstmals - in exemplarischer Auswahl - chronologisch angeordnet und zusammengestellt. Anders, der eigene schriftstellerische Projekte zeitlebens zurückstellte und als Warner vor einer neuen Atomkatastrophe international bekannt wurde, hat wie kein zweiter Autor deutscher Sprache die Erfahrungen von Flucht, US-Exil, Heimkehr ins Nachkriegseuropa und seine Eindrücke von Reisen zu Schauplätzen des Grauens wie Auschwitz und Hiroshima darzustellen gewußt.