This talk explores the possibility of an Eastern European philosophy of technology, focusing on its inhuman or posthuman potential. Drawing on the works of Polish novelist, philosopher, and doctor Stanisław Lem, it examines how his writings reflected Poland's modern history, investigating why Eastern European intellectuals, unlike those in many other post-colonial and post-imperial regions at the time, embraced rather than rejected technological acceleration. It also considers how Lem's technological perspective challenges both humanist principles and dominant philosophies of his time, presenting a distinct "antihumanist stance" informed by his experiences of Nazi and Soviet occupations, his education as a doctor of medicine with an interest in biotechnology, and his studies of theology, information theory, and philosophy. Re-reading his work in the contemporary moment, the talk argues that technology itself is not merely a vessel for political and social dynamics, but an inhuman and not fully controllable causality. Furthermore, it explores possibilities for technological design that align with long-term evolutionary pathways, rather than contingent social morality.

Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of the biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also conducting a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cyberfeminism.

Althusserian theoretical antihumanism must be understood in terms of the complex and multi-layered reasons that motivate it. Firstly, at historiographical reason: basing his argumentation on the concept of ‘problematics’, elaborated in a famous passage from the German ideology, as well as on the concept of coupure taken from Bachelardian epistemology, Althusser elaborates a reconstruction of Marxian thought that allows us to identify its originality precisely in its distancing from Feuerbach's theoretical humanism. This historiographical reconstruction allows Althusser to take a theoretical position that we could summarise in the terms of a structuralist reading of Marxism that is both in dialogue and in critical tension with the Lacanian reading of Freud. This theoretical reason brings with it two important political stances: on the one hand, a stance against so-called Western Marxism, which by valorising the Feuerbachian humanism of the Manuscripts of 1944 in fact offers an interclassist reading of Marx, and, on the other hand against Khrushchev's socialist humanism that ends up not coming to terms with Stalinism. From this reconstruction we will try to explore the limits and prospects of these stances for the contemporary theoretical-political horizon.

Vittorio Morfino is Full Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca, and Director of the Master's programme in Critical Theory of the Society. He has been visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo, the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne and the Universidad nacional de Cordoba, and has been Directeur de Programme at the Collège international de philosohie. He is the author of Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli (Milano, 2002, Paris, 2012), Incursioni spinoziste (Milano, 2002), Il tempo della moltitudine (Roma, 2005, Paris, 2010, Madrid, 2013, Santiago, 2015), Plural Temporality. Transindividuality and the Aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser (Leiden, 2014), Genealogia di un pregiudizio. L’immagine di Spinoza in Germania da Leibniz a Marx (Hildesheim, 2016), and Intersoggettività e transindividualità. Materiali per un’alternativa (Roma, 2002). He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and Décalages. An Althusserian journal.

This keynote talk addresses the legacies of antihumanism within the context of computation and its philosophy. Current developments in artificial intelligence (AI) confirm the increasing autonomy of computational automation. Present-day computing systems can make decisions and produce new data with little human involvement. In response to the social risks implicit in such proliferation of quasi-autonomous computational agents, tech companies, legislative bodies and academia alike have often argued for a ‘human-centred’ approach, which should align the programming and use of AI with human values and goals and thus supposedly make the outcomes of these machines more transparent and trustworthy. It is possible to find in the rhetoric of human-centred AI many conceptual limits that antihumanism has already identified in the foundationalist and subjectivist assumptions and aims of the Western philosophical tradition. This talk will highlight some of these challenging limitations. As part of this presentation, however, the legacies of antihumanism will also be problematised. While guiding the direction of the humanities, antihumanism missed many opportunities to reconceptualise technology anew. What should one keep and what instead should one discard of theoretical antihumanism when proposing a speculative philosophy of computation? To respond to this question, the talk will focus on the implications of moving beyond a standard anthropomorphic and anthropological horizon while maintaining subjectivity and representation as two key concepts to engage not only with computing machines, but also with the symbolic order they structurally produce and sustain.

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She is Reader in Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.

For many commentators, user-friendly generative AI technologies, such as Dall-E, ChatGPT, and Runway, herald an onslaught of unreal, informatic simulacra. Media theorist Matthew Kirschenbaum, for example, has predicted a “textpocalypse” in which human-authored texts will be lost in a sea of machine-generated facsimiles. (Indeed, who among us that teaches classes with any sort of intensive reading and writing has not wondered if our students’ critical faculties will be nipped in the bud, snuffed out before they've even been ignited, by the ease and accessibility of generative AI?) But is the situation really so simple and well-defined, such that we can speak of an inhuman informatics that stands opposite the supposed agency, originality, and critical spirit of human readers and writers? This talk argues for a new formulation of the problem, attentive to how recent AI technologies threaten to consolidate and even elevate an anachronistic humanism. Only by transfiguring this entrenched opposition between technics and the human can we achieve a properly humanist (or, for that matter, antihumanist) philosophy equal to the demands of the present.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and co-chair of the SCMS Philosophy and Theory Scholarly Interest Group. He has taught at universities in New Haven, Paris, London, Evanston, and Gothenburg. Duke University published his book Code: From information theory to French theory in 2024 and his essays on media history appear in journals including Representations, Critical inquiry, and Grey room. He also works as a curator in the areas of media and environmental studies.