Insightful, colorful, interesting; a good book. This guy really introduced me to Heidegger and Nietzsche. Fascinating stuff.
On the new eugenics --
Transgenic determinism? That's the dominant tendency in global cultural politics. After a long sleep during the interregnum years of the Cold War, the language of eugenics stirs again: here articulating itself in the vivisectionist visions of genetic experimentation; there pushed forward by a newly emergent form of transgenic capitalism intent on coding, classifying, manipulating, and harvesting the genetic history of humanity, animals, and plants; now working in the laboratory procedures of stem cell research, clonal propagation, gene sequencing, organ growing, and tissue replacement; later expressing itself in the conjunction of bio-sociality and artificial intelligence to produce artificial life-forms; never acknowledging its historical precedents in the first wave eugenics of the hygiene movement of the early 20th century or the political fascism of National Socialism; always masquerading itself in the cloak of a science of completed genetics.
On an unvealed christianity --
For Nietzsche, the lasting cultural significance of Christianity has less to do with its liturgical significance as a particular act of faith, and everything to do with the fact that under the sign of Christianity a particular order of values was installed in human flesh. A carrier of a dominant cultural meme, Christianity was the method of moral eugenics by which a sovereign self was constructed, representing both an embodiment of the ascetic ideal and a certain sign of the defeat of the vicissitudes of human flesh. In Nietzsche's judgement, we are always born at the precipice of defeat. Of course, what Nietzsche could not foresee it that he himself was also the unwitting agent of the continuation of the story of the will, that the name of Nietzsche may have been the 'gamble' by which liturgical flesh of the Christian will could finally be dropped in order to reveal a future of pure will - the drive to planetary technicity. In this case, the importance of Nietzsche may be as a point of fatal turning, that moment when the sacred object of the (Christian) will recedes from view, only to reveal what has always been the abiding truth of the will to will, that the humiliated subjects - the 'sovereign individual' - would prefer to will nothingness rather than not will at all. In this sense, the triumph of the digital nerve may be, in fact, the real beginning of the age of Christianity, the return of the sacred object signified by the name of God in the form of a will to nothingness that is inspiring because of its depthless emptiness, its "aimlessness" as it sky-drifts across the horizon of social events.
On metal --
The aesthetics of Digital Dirt finds its real political nemesis in calm technology. Calm technology simultaneously closes the eye of human perception and opens human flesh to full passive absorption into the regime of the digital eye. I follow Lyotard: No to the new grand signifier, No to the new grand ocular policing, No to calm perception for a calm digital eye; and yes to the Lyotards' thought that " it's the right moment to render this geometry totally invalid, to hasten its decay and to invent a topological justice." However, unlike Lyotard and Duchamp this moment, this right moment, is more difficult because today we do not have to simply highlight missed chances for incongruities and incommensurables, but actually have to seize back from the optical regime of the digital eye the language of art and technology as a "transformation matrix", replete with strange projections, electronic voids, virtual gateways, digital anamorphoses,--a "hinged universe" of impossible perspectives and "topological justice" that desperately requires that its digital future, its ocular future, its electroptical future, be opened up--excited-- rather than shut down and calmed.
You can find the complete book online, though I suggest that you do not read off of a computer screen, you must know what that does to you, I guess...?
http://ctheory.net/will/index.htmlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK2Pe1xbPqE - amusing video with the author in. Remember: All Roads Lead to the Disney Bunker!