bio
Yunus Tuncel, Ph.D. (New School for Social Research), serves on the Board of Directors of the Nietzsche Circle and the Editorial Board of its electronic journal, The Agonist. He has organized several textual workshops, with the longest one on Thus Spoke Zarathustra out of which evolved the team research project to annotate it. He teaches at NYU’s Liberal Studies Program and is a co organizer of New York Posthuman Research Group. He is the author of Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle (Eye Corner Press, 2011) and Agon in Nietzsche (Marquette University Press, 2013). He is the editor of Nietzsche and Transhumanism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). In addition, his research activities focus on aesthetics, philosophy of sport, theories of emotion and affect, culture of ‘gai saber’ and philosophy of music. With Philomobile, an organization he founded, he organizes trips to explore philosophy and the lives of philosophers on location.
title
"The Unconscious and Posthuman Ethics"
abstract
Classical ethical theories such as Kant’s deontology and Utilitarianism focus on the rightness of action, as they cut off the tie between the action and the doer and undermine the place of unconsciousness and unconscious processes. This separation, or discombobulation of human character and action, is problematic. A different type of ethos is possible, and recent philosophical movements such as psychonanalysis, postmodernity and posthumanism provide different models for it. First, how can re conceptualize the unity of human character and action, contra classical thought? Second, what is the role of unconscious in human life and in our practices? In what ways can dreams, for instance, reflect who we are and their interpretations guide us in our self transformation? Third, how can we include psycho-somatic forces, instincts and drives, in new, post-classical ethical theories? As I reflect on these questions in this paper, I will focus on the idea of integrity of body, mind and soul and place the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious within the discourse of posthumanism.
