Personhood and Technologies of Reason

The African thinker Achille Mbembe has rightly said that we need a new “techne of reason” to respond to planetary changes. Anthropology has been good to think with the body, what is to be a person and the techniques that are salient to both. Artificial Intelligence is asking to rethink what is the limit of the body, reason and agency — the capacity to bring difference in the world.

This course introduces key ideas in anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religion on bodies, personhood, and forms of reason by focusing on textual and multimedia examples on anthropological accounts of personhood, Artificial Intelligence, and medieval and contemporary forms of mysticism. This is then to ask the question of how different technologies of reason may be co-existing, emerging, colliding while shaping politically different forms of being in the world.