Over the course of the twentieth century, a question emerged with renewed force—one that has occupied European thought since its very beginnings. To adopt a term proposed by Peter Sloterdijk, one might call it the “anthropotechnical question.” The guiding thread that runs through centuries of reflection is at once simple and abyssal: it does not merely concern the relationship between human beings and technology, but rather calls for thinking technology as the factor—or at least one of the factors—that has shaped the human being as we know it today.
Far from giving rise to a homogeneous and unified debate, this fundamental interrogation has been developed, reworked, commented upon, and criticized in highly diverse ways, generating multiple lines of inquiry that are sometimes at least partially independent of one another. In particular, over the course of the twentieth century, one can identify a concentration of this reflection within debates of more clearly defined contours: first philosophical anthropology, followed by cybernetics and media theory.
Although these research traditions have followed contrasting trajectories in the course of their reception—intersecting with other modes of thought and continually assuming new configurations—one nonetheless observes an interesting parallelism in the transition from philosophical anthropology to cybernetics and media theory as it unfolds both in the West and in Russia (e.g. Fedorov–Bogdanov–Lotman; Scheler–Wiener–Flusser).
By bringing together scholars from both intellectual horizons—that of Western Europe and that of Russia—this meeting seeks to open a space for dialogue around this technological thread. The aim is to examine how, across different but often convergent intellectual traditions, the anthropotechnical question articulates itself with religious or cosmic perspectives, as well as with scientific and aesthetic ones, and how these dimensions interact in the technical constitution of the human being.