The Master/s # Spacemen and Earthlings
The Master/s, Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, 22. 9. 2022
Spacemen and Earthlings: Sublating The Falsification of Capitalism
The alienation of the master-slave dialectic from its constitutive gesture, that is, the life and death struggle, which is inherent to its establishment qua symbolic relation, is pushed over some unexpected edge with the bio-technological revolution. What was the very condition of possibility of the master-slave dialectic, that is, life itself, turns into its product. The cause turns into a consequence. A materialised, a fabricated consequence of the slave's work and the master's enjoyment, their relationship to things [das Ding], which was, in their setting up, the very the outcome of their life-and-death struggle. In a sense, the masters' aspiration for the biotechnological production of life is logical: they want to control the most unpredictable factor in the production process – the particularities of a living body – and, on the other hand, they want to have the absolute, eternal access to their enjoyment. But here, exactly, is one of the main points of their failure: they fall for the fundamental deception of capitalism, which is the false idea of absolute enjoyment, of a final fulfillment of desire. If there is infinity anywhere, it is not in desire being satisfied, but in its structural insatiability.
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