Post-Europe

by Yuk Hui

Envisioning a post-European not through a neutralization of differences nor a return to tradition, but through an individuation of thinking between East and West.

With the unstoppable advance of global capitalism, the Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) which twentieth-century European philosophers spoke of—and which Heidegger declared had become the "destiny of the world"—is set to become ever more pathological in its consequences. But rather than dreaming of an impossible return to Heimat, Yuk Hui argues that today thinking must start out from the standpoint of becoming-homeless. 

Drawing on the philosophies of Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Jan Patočka alongside the thought of Kitaro Nishida, Keiji Nishitani, and Mou Zongsan among others, Yuk Hui envisions a project of a post-European thinking. If Asia and Europe are to devise new modes of confronting capitalism, technology, and planetarisation, this must take place neither through a neutralization of differences nor a return to tradition, but through an individuation of thinking between East and West.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics

144 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2024

About the author

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He currently teaches at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Between 2012 and 2018 he taught at the institute of philosophy and art (IPK) and Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of the Leuphana University Lüneburg where he wrote his habilitation thesis. He is also a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art where he teaches a master class with Bernard Stiegler every spring. Since 2019 he is Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media of City University in Hong Kong. Previous to that, he was a research associate at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Media (ICAM), postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. He is initiator of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, an international network which facilitates researches and collaborations on philosophy and technology. Hui has published on philosophy of technology and media in periodicals such as Research in Phenomenology, Metaphilosophy, Parrhesia, Angelaki, Theory Culture and Society, Cahiers Simondon, Deleuze Studies, Intellectica, Krisis, Implications Philosophiques, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Techné, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Appareil, New Formations,Parallax, etc. He is editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, December 2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield International, February 2019). His writings have been translated into a dozen languages.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book thought-provoking. Is philosophy, as understood through the European lens down the historical Greek-Roman-Christian trajectory, a search for universal truths and *the* good life? Or does its origins in European concepts and geopolitics condemn it to a petty regionalism, only accidentally internationalized by the crime of imperial colonialism? Or, owing to Europe’s climate and scarcity, was European philosophy (and Europe as a concept) preordained for a global reach?

Hui asks a lot of interesting questions in this short text. His definition and complication of “Europe as that which is not Asia” leads to an interesting examination of post-industrial Japanese and Chinese philosophical trends, leading to a conclusion that the Europeanization of the world and Europe’s subsequent retreat from the world makes us all “Post-Europeans”. His view that European philosophy has been made manifest in technology (techno-logos being the materialization of the uniquely Greek conception of immaterial reason) is also interesting, as is his argument that the adoption of European technology has not meant the adoption of European modes of thinking about Being. Inherent in Hui’s arguments is the acknowledgment that the issue of a post-European world is almost already resolved in the dominance of America and its exportation of consumerist capitalism to Asia and Africa, seeming to supplant indigenous modes of life and ways of thinking.

His central concept of Heimatlosigkeit (hometownlessness?) is also fascinating. Increasing “planeterization” has reduced the distance between us and has increased communication, in a way cheapening the uniqueness and safety of the places we call home. And yet, home is embodied so fiercely in humans that one can view oneself as coming directly from the earth of a given place, almost as if we were an endemic plant. Patterns of immigration and displacement have complicated the feeling of having a Heimat, but I think part of what Hui argues is that the search for Heimat motivates contemporary thought and politics in ways that have yet to be fully understood.

I’m still working through my thoughts on this text, but Hui presents a lot of really interesting points about the future of thought and the path it’s taken to get to the present.

[Noah Balushi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a kind of double introduction for both Yuk Hui and Gilbert Simondon via their claims about Individuation, and it’s made me want to read more of both. Pressing, contemporary concerns dotted throughout: planetarisation, Heimatlosigkeit (a German concept for something close to homelessness; homelessness not only as in the dispossession of shelter, but the uprootedness of post-globalized peoples), Euro-American ethics and logic embedded in world wide technologies, and the meeting of East and West after the successful dominance of Euro-American technologies.

[milana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Antonio Roibas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una afirmación y dos cuestiones después de leer este gran ensayo:

1. Definitivamente Europa imponerse al modelo imperante del Consumismo, fruto del capitalismo neoliberal que en esencia es una creación europea y después estadounidense. Pasar del TENER al SER.

2. ¿Es el vínculo y la transmisión de conocimientos entre Europa y Asia el motor de la historia?

3. ¿El nihilismo europeo conduce a la autodestrucción? ¿O no?

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is really only one problem: it is how to think about particulars and universals in the right measure. I would not usually have thought about this problem in terms of the confrontation between Europe and Asia, but Yuk Hui does, and I appreciate many of his approaches to it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great about particularity and universality (nationalism and the alternative). Was waiting for that discussion of basho while reading. Worked quite well with the (short) discussion of Mignolo

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 4 out of 5]

La pregunta por la técnica hace unos meses que me resulta interesantísima, es curioso que el ensayo comienza preguntandose por la decadencia de Occidente (con todas las connotaciones que eso tiene) y que luego resuelve un viaje metafísico a tra´ves de la técnica como soporte de la memoria de los pueblos, buscando desesencializar ciertas categorías europeas para desentrañar la compleja relación entre Occidente y Oriente, descubriendo pensamientos diversos y reconociendo como ha penetrado el pensamiento colonizador occidental en la propia concepción que Oriente tiene de sí. Es curioso porque el ensayo dentro de su difiucltad se disfruta en muchos momentos como un relato de viajes y anecdótas que dicen mucho de nuestra relación y de la necesidad de pensar en serio la cuestión tecnológica como vía para entender el siglo que se viene encima.