25-28th May 2016 in Madrid
Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Faculty of Philosophy
Posthuman Studies and Technologies of Control
From Nietzsche to Trans- Post- and Metahumanism

www.beyondhumanism.net
www.beyondhumanism2016.org

We invite English or Spanish abstracts in of up to 500 words, to be sent in “MS Word” and “PDF” format to: beyondhumanism2016@gmail.com
Files should be named and submitted in the following manner:
Submission: First Name Last name .docx / .doc / .pdf
Example: “Submission: MaryAndy.docx”

Deadlines:

• Abstracts should be received by the 1st of March 2016.
• Acceptance notifications will be sent out by 15th March 2016.
• All those accepted will receive information on the venue(s), local attractions, accommodations, restaurants, and planned receptions and events
  for participants.
• Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes. Each presenter will be given 10 additional minutes for questions and discussions with the
  audience, for a total of 30 minutes.

Coorganized by:

• Reverso Institute-Metabody Project – International Metabody Forum 2016: Jaime del Val
• Universidad Complutense of Madrid-UCM-Seminario Nietzsche: Mariano Rodriguez and Oscar Quejido

Organising Committee:

• Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, John Cabot University, Rome
• Jaime del Val, Reverso-Metabody, Madrid
• Mariano Rodriguez, UCM, Madrid
• Oscar Quejido, UCM, Madrid
• Francesca Ferrando, NYU, New York
• Sangkyu Shin, Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul

Posthuman Studies and Technologies of Control
From Nietzsche to Trans- Post- and Metahumanism

The relevance of technology companies rises continuously. Technologies get developed which can lead to total surveillance. Can an increased governmental and corporate control promote our freedom? What is the relationship between control, security, and privacy? Does Big Data merely attempt to control, trace and predict desires and behaviours, or does it modulate reality making it more predictable? The list of issues which needs toget rethought is enormous: Bioprivacy, insurance companies, the future of work, Big Data ontology…
Silicon Valley companies cooperate with transhumanist thinkers. Critical posthumanism remains a minoritarian discourse. The Metabody project provides metahumanist pragmatics beyond the art world. There is an enormous list of challenges which is related to the wide range of emerging control technologies. Hence, there is an increasing need to differentiate critically between the different beyond humanism discourses and the various approaches concerning the notion of the posthuman.
During the conference all the central fields concerning control technologies within the wide panorama of comparative posthuman studies can be dealt with. To distinguish between qualitative and quantitative, critical and acritical notions of transformation (or questioning) of the humanist paradigm will be relevant as well as the various historical aspects of these controversial debates from Nietzsche’s overhuman via Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon to more recent accounts of trans-, post- and metahumanism.
Rather than taking a neutral scenario for the debates on the posthuman, the conference attempts to deepen the debates on the radical differences of the diverse approaches to the posthuman and to situate them in a critical historical framework.