Table of Contents

Contents From Aristotle to Hörl by Jean-Luc Nancy Preface to the German Edition Preface to the English Translation The Sacred Channels Introduction Part I In the Shadow of Formalization: A History of Thinking 1 Blind Thinking around 1900: The Turn from the Intuitive to the Symbolic Thinking the unthinkable The symbolic and intuition Leibniz as a prophet 2 The Symbolic and Communication: The Crisis of Thinking Since 1850 The dead skeleton of logic Symbolist subversion Operations research of the human mind Unrepresentable communication Structuralism and field theory 3 The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking: Descent into the Aristotelian Underground The pre-Aristotelian situation of understanding The prehistory of the categories Descartes among the savages Paths of reason Part II The Specter of the Primitive: A Hauntology of Communication 4 The Night of the Human Being: Being and Experience under the Conditions of the Unrepresentable Primitiveness and crisis Savage media Sacred communication Note on heresy 5 The End of the Archaic Illusion: Communication, Information, Cybernetics Desacralizing the channels Coding the real Cybernetics and coldmindedness A new mythology of the binary Appendix: Heidegger and Cybernetics Bibliography Notes Index

About the Author

Erich Hörl is Full Professor of Media Culture at Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany and director of the focus "Rethinking the technological condition" of Leuphanas Digital Culture Research Lab. Before he was Associate Professor of Media Philosophy and Technology at Ruhr-University Bochum. He is the founder of the Bochum Colloquium Mediastudies (bkm), an internationally renown series of diagnostical interventions concerning our contemporary techno-medial situation. He currently works on a General Ecology of Media and Technology.

Reviews

"Digital socialism envisions platform cooperatives and public service media. At times, this book stretched me, but in doing so it also made me feel smarter; it reminded me that knowledge, in itself, is a form of power."
-Kristina Morehouse, Communication Research Trends , vol. 43, 2024

"Hörl’s project is ambitious and original, offering an intellectual history which readers are unlikely to have realised they were missing and which intervenes simultaneously into media theory, anthropology, philosophy and the history of computation."
- Megan Wiessner, Radical Philosophy 2.06 (Winter 2019)

"Erich Hörl’s Sacred Channels is as original and innovative as they come. The book articulates an archaeology of modern notions of the sacred and the primitive and draws upon a wide-ranging theoretical framework that includes philosophy (phenomenology, Heidegger, and deconstruction), anthropology, media theory, and breakthrough developments in modern science. The substantial preface by Jean-Luc Nancy, and the excellent translation by Nils. F. Schott, make Sacred Channels (by now a classic in the German-speaking world) a groundbreaking book finally available to an English-speaking audience."
- Michael Wutz, Weber State University