POST-EUROPE by Yuk Hui

with Yuk Hui in conversation with Pieter Lemmens at 6.30pm

With the unstoppable advance of global capitalism, the Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) which twentieth-century European philosophy 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, Keiki 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 neutralisation of differences nor a return to tradition, but through an individuation of thinking between East and West.

Yuk Hui is the author of several titles including On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (e-flux/University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.