Divinization and Technology

"This volume connects three concepts – which in the first instance appear to be unrelated or even contradictory - as constitutive components of our modern existence: technology, divination and subversion. In fact, and as the authors show, technology has a lot to do with human attempts to attain divine power, which at the same time subvert existing order. Provocative, and with what is sure to be a profound impact, this book, with authors from multi-disciplinary backgrounds, forces sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, historians, and theologians alike to re-evaluate their pre-conceived ideas."

Ivan Szelenyi, William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology and Political Sciences, Yale University, USA.

"Will the Divine save us? It depends. This book follows a resolute path in explaining why. Human life has been sustained by recurrent addictions to a plenitude that is not always in our cards. The promises of unlimited growth and the ‘trickling down’ of wealth, the building of God’s Kingdom on earth, are not just showing their intrinsic limits. The perceptive and uncompromising explorations of the group of scholars who have contributed to this book show, from a variety of disciplinary and socio-cultural perspectives, how it is the process itself of claiming one’s due with whatever means (ethical, legal, political) that has accelerated the collapse of modern innerwordly eschatologies. Their serial subversions of ideals of good life in harmony with the cosmos have transformed human sociability into a ‘Game of Thrones’ of mutually imitative, and spiraling competitive, claims and counterclaims. The contributions to the volume suggest how the biopolitical forms of management of social and political life are not the outcome of a mere technocratic summoning of divine omnipotence from the top down. They are increasingly internalized by subjects who intensify and so ‘valorize’ the liminal whirlpool of self-feeding energeia (ενέργεια), as shown by the dynamics developing in such different fields like economic theory, social media, and drinking habits."

Armando Salvatore, Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies and Professor of Global Religious Studies (Society and Politics), McGill University, Canada.

"This is a subversive book as it addresses the elephant in the room of modernity: our latent desires and the overt fear and anxiety of becoming gods in a cosmos we have declared to be essentially meaningless and amoral – a declaration which emerges, as the authors claim, out of a social cosmos characterized by subversion and schismogenesis. This is a bleak and yet stimulating description of our modernity; a description, which even though does not guide you to how to save the world, at least explains why it is damned."

Manussos Marangudakis, Professor of Sociology, University of the Aegean, Greece.

"The present volume may, at first blush, seem to propose unlikely connections and resonances among concepts one does not usually associate with one another, namely 'subversion', 'technology' and 'divinisation'. This intuitive response should not lead one to ignore the reasoned claims of its authors, for they are as timely as they are significant for any attempt to recuperate a sense of what it means to be a person in the face of a 'divinising' technocratic culture that continually, endlessly, 'subverts' one's sense of self, replacing it with uncertainty and mere mimicry. It confronts one with the paradoxical task of 'subverting subversion' in the specific sense attributed to the concept here."

Bert Olivier, Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy, University of the Free State, South Africa.