In this talk, we locate (in)distinguishability as a singularly important criterion and 21st-century challenge, examining what seems to be a deep resemblance and mutual implicature of electro-optical media, synthetic biology, quandaries of verification, socio-political madness, and the inability to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, “life” and “Life itself,” the living and the dead.

In 1961, in his last published essay, “L'Oeil et l’Esprit” (“Eye and Mind”), Maurice Merleau-Ponty warned that if the reign of “thinking ‘operationally’ . . . a sort of absolute artificialism” were to be extended, we would enter into “a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.”  Calling upon a range of thinkers as interlocutors, including Ivan Illich (spectrality), Giorgio Agamben (the shattering of forms), Erwin Schrödinger (order-from-disorder), Peter Sloterdijk (suspended animation), and Slavoj Žižek (zombie life), we locate (in)distinguishability as a singularly important criterion and 21st-century challenge, examining what seems to be a deep resemblance and mutual implicature of electro-optical media, synthetic biology, quandaries of verification, socio-political madness, and the inability to distinguish between the real and the fake, sleep and wakefulness, “life” and “Life itself,” the living and the dead.

For more information, see http://journalism.uoregon.edu/whatis/life/program/