Draft conference Bombay, June 6, 2015 Reza Negarestani (epilogue)

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:12

  Okay, so I have been asked to kind of elaborate on my philosophical project from where I'm coming from, and then move toward the topic of this presentation. Basically, for the last few years I've been working on a kind of revision of the projects of enlightenment, starting with basically the evolution of modern…

• 00:06:21

  Hence, in a sense, its rationality somehow unbinds some sort of Promethean irreverence. But there is, you know, a massive amount of critique against this Prometheanism of reason. But the majority of them are not convincing, if any of them. Precisely because the core component of this critique is that they want to make…

• 00:11:10

  We are forced to do something, to elaborate the consequences of our freedom. Now, and as I said, one of the most curious, you know, aspects of rational agency is that the rational agency has a history rather than mere past or a nature. What it means to have a history means that it develops a concept out of itself…

• 00:16:52

  It's a cognitive practical enterprise. It's a form of exploration. So, and, so this is the, you know, the main scope of the project. And as a project, it can be, you know, divided into two sections. One, the actual complexity of the structure. And the other one is how we conceive the complexity of this project…

• 00:20:24

  And this allows for a structure to gain a form of stability. That this stability basically is a register of its complexity. What they call it a generative entrenchment. In so far as structures, the functions, and the, you know, the attributes, the behaviors of these structures are entrenched, you know, in lower…

• 00:26:08

  Is it suitable for approaching the kind of species we are, namely human? No. Because precisely capitalism has a complex structure, but, in fact, it does not cultivate the cognitive dimension of how we can critically encounter the complexity of this structure. In fact, what capitalism, and that's exactly the project…

• 00:32:01

  from slavery in the broadest possible sense, then we can only commit to such a project. We only, the only, you know, project of exit out of the slavery of human, whether to itself or nature, is by committing to the project of human, conceiving human as a project. This brings us back, so if we can't really…

• 00:36:46

  So, I'm ready for any kind of discussion or question and, um, argument.