Personal Privacy and Lyotard’s Inhuman

In the introduction to The Inhuman Lyotard formulates his central problem about ‘inhumanity’: “[W]hat if human beings . . . were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?”1 The first part of his problem deals with ‘development’, ie with “advanced capitalism, with its seemingly endless appetite for expansion and technological innovation.”2 The second part of his problem deals with that what forms the uniquely human, “the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage”.3 The problem with development, as Lyotard sees it, is the emphasis on efficiency — it literally leaves no time for the individual. It swallows that which is unique to each individual. It ignores the ‘differend’ between people that, for Lyotard, is an essential part of being human. And, since absolute efficiency can never be reached, development is an unending quest continuously decreasing the possibility to reflect on that what happens. “To go fast is to forget fast.”4 Lyotard claims that the problem with the inhabitation of the properly human by the inhuman is a different ‘sort’ of inhuman than that made by development.5 However, in many cases, this inhumanity is the price to be paid for development: “The system rather has the consequence of causing the forgetting of what escapes it.”6 Without time to reflect, such forgetting happens. Forgetting doesn’t leave the human being in a state of peaceful oblivion, but leaves it with “a mind haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it, sending it delirious, but also making it think — if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn’t give it an outlet, one aggravates it.”7 At the root of both of these problems Lyotard sees new technologies — specifically as embodied8 by computers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and applied by