After a long period of silence surrounding state space programmes, space travel is experiencing a renaissance under the auspices of privatization. Tourists are being transported into space, plans for mining on asteroids are being considered, new sites of humanity are being sought – this is how the colonization of space begins. This goes hand in hand with the creation of a new image of humanity, in which reality is supposed to be in perfect harmony with the imagination. An image, as Jan Völker explains anecdotally and with captivating stringency, from which the unconscious has been eliminated. It not only strives to overcome the limits of reason founded in Kant, but also the image of the earth created by the Apollo missions, which showed it as man's environment and urged concern for the planet. In the eyes of capital, the earth thus proves to be nothing more than a place abandoned in the future, the starting point for a new human reality – left to the coming apocalypse.
Essay
Jan Völker, born in 1976, is a philosopher and lives in Leipzig. He studied general and comparative literature, philosophy and cultural studies in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. He completed his doctorate in 2009 with a thesis on the “aesthetics of liveliness” in Kant's Critique of Judgement.
