Babette Babich is an American philosopher, a founder of the New Nietzsche Studies writing on continental aesthetics, philosophy of science (Nietzsche), technology (Heidegger, Anders), critical and cultural theory. She published Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory in 2021 (Bloomsbury academic). 

Why has the philosophy of Günther Anders gained renewed relevance in 2026, particularly in discussions about artificial intelligence and automation?  

BB: This is an important question — after 70 years of inattention. It’s not as if what Anders wrote attracted commentary in 1956 to begin with! To the contrary, because Anders chose, unlike his fellow travelers in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, those would include names like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to focus, very controversially, on positions critical of US intelligence agencies, like the FBI and the US habit of wiretapping its citizens. Today, these questions are as relevant as ever but we continue to disattend to government influence even as we are increasingly recognizing the omnipresence of ‘surveillance.’ Thus one writes about ‘surveillance capitalism’ but one does not mention Anders who was, arguably, already writing about this decades ago. Discussions of artificial intelligence need Anders because he was one of the first to write about its use in military decisions, specifically with respect to General MacArthur in Korea, and for reasons that are still relevant. Who, when a military strategy is decided via computer, we call it AI, is to be held ‘responsible’ for the bombing? If it happens automatically is it not a quasi-act of God? The pentagon liked to think in these ways and only Friedrich Kittler and Peter Sloterdijk have thought to raise related questions in the interim.  

How does Anders’s concept of the “Promethean gap” help explain contemporary ethical tensions between technological power and human responsibility?  

BB: Scholars who write on Anders opt for ‘Promethean gap’ and thereby resolve Anders’s questions concerning what he identified as a brand new or novel variety of shame in the 20th century, never seen before, so he argued, unrelated to varieties of shame as psychologists analyze shame with respect to the phenomenon in everyday life or, classically, theologically, with Adam and Eve and the postlapsarian expulsion from paradise. This was a ‘shame’ in the face of the machines humans had themselves fabricated: a shame deeply related to envy, the desire to be like the machine, not in the sense of having mechanical powers, given the patent limitations of machines, built into mechanical manufacture by corporate industry as the idea is to sell the identical product, again and again. But this serial replaceability, Anders argued, turns out to be what is desired. What is wanted is to be as the machine is: substitutable, replaceable, upgradable. Lose your phone, but apart from needing to update apps/passwords, one can get a new one, exactly the same as the old one. In addition to that, and that is already a great deal Anders argued, one might opt for the latest (which is not necessarily a better) version. This would yield a serial immortality as opposed to being an individual, unique being. What Anders called ‘Promethean shame’ drew on Goethe’s Prometheus, creating the human being and endowing it with both Titanic and Olympian powers, contests and jealousies as Anders read Aeschylus. Anders argued that one wanted to dismiss one’s uniqueness, qua born once and only once, with mechanical life, complete with spare parts. Think of the transplant industry, advertised as seamless (your results will vary), and human cloning, likewise.  

In what ways do recent translations and publications of The Obsolescence of the Human contribute to the resurgence of interest in his work? 

BB: To the extent that Anglophone scholars increasingly do not read texts in other languages, translation is indispensable. For Anglophone scholars, translation can be the only access to a thinker. At the same time, it is also the case that translators can control the spin of what Anders is saying — beginning at the level of the title itself. Anders is writing not only about ‘obsolescence’ as the recent translation settles the debate (nothing like a publication to do that) but also about what it is to be ‘antiquated,’ that is, specifically, the outdated, the expired, and Anders spends a great deal of time in his first chapter, this, again, is the point of ‘Promethean Shame,’ reflecting on the idea of humanity perceived as having reached a kind of expiry date — périmée — not as Anders’s summary judgment but much rather on the part of human beings desiring to be made or manufactured as machines are. Such distinctions matter because of Anders’s talent as a literary genius, he’s both accessible and elusive, even in German, with a mordant humor certain readers could find off-putting. But this also means that the translator, not unlike the data cleaning crucial for artificial intelligence, can tidy such stylistic offenses as today’s readers might react to these. By the same token, this shock or reaction was for Anders, arguably, the point. 

How can Anders’s critique of technological society illuminate current debates about media influence, nuclear risk, and climate catastrophe?  

BB: I think one can begin by paying attention to Anders’s analysis of media influence as Anders highlighted the experience of the ‘world’ — he was after all, like his first wife, Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger and Heidegger’s concept of world — when one no longer needed to leave one’s home to ‘be’ in-the-world or to imagine that one was experiencing the world. The world would, like the mountain coming to Mohammed, be delivered to one’s living room with the great convenience, remember ‘Lockdown,’ that one could continue whatever one was doing. Anders pictured a housewife vacuuming while listening to music, a scenario that offended his critical musical sensibilities (it would have offended Adorno as well as we can also read in Adorno’s Current of Music, a study of radio indebted to Anders). For Anders: it was bad enough to hear a snatch of song from the radio playing through one’s neighbor’s doors. Anders argued that delivered over to media in this way one would seek to stay home so as not to miss a single ‘crumb,’ as he said, of the ‘world.’ In addition, one occupied one’s mind with the program of broadcast events, arranging one’s life accordingly, conversation topics accordingly. Most importantly and, here it matters that Anders came from a family of psychologists, one paid for one’s radio, one’s television, these days one pays for one’s mobile phone in addition to one’s internet subscription, Microsoft subscription, blue check on Twitter, etc. and the dependence on media would be total. I think we still need to learn to think about what Anders had to say about nuclear catastrophe as he pointed out that we are no longer disturbed by the idea, and for Anders we were thereby sleepwalking not merely into nuclear destruction but the obliteration of time, also a Heideggerian theme, and this fits the destruction of the natural world which is labelled under the catastrophic rubric of climate ‘change’ as if it were somehow simply happening whereby one might pay a ‘carbon tax,’ more fees, or as if building ever more wind farms or covering farm land with solar panels might correct it.    

What does Anders’s thought suggest about the meaning of being human in an age increasingly shaped by machines? 

BB: Ah! This goes back to the very first question! Any reply returns to the challenge of Anders’s first book, of which almost all the chapters were separately published in English as of 1956 or so, with the exception of the first chapter, challenging as that chapter was about, once again, a novel variety of human embarrassment in comparison with the tools and mechanical devices humans have made. And for that I have a book, Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology but I would urge that one read Anders’s novel of prisoners trapped in complete darkness tapping messages in obsolete rhythms, Die molussische Katakombe, I think it is now in French as La Catacombe de Molussie, inspiring, before it was translated, a 2012 film by Nicholas Rey, autrement, la Molussie. Composed in the 1930s, Anders could not find a publisher for his novel, his was a life of many resistances to his ideas. Thus, Beck, Anders’s Munich publisher delayed publishing his Molossian Catacombs until the year of his death in 1992. 

And why does he look so much like the messiah of Dune Timothee Chalamet and the ping pong player Marty supreme ? 

BB: Anders was ‘good looking,’ to quote the song, Summertime …  

In fact, he was so very good-looking that Hans Jonas, author of The Gnostic Religion, being as Jonas tells us also in love with Hannah, would sketch Anders for posterity.  

 I love this as a closing question along with anything that pays attention, our culture does not tend to do this, to male beauty (I have a chapter in my book, The Hallelujah Effect, with illustrations, including a reference to Alexander Nehamas’s book, subtitled: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art which focuses on the ladies, as do most discussions of beauty).  

Anders was also, this is not always to be assumed, in excellent physical condition as a young man. I argue that it makes all the difference that Anders could do hand-stand push-ups and it is amusing to imagine that that would have helped in seducing Hannah Arendt. Some scholars wonder about the speed of their engagement and marriage, but if one adds in the issue of beauty along with common interests, like Rilke, one is talking about one of philosophy’s outstanding, if rare, love affairs. These do not last, just as beauty, male or female, does not. But love endures, if it is love. 

To this same extent, it is worth reading Anders’s homage to Arendt, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt, if only for the sake of the cover. One can also find this in French as La bataille des cerises, Dialogue avec Hannah Arendt, and significantly, not in English, telling the story of their love, Anders is very clear about this, by way of imaginary dialogues. Of course, ever since Plato, all philosophical dialogues have been imaginary. In Anders’s case, given grief, these dialogues would also have been therapeutic for him: written to tell the story of their love from his perspective and testimony to her person, in the wake of her death at the end of 1975.   

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