In his recent book Post-Europe, contemporary philosopher Yuk Hui, currently Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, proposes technics as the critical point from which to rethink—and ultimately unsettle—Eurocentrism. As he remarked during our conversation: “We certainly need to criticize Eurocentrism, which has persisted for centuries. But today it is deeply embedded in our lives through the proliferation of technics. Simply criticizing European values, or declaring that Europe is no longer the point of reference, is far too simplistic.”
For Hui, technics extends far beyond what is commonly understood as modern technology. It encompasses the externalization of human memory, action, and intelligence through forms as diverse as writing, architecture, agriculture, and tools. Technics is therefore never a neutral instrument; it is always embedded within particular cosmologies and moral orders. This insight underpins his concept of cosmotechnics, which argues that every technical system must remain in harmony with its own cosmological understanding of the world. Likewise, his notion of technodiversity is not merely a celebration of cultural difference but an affirmation of the possibility that different civilizations can generate distinct technological trajectories, resisting the homogenizing logic of a singular modernity. Within this framework, the philosophy of technics and postcolonial thought become intertwined as shared critical projects rather than parallel intellectual traditions.
“The twentieth century,” Hui writes, “was an era searching for a home within the planetary expansion of European modernity.” Yet narratives of homecoming and nostalgia have repeatedly slipped into populism, and at times even fascism. Today, as infrastructural expansion devastates landscapes and migration and displacement become defining conditions of the contemporary world, Heimatlosigkeit emerges less as an exceptional experience than as a pervasive existential condition. Established forms of cultural belonging and identity politics seem increasingly inadequate to address it.
Hui therefore asks: Can we consider Heimatlosigkeit as the default, perhaps even as fate? … Can we begin to see the world from the perspective of the ruins—ruins produced by economic and technological globalization?
Rather than treating Heimatlosigkeit as a condition to be overcome, Hui proposes embracing it as a philosophical and ethical position. Under such circumstances, the impetus of artistic practice also shifts: away from the reaffirmation of identity and toward the reconfiguration of perception and cosmology. The situated forms of knowledge and sensibility that emerge through this process may offer ways of deviating, however partially, from the integrative logic of consumer capitalism.
In his latest book, The Kantian Machine: AI and the Critique of Philosophy, Hui turns more directly to the ongoing technological revolution and its implications for human cognition and volition. Within contemporary technological reality, Heimatlosigkeit is no longer an abstract philosophical proposition but an everyday condition of existence. Digital platforms increasingly flatten local experience; individuals lose their grounding in the physical world while simultaneously being reformulated as algorithmically governed data subjects. As generative AI reshapes image production and algorithmic systems increasingly organize sensory experience itself, this condition has become an immediate source of anxiety for artists and cultural practitioners alike.
As Hui observes:
“Pretending to be a good materialist, one suffers, by constantly asking how technology will transform art; but the truth is that it also turns one into a bad materialist, falling to think how art can transform technology.”
What appears at first to be a paradox is, in fact, a methodological shift. Rather than positioning art as something passively shaped by technological systems, Hui invites us to recover its potential as an epistemic practice capable of transforming the very conditions of technics itself. Read from this perspective, contemporary art acquires renewed legibility: the question is no longer simply how art represents or critiques technology, but how artistic practice might experiment with alternative configurations between technics and cosmology from within existing technological regimes.
Beginning with Post-Europe and The Kantian Machine: AI and the Critique of Philosophy, the conversation explores how thought might rediscover the process of individuation amid Heimatlosigkeit, the anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, and the tensions of contemporary technological life. For Hui, individuation is not the assertion of an autonomous self but the ongoing process through which individuals continuously emerge through their encounters with technical, social, and collective milieus. The question, ultimately, is not where we might return, but how we might reinvent the conditions for thinking and creating at the limits of technology.
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