Technology and the Home: Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida
摘要
This essay explores the relationship between technology and the home through the works of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Heidegger opposes the essence of being at-home, labeled as dwelling, with the essence of modern technology, labeled as Gestell. Whereas dwelling is associated with rootedness, guardianship, and letting-be, technology is associated with rootlessness, consumption, and industry. Responding to Heidegger, Levinas argues the opposite; technology, in challenging conventions of place, enhances rather than opposes dwelling insofar as it invites others into the home regardless of place. Derrida, whose corpus is strongly influenced by both Heidegger and Levinas, picks up and advances this debate by using the emergent information and communication technologies of his time to consider the varied impact of technology on the home. The result is a decades-long rumination on technology and dwelling spanning across the works of three of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In offering a longitudinal analysis of these thinkers in relation to each other, this essay surfaces and draws into the twenty-first century the evolving tensions between rootedness and rootlessness, positionality and relationality, commencement and closure, hospitality and hostility, and interiority and exteriority as they relate to technology and the home.