Contemporary ideals, power, and subjectivity: human reality in the face of new digital technologies and the inflation of the imaginary

Abstract

This paper rescues the concept of subjectivity that Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism claims. We will seek to configure the existentialist challenge of taking subjectivity as its object: the difficulties inherent in the search for knowing that which, by definition, implies an obscurity of self — not knowing — and having to be. We must articulate the notion of subjectivity in the current situation, intertwined by new digital technologies, which configures a peculiar situation for human reality. We will go through some elements of the digitalization of life, highlighting aspects involved in the use of new technologies, such as the acclaimed artificial intelligence and its consequences in what we call the process of inflation of the imaginary in the production of forms of life.