RICCARDO VALENTI
Detonating the Image. Nuclear Aesthetics, Hyperobjects, and the Ethics of the Future
This paper examines the nuclear condition as a crisis of perception and reason. Firstly drawing on Joseph Masco’s notion of the nuclear uncanny and Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, it argues that deterrence operates as an aesthetic and epistemic regime that transforms catastrophe into management. Within this regime, the atomic bomb appears not merely as a political instrument but as the negative revelation or akme of European rationality – its unresolved telos of mastery without reflection. Here, reinterpreting Enzo Paci’s phenomenology, the paper proposes a peacebuilding reason counterpart that replaces the logic of deterrence with that of relation. Indeed, Paci’s distinction between negative function and the constant search for proper meaning allows for a reconstruction of rationality as dialogue, turning the suspension of destruction into a more accountable form of reflection. Finally, through Hans Jonas and Bernard Stiegler, the paper extends this phenomenological ethics to the future, outlining an intergenerational imagination capable of confronting new hyperobjects such as artificial intelligence. To "detonate the image", in this sense, means to release perception from paralysis and recover the communicative vocation of reason.