VICTOR J KREBS
Victor J. Krebs is a Peruvian philosopher whose work bridges philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the cultural challenges of the digital age. He is the co-author, with Richard Frankel, of Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations (2022), a book that has earned critical recognition, including the Gradiva Award 2022 from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the Courage to Dream Book Prize 2023, awarded by the Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
He is currently writing A Guide for the Poor Hedonist, which explores the pursuit of pleasure and meaning in contemporary life, and, again in collaboration with Richard Frankel, Dreaming Life in the Digital Age, an investigation into how digital culture is reshaping our capacity to dream and imagine. Krebs’s research also extends to exploring the notion of synchronicity in Jungian thought, as part of a broader effort to develop new ways of seeing and thinking in our time. This engagement is reflected in his founding of the Jungian Circle of Peru.
In addition to his philosophical writings on Wittgenstein, Cavell, aesthetics, and the posthuman, he has contributed to linking philosophy and popular culture, particularly through his coordination of Hermes, the research group on contemporary philosophy at the Center for Philosophical Studies at PUCP. His work often draws on ordinary language philosophy and digital media to address the ethical and existential challenges of the Anthropocene, fostering critical awareness and deeper ethical sensitivity.
He is also author of Del Alma y el Arte. Ensayos sobre la imagen, la tecnologia y la memoria (Caracas, 1997), La recuperación del sentido: Wittgenstein, la filosofía y lo trascendente (Caracas 2007), La imaginación pornográfica. Contra el escepticismo en la cultura (Lima, 2014).
Phone: +51991896204
Address: tudela y varela 351 depto 102
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He is currently writing A Guide for the Poor Hedonist, which explores the pursuit of pleasure and meaning in contemporary life, and, again in collaboration with Richard Frankel, Dreaming Life in the Digital Age, an investigation into how digital culture is reshaping our capacity to dream and imagine. Krebs’s research also extends to exploring the notion of synchronicity in Jungian thought, as part of a broader effort to develop new ways of seeing and thinking in our time. This engagement is reflected in his founding of the Jungian Circle of Peru.
In addition to his philosophical writings on Wittgenstein, Cavell, aesthetics, and the posthuman, he has contributed to linking philosophy and popular culture, particularly through his coordination of Hermes, the research group on contemporary philosophy at the Center for Philosophical Studies at PUCP. His work often draws on ordinary language philosophy and digital media to address the ethical and existential challenges of the Anthropocene, fostering critical awareness and deeper ethical sensitivity.
He is also author of Del Alma y el Arte. Ensayos sobre la imagen, la tecnologia y la memoria (Caracas, 1997), La recuperación del sentido: Wittgenstein, la filosofía y lo trascendente (Caracas 2007), La imaginación pornográfica. Contra el escepticismo en la cultura (Lima, 2014).
Phone: +51991896204
Address: tudela y varela 351 depto 102
Miraflores
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Las imágenes digitales, al desvincularse de su origen material, se convierten en fenómenos autónomos capaces de transformar la realidad, en sintonía con un nuevo materialismo que considera la materia como vibrante y activa. Este cambio ontológico sugiere una superación del desencantamiento moderno, fomentando una ética de apertura y asombro hacia la interconexión entre lo humano, lo no humano y lo virtual.
This essay explores the philosophical implications of the rise of technical images, drawing on Vilém Flusser’s insights into their transformative nature. Technical images, unlike traditional ones, are not reflections of physical reality but abstractions generated through digital processes. This detachment from materiality, often perceived as a loss, signals the obsolescence of older conceptions of the world and the emergence of a posthuman reality. Drawing parallels with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the "aura" and E.M. Forster’s *The Machine Stops*, the essay examines how virtual presence reshapes identity, intimacy, and perception. While digital images lack the historical depth and tangible immediacy of natural images, they introduce new dimensions of autonomy and abstraction, requiring a reorientation of human imagination. In this shift, traditional binaries such as real and artificial give way to categories like concrete and abstract. As Michel Foucault anticipated, the dissolution of historical frameworks challenges the very concept of "man," suggesting that the virtual age may herald a profound transformation in human self-conception. Ultimately, the essay posits that this posthuman moment offers not a nihilistic loss but an opportunity to reimagine reality and identity in radically new terms.
Las imágenes digitales, al desvincularse de su origen material, se convierten en fenómenos autónomos capaces de transformar la realidad, en sintonía con un nuevo materialismo que considera la materia como vibrante y activa. Este cambio ontológico sugiere una superación del desencantamiento moderno, fomentando una ética de apertura y asombro hacia la interconexión entre lo humano, lo no humano y lo virtual.
This essay explores the philosophical implications of the rise of technical images, drawing on Vilém Flusser’s insights into their transformative nature. Technical images, unlike traditional ones, are not reflections of physical reality but abstractions generated through digital processes. This detachment from materiality, often perceived as a loss, signals the obsolescence of older conceptions of the world and the emergence of a posthuman reality. Drawing parallels with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the "aura" and E.M. Forster’s *The Machine Stops*, the essay examines how virtual presence reshapes identity, intimacy, and perception. While digital images lack the historical depth and tangible immediacy of natural images, they introduce new dimensions of autonomy and abstraction, requiring a reorientation of human imagination. In this shift, traditional binaries such as real and artificial give way to categories like concrete and abstract. As Michel Foucault anticipated, the dissolution of historical frameworks challenges the very concept of "man," suggesting that the virtual age may herald a profound transformation in human self-conception. Ultimately, the essay posits that this posthuman moment offers not a nihilistic loss but an opportunity to reimagine reality and identity in radically new terms.
The Myth of Pygmalion is an archetypal image that articulates a human complex that has defined Western culture since Plato’s world of Forms, (those intelligible ideals that the sensible world was said to imperfectly copy) accessible to our rational minds. Since then, we have like Pygmalion, sought to replace an imperfect world, hostile to our desires, by a world more docile and yielding to them, by means of our technological art. The internet is our Pygmalionic statue, providing us immediate satisfaction with a simple click. The myth ends with Aphrodite granting Pygmalion’s wish of a perfect woman, by bringing the statue to life, suggesting that the whole process of objectification that constitutes the pygmalionic impulse, is merely a necessary transition towards a fuller reality.
What can this myth tell us about our contemporary culture? We will answer that question adding a second myth - another defining archetype of our contemporary culture - that of Endymion, the beautiful Greek ephebe who swapped his waking mortal life for an eternal dream, where he could remain eternally gazing at the beauty of his beloved Selene.
abruptamente arrojados a la vida virtual, una dimensión de la existencia humana que recién empezábamos a conocer pocos y de a pocos. De un solo sorbo hemos tenido que tomar la pócima, y en estado de shock estamos como aprendiendo a nadar, cuando solo habíamos sabido caminar. Reflexionamos aqui sobre los cambios radicales en la
forma de nuestras vidas, que empiezan a obligarnos una revisión de nuestras expectativas y nuestros planes, e incluso a cuestionar nuestra concepción misma del ser humano y de la vida.
What can this myth tell us about our contemporary culture? We will answer that question adding two further myths: that of Endymion, the beautiful Greek ephebe who swapped his waking mortal life for an eternal dream, where he could remain eternally gazing at the beauty of his beloved Selene. This myth provides us a rich image of what is happening in our capitalist culture as it grows into a digital culture. And the myth of Narcissus contemplating his own image on the pond may suggest, in al alternative reading to the usual, a way of understanding our digital engagement also as holding the promise of a transformation akin to that transitional objects (in WInnicott's sense) play in helping us negotiate the difficult tension between our desire and the world.