This book is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of holy and the primitive.

ContentsFrom Aristotle to Hörl by Jean-Luc NancyPreface to the German EditionPreface to the English TranslationThe Sacred ChannelsIntroductionPart I In the Shadow of Formalization: A History of Thinking1 Blind Thinking around 1900: The Turn from the Intuitive to the SymbolicThinking the unthinkableThe symbolic and intuitionLeibniz as a prophet2 The Symbolic and Communication: The Crisis of Thinking Since 1850The dead skeleton of logicSymbolist subversionOperations research of the human mindUnrepresentable communicationStructuralism and field theory3 The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking: Descent into the Aristotelian UndergroundThe pre-Aristotelian situation of understandingThe prehistory of the categoriesDescartes among the savagesPaths of reasonPart II The Specter of the Primitive: A Hauntology of Communication4 The Night of the Human Being: Being and Experience under the Conditions of the UnrepresentablePrimitiveness and crisisSavage mediaSacred communicationNote on heresy5 The End of the Archaic Illusion: Communication, Information, CyberneticsDesacralizing the channelsCoding the realCybernetics and coldmindednessA new mythology of the binaryAppendix: Heidegger and CyberneticsBibliographyNotesIndex