The Politics of Spirit in Stiegler’s Techno-Pharmacology

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit. </jats:p

The ethics of heterogeneity : a speculative critique of Jean-François Lyotard's "The differend"

The thesis is an attempt to develop a speculative (Hegelian) critique of the ethical and political questions raised by Jean-Francois Lyotard's book The Differend. I have argued that these questions are dependent upon the reading of Kant's three Critiques, and his political essays, which Lyotard develops in The Differend's four `notices' on Kant, and that it is this reading which opens up his concept of difference (`heterogeneity') to the possibility of a speculative critique. Chapter one comprises an examination of Lyotard's attempt to establish speculative thinking's dependence upon a metaphysical idea of the self as the possibility of ethical sublation. I have argued that Lyotard's appropriation of Adorno's idea of "Auschwitz" as blocking dialectical sublation, fails to recognize the speculative significance of the concrete conditions which produced the historical emergence of Nazism. The following three chapters are concerned to develop the argument that Lyotard's misrepresentation of the spirituality of Hegel's philosophy, conditions his reading of the critical philosophy as disclosing the possibility of a spontaneous (ethical) judgement of difference. Chapter two argues that Lyotard's claim to show critical subjectivity to be a `litigation' of self-conscious faculties, fails to recognize the actual lack of unity which characterizes Kant's `transcendental unity of apperception'. The exclusion of `otherness', which Lyotard claims is disclosed and suppressed in Kant's notion of cognitive experience, actually necessitates concrete selfrecognition. In chapter three, Lyotard's attempt to abstract an ethical `obligation without conditions' from Kant's critical morality is interrogated. I have argued that the aporias constituted through the spontaneity of practical reason, are reinforced through Lyotard's concept of `ethical time'. The final chapter develops a speculative approach to the notions of ethics and politics which Lyotard abstracts from the Third Critique. I have argued that the notion of an `unpredetermined' judgement which Lyotard articulates in the final sections of The Differend, constitutes a subjective `culture' which is ultimately non-ethical and apolitical

Gorz and Stiegler:Politics, Ecology and the Neganthropocene

The article explores the relationship between André Gorz’s account of the possibility of a deproletarianised regime of labour and Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the Neganthropocene. Gorz’s formulation of the impact of computer and robotic systems on the turnover of capital was, I will argue, a turning point in the way critical theory conceived the social implications of technology. His account of the supervenience of work and culture over the sphere of production forms the basis of the fundamental questions about life, creativity, and freedom that have emerged in the digital age. The paper will show that it is this notion of a fragile and disputed supervenience that is re-formulated and extended in Stiegler’s account of the Neganthropocene, particularly in his account of the fate of reflexive culture under the regime of global-digital capitalisation