The Neganthropocene

In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end “banality” of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in

The digital regime of truth:from the algorithmic governmentality to a new rule of law

This text is a transcription of Rouvroy’s presentation on 7th October 2014 at the “Digital Studies” seminar series at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This seminar series, organised by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, question the influence of digital technologies on knowledge from an epistemological point of view and from the way they alter academic disciplines

Life and the Technical Transformation of Différance: Stiegler and the Noopolitics of Becoming Non-Inhuman

Through a re-articulation of Derridean différance, Bernard Stiegler claims that the human is defined by an originary default that displaces all psychic and social life onto technical supplements. His philosophy of technics re-articulates the logic of the supplement as concerning both human reflexivity and its supports, and the history of the différance of life itself. This has been criticised for reducing Derrida’s work to a metaphysics of presence, and for instituting a humanism of the relation to the inorganic. By refuting these claims, this article will show that Stiegler’s doubling of différance enables him to articulate the human as constituted by both the individuation characteristic of ‘life’, and that of a technical, psychic and collective individuation. Putting forward a reading of the logic of the trace in life, and emphasising the aspects of Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon, and Canguilhem that Stiegler uses in his reading of Derrida, I will demonstrate that the political stakes of adaption and adoption in Noo-Politics require this re-articulation of différance. Technics shapes the human future, arising from this differential mutation; marking the invention of the human as the site of the political

Machine

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine. Contents: Introduction: Un/Civil Engineering (Thomas Pringle); Animation of the Technical and the Quest for Beauty (Gertrud Koch); For a Neganthropology of Automatic Society (Bernard Stiegler); The Ecosystem Is an Apparatus: From Machinic Ecology to the Politics of Resilience (Thomas Pringle)

Temporality and technical, psychic and collective individuations in the work of Simondon

Simondon describe el objeto técnico como tendiente a la organización, como individuándose. Una relación dinámica constituye los términos que relaciona con el movimiento de individuación del objeto técnico: se dirá que el objeto técnico se individualiza de manera transductiva. La transducción es una relación dinámica porque, a partir de un horizonte preindividual, tiende hacia la unidad sin nunca petrificarse allí: habitada por un desfase, es totalmente temporal. En otro texto, Simondon describe la individuación psicosocial en los mismos términos de un proceso transductivo sobre el fondo de lo preindividual. Pero Simondon no articuló estos dos aspectos de su trabajo. Sin embargo, ¿no articula la técnica, como huella y herencia, la individualidad psíquica y colectiva en lo que denominaremos aquí «epifilogénesis»? A partir de Heidegger y Derrida, se trata de designar el irreductible avance de la técnica que, diferencia temporal originaria, forma el horizonte de cualquier individuación psicosocial. temporality and technical, psychic and collective individuations in the work of Simondon. Simondon describes technical artefacts as possessing a tendency towards increasing organisation, in a process of individuation. In the case where a dynamic relation actually constitutes the terms of the relation itself, and this constitution occurs in the very process of individuation of a technical artefact, one speaks of the individuation as occurring in a transductive manner. Transduction is a dynamic relationship because, starting from a pre-individual horizon, it tends towards unity without ever becoming rigidly fixed: perpetually out of phase, the transductive process is essentially temporal in nature. In another text, Simondon describes psychosocial individuation in the same terms, as a transductive process on a preindividual background. However, Simondon never articulated these two aspects of his work. It is nevertheless tempting to advance the thesis that the articulation between psychic individuality and collective individuality in the course of epi-phylogenesis is realized precisely by technical artefacts, which are both traces and heritage. Drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, this article seeks to designate the irreducible advance of technics which, as the original temporal difference, constitutes the horizon of all psychosocial individuation

Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy

The concept of desire is the key to understanding the relation between economics and psychoanalysis, that is, between social and psychic investment, or between productive and libidinal economies. Today, the system organising the relation between these two economies is less a matter of biopower than of 'psychopower,' technologies and industries developed in order to control the behaviour of consumers. But this system interferes with the intergenerational circuits on which desire has hitherto always been based. Consequently, the system is now encountering certain limits, threatening the collapse of the system itself, and requiring a new economic understanding, itself dependent on a new theoretical foundation for understanding desire in general