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The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Heidegger What is Matter?—Never Mind.What is Mind?—No Matter. Punch It is a commonplace of contemporary economic, social and political culture that we live in a world articulated through increasingly sophisticated technological supports. It is also a commonplace of the cognitive sciences and of the sciences of life that a radical transformation of the site of humanity in the world (its location and the very value of the concept ‘humanity’) accompanies this process of sophistication. Little of interest has yet been said, however, of how this transformation is to be thought (ultimately how do we still talk of ‘we’?) and how ‘we’ are to orient ourselves in this increasingly technicized world. There is, of course, much literature (often quickly ‘vulgarized’ for the general reader or for the reader unversed in the languages of the contemporary sciences) which either affirms the technicization of the world or, in contrast, affirms the human against these very processes of technicization. There is little, however, which reflects, in an innovative manner, upon the relation between the human and the technical; that is, which thinks technology without opposing thought (and, therefore, intelligence, will, ‘man’ as such) to technics.2 The difficulty of such an enterprise is made evident by the career of one of the most important of twentieth century philosophers, Martin Heidegger—a great philosopher, complicit, for a part of his life, with the politics of Nazism. If this monstrosity has become one of the conundrums of contemporary continental thought, is it not in fact because Heidegger’s complicity is a sign of the ever-present difficulty of thinking the technical and the human together? For if Nazism is precisely an ‘unthought’ politics of technology (as any paragraph of Mein Kampf shows), Heidegger’s complicity is also the sign of a failure to think technics—despite his critique of Nazism from within this complicity, and despite the enormous fact that he is one of the first philosophers, after Marx, to think technics. (My terminology is, after all, partly Heideggerian.) Since this failure has also been mirrored on the political Left—whatever the differences between fascism, communism, and socialism—and since after the end of communism this failure of the Left is all the more transparent, it is historically and politically urgent to re-articulate the lack of reflection on the relation between the human and the technical. For as the violence of twentieth century politics has shown, this articulation involves everything that is seen to be specifically human—that is, the conscious organization of life and death.3 It is the ground-breaking originality and force of Bernard Stiegler’s compelling La Technique et le temps: Tome 1. La faute d’Epiméthée to have embarked upon this reflection. In doing so, Stiegler shows why such reflection has immediate cultural and political stakes and, more interestingly, how it necessarily calls for a transformation of the present co-ordinates of thinking on the political. The book, the second volume of which appears this year, constitutes, in this and many other respects, a decisive contribution to an as yet under-subscribed debate concerning technics between philosophy, the arts, the human, social and political sciences and the contemporary sciences of ‘technology’. Indeed, it is perhaps the great merit of La Technique et le temps to have laid out the terms for such a debate. In this regard, and as we shall see in detail later, it is a work the importance and effects of which can be compared, in the continental tradition at least, with Heidegger’s Being and Time and Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Given the importance of La Technique et le temps I believe it necessary—at this stage of the work’s reception in the Anglo-saxon world—to develop the theses of the book in detail. Consequently, my review of the work will remain on the level of exposition. That said, its expository nature intends to shed a very particular light on the work’s theses: i) by making explicit its ‘method’; ii) by focusing on the political implications of its reading of Heidegger; and iii) by then suggesting what is particular about its own reflections on the political. The initial focus on method will be divided into two parts separated, for reasons which will become clear, by the particular slant to my review of Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger. These two parts will concern, firstly, the specificity of Stiegler’s deconstruction of the empirico-transcendental divide and, secondly, the difference between Stiegler’s ‘genealogy’ of ‘matter’ and Derrida’s deconstruction of the tradition of philosophy. The third, concluding argument will logically follow from the opening up of this difference. What is the particular light which I wish to shed? Firstly, it is, I believe, important to show that Stiegler’s thinking of technology depends on philosophical speculation, but that it transforms philosophy in the process, given its presentation of philosophy’s constitutive inability to think techne. It is this approach to the question of technics which, far from being too philosophical or too close to Heidegger (possible reproaches to La Technique et le temps), allows the relation between the technical and the human to appear through past failures to think it. Put differently, Stiegler’s method shows the necessity today of interdisciplinarity between philosophy and the sciences, for technics to be thought in its undetermined ‘specificity’. In this context, as we shall see, La Technique et le temps, whilst highly indebted to recent continental philo-sophy (specifically the phenomenology of Husserl, the radical ontology of Heidegger and the deconstructive philosophy of Derrida), also transforms this thinking. Stiegler’s break with both Heidegger and Derrida is, in this context, both highly complicated and decisive.4 Thus, the second reason for the particular orientation of my review is my wish to engage with this complexity, given the philosophical, disciplinary, institutional and, ultimately, ethico-political stakes involved. Stiegler’s genealogy of the relation between the human and the nonhuman is not only highly original. Its implications are also innovative since, contra most philosophical reflection today (which has, with Heidegger or not, mourned ontology),5 it leads to a politics, what Stiegler calls ‘une politique de la mémoire’ (TT, 278). It is this itinerary—the path that necessarily takes Stiegler from a genealogy of matter to a politics of memory—which I wish to trace. As a result the review situates, at times in very stark terms, the break which La Technique et le temps makes with contemporary ‘post’-metaphysical concerns with the ‘other’ of metaphysics—radical finitude, alterity and matter. I will proceed according to three axes, each of which lead—separately and in tandem—to my conclusion on the relation between the technical and the political: 1) the question in La Technique et le temps of the classical and modern divide between the transcendental and the empirical; 2) its interpretation of what Lacoue-Labarthe provocatively called in La fiction du politique the ‘faute’ of Heidegger (his philosophico-political complicity with Nazism);6 3) the difference between Stiegler’s deconstruction of the above divide and Derrida’s original deconstructions of it. First axis: At a decisive moment of La Technique et le temps Stiegler recalls Plato’s Meno and the aporia of memory which Socrates develops in the first part of the dialogue. Aporia, which comes from the Greek aporos meaning ‘without issue’ or ‘without way’, that which is ‘im- practicable’, is what thought cannot resolve or untie without forgetting the undecidability which structures the aporia. In this sense aporia is what is irreducible in and for thought; an aporia is an aporia of thought, it is where man stops thinking forward. This is how the aporia of memory is expounded in Meno: it is impossible for a man to discover either what he knows or what he does not know. He could not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for. (Meno, 80e, quoted in TT, 109) This aporia is only taken up by Socrates to be resolved by the myth of reminiscence. The finitude inherent to the aporia of memory is ‘disavowed’ through the Platonic articulation of anamnesis.7 Since this articulation institutes ‘Platonism’, Stiegler’s turn to the aporia is not an illustrative detail in his argument, but a crucial attempt to re-cognize, in terms that are neither exclusively philosophical nor exclusively technicist, philosophy’s constitutive exclusion of techne from the arche and telos of knowledge. Why is Meno so relevant in this respect? The question of recognition (of the universal in the particular) is situated for Plato in terms of memory. To learn is to remember—a thesis which necessitates an axiomatic distinction between two modalities of time, that of the eternal, of being (concretized in the idea of the immortal soul)—the modality of time as that of the transcendence of time—and that of time as passing away, finitude, the body condemned to corruption and death. The myth of reminiscence therefore unties the aporia of memory by instituting the metaphysical oppositions between soul and body, infinite and finite, transcendental and empirical, logos and techne, form and matter. Instituting them, however, the myth forgets (disavows) finitude. Indeed, the myth of reminiscence is nothing but the forgetting of the aporia as the logic of opposition. According to Stiegler (and here he follows the implications of Derrida’s philosophy closely) this aporia provokes the axiomatic of the philosophical tradition. Lying behind the question of Being in Greek philo-sophy, the ontological proof of God in mediaeval or rationalist philo-sophy, the aporia haunts in turn the question of transcendental method in modern philosophy. In other words, whatever the differences between these philosophies, their history, as a ‘history’, takes form in the gesture which turns the aporia of memory into a phantasmatic opposition between two types of being, life, intelligence, or—and this is the decisive and, for Stiegler, determining opposition—two types of memory. For Stiegler, however, the transcendental question does not simply disavow finitude; it disavows technics. Or rather, the disavowal of finitude is nothing but the disavowal of techne. By settling the aporia in terms of an opposition, the transcendental question is in fact the forgetting of the ‘prosthetic already-there’ (TT, 238 et al.) which gives access, in the first place, to time and transcendence. In other words—and this is Stiegler’s thesis—the aporia which provokes the metaphysical disavowal of finitude (as in Meno) should be developed as an aporetic, inextricable relation between thought and technics. Since access to time marks the specificity of human culture, to forget finitude is thus to deny the constitutive role of techne in the process of hominization. Quite simply, in its panic before time and matter, philosophy has not yet considered the zoo-techno-logical species called ‘man’. Stiegler’s development of the aporia of thought in terms of technics is of course indebted to the innovative philosophical strategies of Jacques Derrida. It is Derrida’s early work, with and beyond Husserl, which shows that the metaphysical disavowal of finitude opens up the transcendental horizon (Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Speech and Phenomena). Let us recall in this context (and we must return to the point later) Derrida’s argument at the beginning of the chapter ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ in Of Grammatology concerning the impossibility of a science of the gramme. Derrida observes: writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science—and possibly its object—but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in the Origin of Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of episteme. [...] historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of history—of an historical science—writing opens the field of history—of historical becoming. And the former (Historie in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte).8 The condition of truth is the possibility of writing, that is, of a material inscription. Rather than this inscription (mis-)reflecting the truth—the argument which institutes ‘logocentrism’—its possibility is constitutive of truth as such. Thus, for Derrida, metaphysics constitutes its oppositions (the non-worldly/the worldly, the ideal/the material) by expelling into one term of the opposition the very possibility of the condition of such oppositions. Derrida calls this general possibility of inscription arche-writing. Now, Stiegler appropriates this thesis (one which ‘comes through’ a phenomenological approach to the memorization of truth) in terms of the ‘originary prostheticity’ of the human (TT, 98-100). La Technique et le temps thus pushes the Derridean analyses of arche-writing, as well as the concomitant thesis on the ‘closure’ of metaphysics, in the direction of technicity and its disavowal. However, as we shall see, this is more than a refinement of Derridean themes; there is a major difference of method and aim, one which concerns the theoretical rigor of the term ‘closure’ and carries ethico-political consequences. According to Stiegler, then, it is technics which, as the support of the inscription of memory, is constitutive of transcendence. Since, following the Heideggerian destruction of ontology in terms of time, transcendence is nothing but the transcendence of ‘now’, and since this possibility is only given through a support which registers ‘indelibly’ (Husserl, Derrida), then, for Stiegler, matter, organized as support, is its condition. In other words, organized matter (the technical object) is the condition of consciousness as such. In its absolute resistance to transcendental or phenomenological reduction (epochality), the technical object (organized matter) at the same time makes the transcendental gesture im-possible in its possibility. Technics is thus—to use Derridean concepts at this stage—the condition of (im-)possibility of the transcendental gesture which marks the human species with its non-genetic specificity. Humanity ‘transcends’ its genetic program in pursuing its life through means other than life (matter). For Stiegler, this aporia is the unthought of both classical and modern philosophy. Indeed, since all thinking, up to Heidegger and beyond, constitutes itself in turn in its differentiation from technics, the weight of Stiegler’s argument is immense. Further, re-cognized (in the Hegelian sense)9 in terms of technics, the aporia has wide implications for future relations between philosophy, the sciences and the arts. For, if it is explicitly as technical consciousness that man invents himself, then experimentation is what is proper to man. The metaphysical (and in part Heideggerian) divide between the Humanities and the sciences is accordingly no longer tenable. Indeed, the divide is seen for what it is—a symptomatic disavowal of matter.10 Stiegler calls the support of consciousness ‘organized inorganic matter’ (la matière inorganique organisée). The concept is crucial for an understanding of the radicality of his argument. Organized inorganic matter is matter which transforms itself in time as technical object. Whilst in time, its transformations, however, are the condition of the human temporalization of time. In this sense, matter is constitutive of temporality. And this, in an explicitly historical sense: each ‘time’ matter undergoes radical evolution, the temporalization of time changes. Change in the temporalization of time means, in turn, change to the ‘conditions of sensibility’ (in the Kantian sense) and, therefore, change also to the very ‘identity’ of man. By elaborating the constitutive role of matter, Stiegler re-articulates matter (a straightforward concept in philosophical reflection, its object hardly disavowed) as the history of matter in its relation to the human. Matter has a history when organized; it is precisely the evolution of the relation between matter and the human: from the stone implement to the portable computer to the immanent optical and memory ‘implants’.11 The concept of organized inorganic matter is crucial to Stiegler’s re-organization of the relations between philosophy and technology because it re-articulates the metaphysical opposition between organic life and inorganic matter, animating form and inanimate matter, in terms of technical evolution. Organized inorganic matter is, in other words, an originary co-implication of ‘matter’ and ‘humanity’. It precedes the metaphysical determination which opposes matter to form-giving (divine or human). Indeed, the metaphysical determination of matter (as what is given to form) should be seen as a disavowal of the complex human-technical (in Stiegler’s terms the originary complex who-what). It is this co-implication which distinguishes man from other forms of life: The zootechnological relation of man to matter is a particular case of the relation of the living to the environment, that is, a relation of man to his environment which passes through organized inert matter, the technical object. The singularity of this relation is that the inert, although organized matter which is the technical object evolves itself in its organization: it is no longer simply inert matter, but it is not living matter either. It is an organized inorganic matter which is transformed in time, just as living matter is transformed in its interaction with the environment. Moreover, it becomes the interface through which the living matter which is man enters into relation with the environment. (TT, 63, author’s italics) Now this articulation of matter as organized inorganic matter both accounts for the aporia of the origin (suppressed by Plato and the tradition of philosophy) and allows for a history of human culture as the history of the differentiations within the originary complex human-technical object. It does so, however, without flattening out the transcendental question in terms of a mythic or finite history of humanity which would untie the aporia by narrating the origin of transcendence. The first coup of Stiegler’s thought with regard to present philosophical concerns is to be felt here. Stiegler offers us a genealogy of matter—‘matter’ in the above sense of the originary complex human-technics (written from now on ‘matter’)—without finitizing the aporia of the origin. Briefly put (although it merits a long article in itself), this argument constitutes a fundamental transformation of the relation between the philosophies of Derrida and Nietzsche, maintaining that a genealogy of transcendence is possible (Nietzsche) whilst guarding the philosophical specificity of the aporia of origin (Derrida).12 Stiegler consequently guards the aporia of the origin as aporia whilst at the same time constructing a history of the aporia. The paradox is held together by the following argument. Man and matter mutually organize each other without either of the two terms of the originary relation becoming the origin of the other. Since neither term is the origin of the other, history is nothing but the relation between the human and the non-human, which relation refuses all forms of ontologization (including all ‘materialism’ from Democritus to Marx). History and aporia are in this sense, and in this sense alone, to be thought together. Stiegler thereby holds his thought off from the ontological traps of determining the origin, whilst giving a history of the aporetic nature of the origin. The argument is structural to Stiegler’s overall concerns. Starting with the aporia of Meno, it ultimately constitutes a complex negotiation between philosophy and the technosciences which repeats and transforms Derrida’s moves between philosophy and the human and social sciences in works like Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy. It repeats the strategy in the sense that Derrida’s philosophy constitutes a transformation of oppositional logic, notably that between the transcendental and the empirical, which works towards a more refined thinking of finitude. It transforms Derrida’s relation to the tradition of philosophy, however, by giving in the aporetic terms of ‘matter’ a history of what precedes oppositional logic.13 Given the stakes, it is worth seeing in detail how this is done. Stiegler’s rewriting of the divide between the transcendental and the empirical is translated first into the very form of La Technique et le temps. The first part is devoted to the history of technics (essentially the work of Bertrand Gille and Gilbert Simondon),14 to the evolution of technics within time and to the dynamics particular to technical evolution. The second part is given over to what could be called a ‘chiasmus’ between an anthropology which wishes to be transcendental—Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality between Men—and a paleontological anthropology—the writings of the paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan—which explicitly criticizes the transcendental approach of Rousseau.15 This does not prevent the critique of a transcendental approach, how-ever valuable its recourse to prehistoric discoveries, from falling itself into the metaphysical traps of empiricism.
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