Robert Sinnerbrink

This essay seeks to further the critical reception of Stiegler's philosophy of technology by situating his work within the legacy of critical theory and deconstruction. Drawing on what Richard Beardsworth has described as Stiegler's 'Left-Derrideanism'-his radical re-thinking of the problem of technics and related call for a "politics of memory"-I argue that Stiegler's transformation of both Heidegger and Derrida retrieves and renews the interrupted Frankfurt school tradition of culture industry critique. What we might call Stiegler's 'deconstructive materialism' reinvigorates the project of a cultural politics that would take place in the intersection between culture, technics, and politics in the more conventional sense. In this respect, Stiegler's culture industry redux points to a number of important practical cultural responses to the debilitating malaise that increasingly afflicts politics in liberal capitalist democracies. I conclude by suggesting what such a Stieglerian 'cultural politics of memory' might entail.

This paper examines the theme of recognition in Hegel's account of self-consciousness, suggesting that there are unresolved difficulties with the relationship between the normative sense of mutual recognition and phenomenological cases of unequal recognition. Recent readings of Hegel deal with this problem by positing an implicit distinction between an 'ontological' sense of recognition as a precondition for autonomous subjectivity, and a 'normative' sense of recognition as embodied in rational social and political institutions. Drawing on recent work by Robert Pippin and Axel Honneth, I argue that Hegel's conception of rational freedom provides the key to grasping the relationship between the ontological and normative senses of recognition. Recognitive freedom provides a way of appropriating Hegel's theory of recognition for contemporary social philosophy.