Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

Those who know the work of Karl Popper will have recognized in my title the transformation into interrogation of a formula repeated several times by this eminent philosopher of science, whom some consider as the greatest of the 20th century in his specific field - even if they do not share his theses. This Popperian formula, to which I wish to devote my analyzes here, has at least the merit of being clear and impactful. But as often, what is clear and impactful can become too simple for what is to be thought, and perhaps even too simple to express faithfully the philosophy which one seeks to summarize there. Writing this, I am not claiming that Popper was not really a falsificationist. Far be it from me to dispute that the great thesis of his epistemology consists in making any scientific theory worthy of the name falsifiable or refutable. This is indisputable: for Popper, the dividing line between scientific theory and non-scientific theory lies precisely in this falsifiable character.

Beginning with The Automatic Society, where Stiegler, on the occasion of an analysis of the unification of the technical system by the digital, synthesizes his thought of the three stages of the process of "proletarianization," this paper comes first to a critical examination of the originary "prosthetic conditions" which, according to Technics and Time, made possible the ambivalence of the technical pharmakon and the "systemic stupidity" of today. This leads then to a development on the problem of the status of desire in the stieglerian pharmacology of mind, which makes it infinite and specific to humans. Finally, this development leads us to a confrontation between Stiegler’s mobilization of doing-right (faire-droit) to unify the domains of philosophy, and a redefinition of doing-right within a differently unified human ecology, whose archireflexive methodological questioning is translated secondarily in this redefinition in terms of suffering needs versus consumerist Desire.