Bernard Stiegler

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions. New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities. Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available

Pour Bernard Stiegler, le revenu universel d’existence est une condition de démarrage d’un processus de transformation bien plus vaste de notre économie à moyen et long terme. Mais ce revenu de base n’est pas suffisant en tant que tel, et peut même s’avérer dangereux si sa mise en place ne sert que de prétexte à l’ uberisation intégrale de la société. Sortir d’une économie entropique, destructrice de l’environnement et de nos singularités, pour construire peu à peu une économie qu’il qualifie à l’inverse de « néguentropique », suppose non seulement un revenu d’existence, mais surtout un revenu contributif et l’extension progressive à toute la population de la possibilité d’accéder au régime des intermittents du spectacle.

The article considers the increasing influence acquired displayed by the screens of our devices for communicating information and elaborating data. These screens are becoming “writing screens”. They constitute a danger for our individual and collective experience, since they redesign in depth the temporality and rhythm of all human activities, above all work, which becomes now a life form that never stops accompanying our existence. According to Derrida’s concept of pharmakon, the author argues that the very concept of “writing screen” should be interpreted from within its nature, attempting to elaborate a new “hermeneutics” of screens – a hermeneutics capable of rendering a shared meaning, as well as the possibility of having experience through the new interactive media and devices.

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated

This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains and re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge.

Même si Simondon, comme l’a bien relevé Jean-Hugues Barthélémy dans Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, souligne le rôle de stabilisateur du transindividuel dévolu à la technique, il n’analyse pas la dimension intrinsèquement technologique du pré-individuel. C’est pourquoi la religion, que Simondon origine pourtant dans la magie, n’est pas pensée depuis sa constitution profondément technique. Or, cette question revient là où Simondon s’avance du côté de la psychanalyse : la critique simondonienne de cette dernière n’a pas clairement formulé l’objection qu’il faut lui adresser, à savoir qu’elle ne pense pas le rôle de la technique dans l’individuation, c’est-à-dire dans le désir.Even if Simondon, as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy well noted in Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, indeed stresses the stabilization part played by the trans-individual granted as it may be to technique, yet the latter never analyzes the intrinsically technological dimension of the pre-individual. That is why religion, which Simondon originates however amid the magical, is no longer thought since its deeply technical constitution. Now such a question goes back to where Simondon moves towards psychoanalysis : the Simondon criticism of the latter never clearly formulated the objection that should be addressed to it, i.e. never taking into thought the part played by technique in individuation, i.e. within desire.

This interview is articulated around the following theses: capitalism must first be understood as a « libidinal economy » ; this libidinal economy is exhausted by the hyper-industrialization of contemporary capitalism : industrially treated desire leads to the destruction of desire ; whence the necessity of inventing a new form of public authority which can reactive, stimulate desire. Ecological damage is indeed the consequence of a symbolic poverty, a poverty of the forms of life and practices. The only response to such damage is to propose a genuine ecology of mind

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated.