Emanuele Clarizio

This article aims to introduce English-speaking readers to a still little-known tradition of French philosophy of technology: the “biological philosophy of technology.” As recognized by Georges Canguilhem, this philosophy was initiated by Henri Bergson, who conceived of technology as an extension of life, which in its evolution, creates natural tools (organs) and artificial ones (technical objects). The paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan took up this thesis and put it to the test of archaeological data to demonstrate, on the one hand, the biological basis of technical evolution and on the other hand, the importance of technics for human evolution. Finally, Gilbert Simondon extended Leroi-Gourhan’s scientific technology from the study of tools to that of machines, providing yet another fruitful example of the biological philosophy of technology.

The aim of this article is to consider biobanks through the conceptual tools of French Thought and twentieth-century French philosophy of technology. Firstly, two pairs of authors and their respective conceptions of the relationship between technics and memory are considered: on the one hand, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, who thought of memory and technics on the model of writing; on the other hand, Henri Bergson and André Leroi-Gourhan, who thought of memory as linked to biological life, and of technics as an exteriorization of life. On the basis of this discussion, a philosophical analysis of biobanks is then provided, understanding them as exteriorized memories of life, and some conceptual problems raised by biobanks are addressed: the question of exteriorization and its relation with the organic and the inorganic matter; the relation between the living and the environment; the mode of existence of biological data; and the distinction between natural and artificial memory.

I. Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a maintext to catch the epistemological tensions created by the emerging notion of life . By investigating the specific causality of life in order to explain the phenomenon of self-organization of the living, Kant uses the remarkable concept of technique of nature , thus establishing a strong analogy between technique and life.The consequences of this analogy affect not only the epistemology of life, but also the modern conception of technique.To a technicization of life corresponds a vitalization of technique. A new hybrid territory is thus discovered – that of technical life – in whichstands the possibility of a biological archaeology of modern technique