Ian James

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler.

In Of Grammatology Derrida called upon Charles Sanders Peirce as a partial ally in his ‘deconstruction of the transcendental signifier’. Here Derridean thought and biodeconstruction are brought into a comparative relation with contemporary Peircean biosemiotic theory. The discussion examines an intertwining of philosophical currents and trajectories that run through both Peirce and the philosophical hinterland of biosemiotics. What can be seen to emerge here is an evolution or transformation from idealism (the legacies of Hegel and Kant in Peirce and biosemiotic thought, respectively) to a novel configuration of relational realism. This configuration is, in turn, thought alongside Derridean notions of différance, arche-writing and generalized textuality. A productive dialogue is opened up between biodeconstruction and biosemiotics. The latter can be shown to complement the former, offering a realist, post-metaphysical theoretical framework and methodology for biology that has the potential to inform the activity and research of working biologists.

This article argues that attempts by philosophy to think emotions as embodied is caught between the necessity of thinking them as a subjective first-person dimension of experience on the one hand and as an objective biological determination on the other. Philosophy has tended to view these two dimensions, qualitative and quantitative, respectively, as either in a parallelism with each other or alternatively has dispensed with either one or the other. This article draws on Georges Canguilhem’s biological thinking of “sense” as a mode of functional relationality that constitutes the being of organisms as such and brings it into a comparative alignment with Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of sense and touch. On this basis it argues that emotions are an extension of a more fundamental affectivity proper to biological life in general. This allows for the qualitative dimension of emotions and the objective knowledge of them in biology to be thought in an ontological continuity with each other. It also allows for a renewed thinking of the fundamental continuity of emotional and affective experience in human and non-human animal life.