Impossible, Unprincipled, and Contingent: Bernard Stiegler's Project of Revolution and Redemption

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler's corpus is at once a diagnosis of the human organism's capacities and incapacities in relation to technè at the same time as it couples this organology with the refusal and affirmation of a properly human technological life. His work is at once destructive of any notion of human autonomy at the same time as it laments a certain automatism of the human in its captivation by the very systems that enable its ongoing life. Differing significantly from other forms of deconstruction that posit a possible future in a formal opening that is made possible by any repeatable text (such that to repeat a text is to allow for its transformation), Stiegler locates the pharmakon in a specifically inorganic relation the human bears to itself as an organism. In order to function as a relatively stable and autonomous self, the human must be open to inscriptive systems that are as incapacitating as they are enabling. This leaves the problem of the decision regarding the future as at once ungrounded while also bounded by the archive of the human species.