Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Peter Skafish So many of us concerned today with thinking feel acutely the deep burn of what is doubtlessly one of its core problems. Still living, as we are, through the forced joining of the entirety of the planet into a political, economic, and rational system that continues to erode and destroy many of the traditions of thought, symbolic-aesthetic schemes, and languages—that is, the worlds—that once thrived there, we realize that thought, whatever it is conceived as being (critical theory, philosophy, "humanistic" inquiry, literature . . .), can no longer be undertaken solely through or in respect to those European traditions of knowledge that rarely manifestly opposed the colonial domination at the source of this situation, or else, as happened for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showed to those crushed by it only cold indifference. We know full well that thought, if it is to be that at all, cannot simply go on reconstituting itself in relation to these traditions as if they were the only ones, as if there would be no violence in doing so, and as if the conditions of the catastrophes of the last centuries could really then be understood and a future in which they are no longer in place reached. But what we can nonetheless only dimly see is how thought might be reconceived. Just what, we struggle to ask, must it transform into if it is to understand the profound epistemic ethnocentrism undergirding not only the present global [End Page 91] order, but even many of those discourses most opposed to it? What must thought become in order to help found another world without at the same time violently reinstituting the conceptual bases of the modern, "new world" whose current metastasis may yet consume those inhabiting it? And how can it be opened to those worlds presently at risk of passing away, so that conceptual transfers from them can begin to enter into and change it? The articles that here follow all respond to these questions in their own ways, the first of them—Bernard Stiegler's—by forcefully declaring, as philosophers (whether French or otherwise) only too rarely do, that the future of thinking can be considered only when the accidental character of its European history is as well. So even as he takes France's recent centrality in philosophy as the point of departure for his endeavor of thinking technics and sociopsychic individuation, Stiegler insists that "philosophy, at the end of the twentieth century, is not French" and that "the 'French' accident [. . .] must not be overestimated" since philosophy will have, at the present historical juncture, "to become global" and other to itself—"de-Europeanize"—or else face gradual extinction. The reason for this, according to Stiegler, is that as long as European-derived thought continues its long tradition of conceiving technics as secondary and exterior to some transcendental or anthropological first principle, it will remain incapable of comprehending the consequences of the dissemination across the planet of the information and media technologies it has recently spawned. The old philosophical conception of the technological, that is, as what perverts the human and alienates it from its essence occludes both the integral role technics in fact plays in constituting and transforming it and thus those specific changes right now being wrought in it by mass and new media. Only where philosophy manages to give up on its suppression of technics and therefore its perhaps most characteristically Western trait does it prove capable of formulating concepts adequate for assessing these mutations. What is striking about this acknowledgment of its inevitability and ethical necessity is that "de-Europeanization" does not for Stiegler consist in rejecting those thinkers he identifies as "the main interlocutors of the French" (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, and [End Page 92] Heidegger) but in approaching them in a novel manner that involves continuing to read them, as Derrida did, against their metaphysical assumptions about technics, but also now for how they illumine the concrete historical problem of the havoc being wrought on the human psyche through it. For from Stiegler's perspective, a series of social phenomena peculiar to advanced industrial countries in the last decades—the explosive growth...