Stiegler and Technics

Christina Howells is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She works on twentieth-century French literature and thought, Continental Philosophy and Literary Theory. Her publications include Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1988), and The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Polity Press, 1998); French Women Philosophers (Routledge, 2004); and Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought (Polity, 2011). Gerald Moore is Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University. He is the author of Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (Edinburgh, 2011), as well as articles on recent French thought (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler), psychoanalysis and literature (Michel Houellebecq). He is currently preparing a monograph, Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Technology, for Polity.

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations & Guide to Referencing; Introduction: Philosophy – The Repression of Technics, Christina Howells & Gerald Moore; I: Anthropology – The Invention of the Human; 1. Adapt and Smile or Die! Stiegler Among the Darwinists, Gerald Moore; 2. The Prehistory of Technology: On the contribution of Leroi-Gourhan, Christopher Johnson; 3. Of a Mythical Philosophical Anthropology: The Transcendental and the Empirical in Technics and Time, Michael Lewis; 4. Technics and Cerebrality, Ian James; II: Aesthetics – The Industrialisation of the Symbolic; 5. Technics, or the Fading Away of Aesthetics: The Sensible and the Question of Kant, Serge Trottein; 6. Experience of the Industrial Temporal Object, Patrick Crogan; 7. The Artist and the Amateur, from Misery to Invention, Martin Crowley; III: Psychoanalysis – The (De)sublimation of Desire; 8. ‘Le Défaut d’origine’: the prosthetic constitution of love and desire, Christina Howells; 9. The Technical Object of Psychoanalysis, Tania Espinoza; 10. Desublimation in Education for Democracy, Oliver Davis; IV: Politics – The Consumption of Spirit; 11. The New Critique of Political Economy, Miguel de Beistegui; 12. Stiegler and Foucault: The Politics of Care and Self-Writing, Sophie Fuggle; 13. Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard Stiegler, Richard Beardsworth; 14. Memories of Inauthenticity: Stiegler and the Lost Spirit of Capitalism, Ben Roberts; V: Pharmacology – The Poison that is also a Cure; 15. Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction, Daniel Ross; 16. Techno-pharmaco-genealogy, Stephen Barker; Notes on contributors; Bibliography.

Since publication of Technics and Time, 2, it has been clear that Bernard Stiegler understood, more incisively than almost all of his contemporaries, that the technological is political. Howells and Moore have assembled an impressive range of commentaries around that idea, in all its complexity, tracing the contours of a rich field that gives Stiegler’s thinking its due, and laying out the terms for future discussion.