| "The hand is infinitely different from
all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different
by an abyss of essence." Heidegger |
"What is Matter?—Never Mind. What is Mind?—No
Matter." Punch |
It is a commonplace of contemporary economic,
social and political culture that we live
in a world articulated through increasingly
sophisticated technological supports. It
is also a commonplace of the cognitive sciences
and of the sciences of life that a radical
transformation of the site of humanity in
the world (its location and the very value
of the concept ‘humanity’) accompanies this
process of sophistication. Little of interest
has yet been said, however, of how this transformation
is to be thought (ultimately how do we still
talk of ‘we’?) and how ‘we’ are to orient
ourselves in this increasingly technicized
world. There is, of course, much literature
(often quickly ‘vulgarized’ for the general
reader or for the reader unversed in the
languages of the contemporary sciences) which
either affirms the technicization of the
world or, in contrast, affirms the human
against these very processes of technicization.
There is little, however, which reflects,
in an innovative manner, upon the relation
between the human and the technical; that
is, which thinks technology without opposing
thought (and, therefore, intelligence, will,
‘man’ as such) to technics. 2
The difficulty of such an enterprise is made
evident by the career of one of the most
important of twentieth century philosophers,
Martin Heidegger—a great philosopher, complicit,
for a part of his life, with the politics
of Nazism. If this monstrosity has become
one of the conundrums of contemporary continental
thought, is it not in fact because Heidegger’s
complicity is a sign of the ever-present
difficulty of thinking the technical and
the human together? For if Nazism is precisely
an ‘unthought’ politics of technology (as
any paragraph of Mein Kampf shows), Heidegger’s
complicity is also the sign of a failure
to think technics—despite his critique of
Nazism from within this complicity, and despite
the enormous fact that he is one of the first
philosophers, after Marx, to think technics.
(My terminology is, after all, partly Heideggerian.)
Since this failure has also been mirrored
on the political Left—whatever the differences
between fascism, communism, and socialism—and
since after the end of communism this failure
of the Left is all the more transparent,
it is historically and politically urgent
to re-articulate the lack of reflection on
the relation between the human and the technical.
For as the violence of twentieth century
politics has shown, this articulation involves
everything that is seen to be specifically
human—that is, the conscious organization
of life and death. 3
It is the ground-breaking originality and
force of Bernard Stiegler’s compelling La
Technique et le temps: Tome 1. La faute d’Epiméthée
to have embarked upon this reflection. In
doing so, Stiegler shows why such reflection
has immediate cultural and political stakes
and, more interestingly, how it necessarily
calls for a transformation of the present
co-ordinates of thinking on the political.
The book, the second volume of which appears
this year, constitutes, in this and many
other respects, a decisive contribution to
an as yet under-subscribed debate concerning
technics between philosophy, the arts, the
human, social and political sciences and
the contemporary sciences of ‘technology’.
Indeed, it is perhaps the great merit of
La Technique et le temps to have laid out
the terms for such a debate. In this regard,
and as we shall see in detail later, it is
a work the importance and effects of which
can be compared, in the continental tradition
at least, with Heidegger’s Being and Time
and Derrida’s Of Grammatology.
Given the importance of La Technique et le
temps I believe it necessary—at this stage
of the work’s reception in the Anglo-saxon
world—to develop the theses of the book in
detail. Consequently, my review of the work
will remain on the level of exposition. That
said, its expository nature intends to shed
a very particular light on the work’s theses:
i) by making explicit its ‘method’; ii) by
focusing on the political implications of
its reading of Heidegger; and iii) by then
suggesting what is particular about its own
reflections on the political. The initial
focus on method will be divided into two
parts separated, for reasons which will become
clear, by the particular slant to my review
of Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger. These
two parts will concern, firstly, the specificity
of Stiegler’s deconstruction of the empirico-transcendental
divide and, secondly, the difference between
Stiegler’s ‘genealogy’ of ‘matter’ and Derrida’s
deconstruction of the tradition of philosophy.
The third, concluding argument will logically
follow from the opening up of this difference.
What is the particular light which I wish
to shed? Firstly, it is, I believe, important
to show that Stiegler’s thinking of technology
depends on philosophical speculation, but
that it transforms philosophy in the process,
given its presentation of philosophy’s constitutive
inability to think techne. It is this approach
to the question of technics which, far from
being too philosophical or too close to Heidegger
(possible reproaches to La Technique et le
temps), allows the relation between the technical
and the human to appear through past failures
to think it. Put differently, Stiegler’s
method shows the necessity today of interdisciplinarity
between philosophy and the sciences, for
technics to be thought in its undetermined
‘specificity’. In this context, as we shall
see, La Technique et le temps, whilst highly
indebted to recent continental philosophy
(specifically the phenomenology of Husserl,
the radical ontology of Heidegger and the
deconstructive philosophy of Derrida), also
transforms this thinking. Stiegler’s break
with both Heidegger and Derrida is, in this
context, both highly complicated and decisive.
4 Thus, the second reason for the particular
orientation of my review is my wish to engage
with this complexity, given the philosophical,
disciplinary, institutional and, ultimately,
ethico-political stakes involved.
Stiegler’s genealogy of the relation between
the human and the nonhuman is not only highly
original. Its implications are also innovative
since, contra most philosophical reflection
today (which has, with Heidegger or not,
mourned ontology),5 it leads to a politics,
what Stiegler calls ‘une politique de la
mémoire’ (TT, 278). It is this itinerary—the
path that necessarily takes Stiegler from
a genealogy of matter to a politics of memory—which
I wish to trace. As a result the review situates,
at times in very stark terms, the break which
La Technique et le temps makes with contemporary
‘post’-metaphysical concerns with the ‘other’
of metaphysics—radical finitude, alterity
and matter.
I will proceed according to three axes, each
of which lead—separately and in tandem—to
my conclusion on the relation between the
technical and the political:
1) the question in La Technique et le temps
of the classical and modern divide between
the transcendental and the empirical;
2) its interpretation of what Lacoue-Labarthe
provocatively called in La fiction du politique
the ‘faute’ of Heidegger (his philosophico-political
complicity with Nazism);6
3) the difference between Stiegler’s deconstruction
of the above divide and Derrida’s original
deconstructions of it.
First axis: At a decisive moment of La Technique
et le temps Stiegler recalls Plato’s Meno
and the aporia of memory which Socrates develops
in the first part of the dialogue. Aporia,
which comes from the Greek aporos meaning
‘without issue’ or ‘without way’, that which
is ‘im- practicable’, is what thought cannot
resolve or untie without forgetting the undecidability
which structures the aporia. In this sense
aporia is what is irreducible in and for
thought; an aporia is an aporia of thought,
it is where man stops thinking forward. This
is how the aporia of memory is expounded
in Meno:
it is impossible for a man to discover either
what he knows or what he does not know. He
could not seek what he knows, for since he
knows it there is no need of the inquiry,
nor what he does not know, for in that case
he does not even know what he is to look
for. (Meno, 80e, quoted in TT, 109)
This aporia is only taken up by Socrates
to be resolved by the myth of reminiscence.
The finitude inherent to the aporia of memory
is ‘disavowed’ through the Platonic articulation
of anamnesis. 7 Since this articulation institutes
‘Platonism’, Stiegler’s turn to the aporia
is not an illustrative detail in his argument,
but a crucial attempt to re-cognize, in terms
that are neither exclusively philosophical
nor exclusively technicist, philosophy’s
constitutive exclusion of techne from the
arche and telos of knowledge. Why is Meno
so relevant in this respect?
The question of recognition (of the universal
in the particular) is situated for Plato
in terms of memory. To learn is to remember—a
thesis which necessitates an axiomatic distinction
between two modalities of time, that of the
eternal, of being (concretized in the idea
of the immortal soul)—the modality of time
as that of the transcendence of time—and
that of time as passing away, finitude, the
body condemned to corruption and death. The
myth of reminiscence therefore unties the
aporia of memory by instituting the metaphysical
oppositions between soul and body, infinite
and finite, transcendental and empirical,
logos and techne, form and matter. Instituting
them, however, the myth forgets (disavows)
finitude. Indeed, the myth of reminiscence
is nothing but the forgetting of the aporia
as the logic of opposition.
According to Stiegler (and here he follows
the implications of Derrida’s philosophy
closely) this aporia provokes the axiomatic
of the philosophical tradition. Lying behind
the question of Being in Greek philo-sophy,
the ontological proof of God in mediaeval
or rationalist philo-sophy, the aporia haunts
in turn the question of transcendental method
in modern philosophy. In other words, whatever
the differences between these philosophies,
their history, as a ‘history’, takes form
in the gesture which turns the aporia of
memory into a phantasmatic opposition between
two types of being, life, intelligence, or—and
this is the decisive and, for Stiegler, determining
opposition—two types of memory.
For Stiegler, however, the transcendental
question does not simply disavow finitude;
it disavows technics. Or rather, the disavowal
of finitude is nothing but the disavowal
of techne. By settling the aporia in terms
of an opposition, the transcendental question
is in fact the forgetting of the ‘prosthetic
already-there’ (TT, 238 et al.) which gives
access, in the first place, to time and transcendence.
In other words—and this is Stiegler’s thesis—the
aporia which provokes the metaphysical disavowal
of finitude (as in Meno) should be developed
as an aporetic, inextricable relation between
thought and technics. Since access to time
marks the specificity of human culture, to
forget finitude is thus to deny the constitutive
role of techne in the process of hominization.
Quite simply, in its panic before time and
matter, philosophy has not yet considered
the zoo-techno-logical species called ‘man’.
Stiegler’s development of the aporia of thought
in terms of technics is of course indebted
to the innovative philosophical strategies
of Jacques Derrida. It is Derrida’s early
work, with and beyond Husserl, which shows
that the metaphysical disavowal of finitude
opens up the transcendental horizon (Introduction
to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Speech and
Phenomena). Let us recall in this context
(and we must return to the point later) Derrida’s
argument at the beginning of the chapter
‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ in Of Grammatology
concerning the impossibility of a science
of the gramme. Derrida observes:
Writing is not only an auxiliary means in
the service of science—and possibly its object—but
first, as Husserl in particular pointed out
in the Origin of Geometry, the condition
of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore
of scientific objectivity. Before being its
object, writing is the condition of episteme.
[...] historicity itself is tied to the possibility
of writing; to the possibility of writing
in general, beyond those particular forms
of writing in the name of which we have long
spoken of peoples without writing and without
history. Before being the object of history—of
an historical science—writing opens the field
of history—of historical becoming. And the
former (Historie in German) presupposes the
latter (Geschichte).8
The condition of truth is the possibility
of writing, that is, of a material inscription.
Rather than this inscription (mis-)reflecting
the truth—the argument which institutes ‘logocentrism’—its
possibility is constitutive of truth as such.
Thus, for Derrida, metaphysics constitutes
its oppositions (the non-worldly/the worldly,
the ideal/the material) by expelling into
one term of the opposition the very possibility
of the condition of such oppositions. Derrida
calls this general possibility of inscription
arche-writing. Now, Stiegler appropriates
this thesis (one which ‘comes through’ a
phenomenological approach to the memorization
of truth) in terms of the ‘originary prostheticity’
of the human
(TT, 98-100). La Technique et le temps thus
pushes the Derridean analyses of arche-writing,
as well as the concomitant thesis on the
‘closure’ of metaphysics, in the direction
of technicity and its disavowal. However,
as we shall see, this is more than a refinement
of Derridean themes; there is a major difference
of method and aim, one which concerns the
theoretical rigor of the term ‘closure’ and
carries ethico-political consequences.
According to Stiegler, then, it is technics
which, as the support of the inscription
of memory, is constitutive of transcendence.
Since, following the Heideggerian destruction
of ontology in terms of time, transcendence
is nothing but the transcendence of ‘now’,
and since this possibility is only given
through a support which registers ‘indelibly’
(Husserl, Derrida), then, for Stiegler, matter,
organized as support, is its condition. In
other words, organized matter (the technical
object) is the condition of consciousness
as such. In its absolute resistance to transcendental
or phenomenological reduction (epochality),
the technical object (organized matter) at
the same time makes the transcendental gesture
im-possible in its possibility. Technics
is thus—to use Derridean concepts at this
stage—the condition of (im-)possibility of
the transcendental gesture which marks the
human species with its non-genetic specificity.
Humanity ‘transcends’ its genetic program
in pursuing its life through means other
than life (matter).
For Stiegler, this aporia is the unthought
of both classical and modern philosophy.
Indeed, since all thinking, up to Heidegger
and beyond, constitutes itself in turn in
its differentiation from technics, the weight
of Stiegler’s argument is immense. Further,
re-cognized (in the Hegelian sense)9 in terms
of technics, the aporia has wide implications
for future relations between philosophy,
the sciences and the arts. For, if it is
explicitly as technical consciousness that
man invents himself, then experimentation
is what is proper to man. The metaphysical
(and in part Heideggerian) divide between
the Humanities and the sciences is accordingly
no longer tenable. Indeed, the divide is
seen for what it is—a symptomatic disavowal
of matter. 10
Stiegler calls the support of consciousness
‘organized inorganic matter’ (la matière
inorganique organisée). The concept is crucial
for an understanding of the radicality of
his argument.
Organized inorganic matter is matter which
transforms itself in time as technical object.
Whilst in time, its transformations, however,
are the condition of the human temporalization
of time. In this sense, matter is constitutive
of temporality. And this, in an explicitly
historical sense: each ‘time’ matter undergoes
radical evolution, the temporalization of
time changes. Change in the temporalization
of time means, in turn, change to the ‘conditions
of sensibility’ (in the Kantian sense) and,
therefore, change also to the very ‘identity’
of man. By elaborating the constitutive role
of matter, Stiegler re-articulates matter
(a straightforward concept in philosophical
reflection, its object hardly disavowed)
as the history of matter in its relation
to the human. Matter has a history when organized;
it is precisely the evolution of the relation
between matter and the human: from the stone
implement to the portable computer to the
immanent optical and memory ‘implants’.11
The concept of organized inorganic matter
is crucial to Stiegler’s re-organization
of the relations between philosophy and technology
because it re-articulates the metaphysical
opposition between organic life and inorganic
matter, animating form and inanimate matter,
in terms of technical evolution. Organized
inorganic matter is, in other words, an originary
co-implication of ‘matter’ and ‘humanity’.
It precedes the metaphysical determination
which opposes matter to form-giving (divine
or human). Indeed, the metaphysical determination
of matter (as what is given to form) should
be seen as a disavowal of the complex human-technical
(in Stiegler’s terms the originary complex
who-what). It is this co-implication which
distinguishes man from other forms of life:
The zootechnological relation of man to matter
is a particular case of the relation of the
living to the environment, that is, a relation
of man to his environment which passes through
organized inert matter, the technical object.
The singularity of this relation is that
the inert, although organized matter which
is the technical object evolves itself in
its organization: it is no longer simply
inert matter, but it is not living matter
either. It is an organized inorganic matter
which is transformed in time, just as living
matter is transformed in its interaction
with the environment. Moreover, it becomes
the interface through which the living matter
which is man enters into relation with the
environment.
(TT, 63, author’s italics)
Now this articulation of matter as organized
inorganic matter both accounts for the aporia
of the origin (suppressed by Plato and the
tradition of philosophy) and allows for a
history of human culture as the history of
the differentiations within the originary
complex human-technical object. It does so,
however, without flattening out the transcendental
question in terms of a mythic or finite history
of humanity which would untie the aporia
by narrating the origin of transcendence.
The first coup of Stiegler’s thought with
regard to present philosophical concerns
is to be felt here. Stiegler offers us a
genealogy of matter—‘matter’ in the above
sense of the originary complex human-technics
(written from now on ‘matter’)—without finitizing
the aporia of the origin. Briefly put (although
it merits a long article in itself), this
argument constitutes a fundamental transformation
of the relation between the philosophies
of Derrida and Nietzsche, maintaining that
a genealogy of transcendence is possible
(Nietzsche) whilst guarding the philosophical
specificity of the aporia of origin (Derrida).12
Stiegler consequently guards the aporia of
the origin as aporia whilst at the same time
constructing a history of the aporia. The
paradox is held together by the following
argument.
Man and matter mutually organize each other
without either of the two terms of the originary
relation becoming the origin of the other.
Since neither term is the origin of the other,
history is nothing but the relation between
the human and the non-human, which relation
refuses all forms of ontologization (including
all ‘materialism’ from Democritus to Marx).
History and aporia are in this sense, and
in this sense alone, to be thought together.
Stiegler thereby holds his thought off from
the ontological traps of determining the
origin, whilst giving a history of the aporetic
nature of the origin. The argument is structural
to Stiegler’s overall concerns. Starting
with the aporia of Meno, it ultimately constitutes
a complex negotiation between philosophy
and the technosciences which repeats and
transforms Derrida’s moves between philosophy
and the human and social sciences in works
like Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology,
Margins of Philosophy. It repeats the strategy
in the sense that Derrida’s philosophy constitutes
a transformation of oppositional logic, notably
that between the transcendental and the empirical,
which works towards a more refined thinking
of finitude. It transforms Derrida’s relation
to the tradition of philosophy, however,
by giving in the aporetic terms of ‘matter’
a history of what precedes oppositional logic.
13 Given the stakes, it is worth seeing in
detail how this is done.
Stiegler’s rewriting of the divide between
the transcendental and the empirical is translated
first into the very form of La Technique
et le temps. The first part is devoted to
the history of technics (essentially the
work of Bertrand Gille and Gilbert Simondon),14
to the evolution of technics within time
and to the dynamics particular to technical
evolution. The second part is given over
to what could be called a ‘chiasmus’ between
an anthropology which wishes to be transcendental—Rousseau’s
Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality
between Men—and a paleontological anthropology—the
writings of the paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan—which
explicitly criticizes the transcendental
approach of Rousseau. 15 This does not prevent
the critique of a transcendental approach,
how-ever valuable its recourse to prehistoric
discoveries, from falling itself into the
metaphysical traps of empiricism. These traps
are informed by a ‘logic’, precisely, which
has nothing to do with history (nor with
the prehistoric) and which the Rousseauist
‘epokhe’ of historical facts intended to
avoid. Hence the chiasmus. The third part
begins with a profound philosophical reading
of the error or fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus’
brother. 16 It then shows, in close relation
to this reading of epimetheia, that the radical
ontology of Heidegger—whilst being the first
systematic thinking of technology at the
‘end’ of metaphysics—is also constituted
through an originary forgetting of technicity.
This forgetting structures Heidegger’s attempt
to disentangle originary temporality from
technical calculation.
La Technique et le temps therefore thinks
technics firstly within time (in terms of
its own historical dynamic), secondly with
time (in terms of the impossibility of the
origin), and thirdly as time (as the impure,
retrospective constitution of the apophantic
‘as such’, or consciousness). The three parts
of the book are intimately linked from the
methodological viewpoint of the transformation
of the empirico-transcendental difference:
technics is first thought within time, then
with time to be finally thought as constitutive
itself of temporality. Through its constant
passing between the empirical and transcendental
gestures—a passage simultaneously within
and between each part of the book—La Technique
et le temps sets up unremittingly the aporetic,
but historical ‘condition’ of the differentiation
between the transcendental and the empirical—organized
inorganic matter.
I will now consider the major example of
this ‘method’: the drawing of the chiasmus
between Rousseau’s transcendental analysis
of the aporia of origin and Leroi-Gourhan’s
empirical analysis of the process of hominization
(TT, Chapter Two, ‘Technology and Anthropology’).
Following this chiasmatic figure, we shall
see that the development of the concept of
organized inorganic matter through the two
analyses transforms the terms of each. The
transformation leads to Stiegler’s two other
formulations of ‘matter’—epiphylogenesis
and the complex who-what.
Stiegler firstly elaborates in terms of technics
the intellectual rigor of the aporias of
origin in Rousseau’s providentialist thinking
of the origin of man and of society. The
(second) origin of society, which Rousseau
cannot explain except through the intervention
of God, is thought in relation to the first
aporia of the Discourse, man’s original absence
of origin, that is, it is thought in terms
of human technicity (TT, 117-141). Technics
is the écart of nature which constitutes
the human species. Stiegler then shows how
Leroi-Gourhan’s paleontological account of
the origin of man (in terms of the stone
implement) keeps intact the difficulty which
Rousseau’s paradoxical thinking confronts,
but which Leroi-Gourhan refuses to confront
despite having the very terms to do so (‘originary
technicity’). The paradox is allowed to emerge
in terms of the aporetic structure of organized
inorganic matter, recast at this point as
a reflective relation between cortex and
stone tool.
First, the empiricist dilemma: In Le Geste
et la Parole Leroi-Gourhan grants the prehominid
(the Australopithecus or, more precisely,
the Zijanthropicus) the possibility of speech,
but refuses it the possibility of anticipation
and the symbolic (the thought of death).
He thereby maintains that the technics of
the Zijanthropicus is still of a zoological
type. Hence its language is nothing but the
articulation of a cry, a concrete language
prior to abstraction (TT, 75). Leroi-Gourhan
situates the Zijanthropicus before the passage
from the genetic to the non-genetic, concluding
that it is this passage which opens up the
horizon of the human species (from the Neanderthal
onwards). In other words, the Zijanthropicus
has no human qualities (anticipation, language,
the symbolic). And yet—and here Stiegler
mobilizes and transforms the insights of
Husserlian phenomenology together with the
development by Derrida of their methodological
implications for the sciences—any possibility
of speech already rests on a movement of
idealization without which there would be
no language in the first place (however ‘concrete’),
this idealization resting in turn on the
possibility of anticipation (174-176). As
a result the passage from the genetic to
the non-genetic cannot have a simple origin
(from the prehominid to the hominid), as
Leroi-Gourhan’s empiricist approach ends
up, in contrast, maintaining. Rather, the
passage demands to be thought, that is, it
demands to be thought in terms of the im-possibility
of its ‘as such’, in terms of the aporia
of origin, and neither avoided nor disavowed.
Second, the transcendental dilemma: Despite
his falling short of thinking the impasse
of the passage to the human, Leroi-Gourhan
is at the same time perfectly right to criticize
the transcendental approach of Rousseau in
Discourse of the Origin of the Inequality
among Men. Rousseau (and those anthropologists
in his wake) approaches the aporetic origin
of the human with the presupposition that
man is already standing on two feet. This
is an anthropological a priori which, Stiegler
suggests, any philosophical analysis of technics
must develop out (TT, 97, 142, 158). Otherwise,
one’s reading of the aporia of origin, and
one’s thinking of aporia in general, remains,
as in Rousseau’s case, transcendental.
Now, what is at play in both the empiricist
and transcendental dilemmas, irreducible
to one as much as to the other, is the very
condition of their difference. Before proceeding
to the development of this condition, it
should be stressed that we are not involved
here either with an act of museological classification
or with a piece of intellectual acrobatics.
We are involved with the very terms in which
one thinks anticipation (and, therefore,
access to time and memory). The condition
re-invents the anthropological question:
‘What is specific to the human?’—a re-invention
crucial to forthcoming ethical and political
decision-making concerning technological
invention. In other words, we are precisely
at the moment of trying to think the relation
between the human and the nonhuman, the political
stakes of which I underlined at the beginning
of this article.
Third, the ‘genealogy’ of aporia in response
to the two dilemmas: Leroi-Gourhan insists
that the Zijanthropicus does not anticipate,
in order to situate the beginning of culture
in another organization, different from that
of the relation cortex-stone implement particular
to the ‘prehominid’. This exclusion is in
fact made to isolate and give qualitative
specificity to the reflective intelligence
of the man of sepulchers, an intelligence
which indicates the origin of the beginning
of culture. For all culture is a culture
of death. 17 Leroi-Gourhan does not wish
this intelligence to be essentially technical
given his belief (or rather, desire) that
what is specifically human is the symbolic
transcendence of the technical. In other
words, keeping the Zijanthropicus within
a concrete language and a zoological type
guards the qualitative nature of the leap
from the technical to the symbolic. The exclusion
brings back into Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis
of hominization a Platonic opposition between
technical intelligence and symbolic intelligence
(a repetition of Meno!) which his paleontology
was intended to account for.
In its inability to think the aporia of origin,
Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis is beset in turn
by a non sequitur. Technical intelligence
ends up zoological. It does not mark the
specificity of the human—a conclusion which
is in flagrant contradiction with the major
thesis of Leroi-Gourhan’s paleontology; that
is, that man is nothing but a process of
‘exteriorization’, a process in which man’s
access to time and culture is developed through
memory as the relation between the ‘human’
and the ‘technical object’ (TT, 152,
164). Clearly this thesis had already helped
Stiegler to develop his own understanding
of originary technicity in terms of ‘organized
inorganic matter’. Quite coherently, then,
Stiegler now turns this thesis against the
metaphysical conclusions of Leroi-Gourhan’s
empiricist critique of Rousseau’s transcendental
anthropology in order to dissipate the contradiction
without, however, in so doing, losing the
aporia of the origin (166-171). The result
is a genealogical ‘analytic’ of that which
precedes the empirico-transcendental divide.
If the Zijanthropicus already anticipates
by the very fact that he speaks, it is because
the ‘reflective’ relation between the cortex
and the stone implement (the one ‘mirroring’
itself in the other: TT, 152-153) sets off
a capacity for anticipation and memorization
on which any relation to the future depends.
The way to think the problem of the Zijanthropicus
is consequently to think technics as constitutive
of the process of anticipation and, therefore,
of the very process of hominization (time,
language, society, etc.). There is, then,
no opposition between the technical and the
symbolic. On the contrary, in the process
of exteriorization-hominization, in the double
differantial constitution of technics and
man, there is a further differentiation of
life (the human species). Again, man is the
paradox that life is pursued by other means
than life. Thus, the truth of the simple
origin in Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis of the
passage from the zoological to the symbolic
is in fact not the aporia of the impossibility
of the origin, but what Stiegler calls ‘the
aporetic and paradoxical beginning of exteriorization’
(TT, 151). (As we shall see, here lies the
major difference with Derrida’s thinking.)
The who of the human species is nothing less
than the who-what of the reflective relation
between cortex and tool. This who-what is
both a differentiation within life (starting
with the stone implement) and itself a constant
process of differentiation (the history of
technics). It is in these terms that the
passage from the genetic to the non-genetic
is to be understood. The human zoon is essentially
technical; it is a specific differentiation
within the differantial economy of life which
marks it out from other living beings who
remain in the more simple différance of their
genetic programs. The human zoon, organized
inorganic matter, and culture are part of
the same movement of exteriorization. This
fact, one upon which the empirico-transcendental
difference falls in disavowal of this sameness,
is given the name epiphylogenesis. I quote
Stiegler’s definition in full given its importance:
the individual develops out of three memories:
—genetic memory
—memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic)
—techno-logical memory (language and technics
are here amalgamated in the process of exteriorization).
The process is as much the result as the
condition of its production, both the support
of the memory of operational chains which
produce it, conserving the trace of past
epigenetic events which accumulate as lessons
of experience, and the result of the transmission
of these operational chains by the very existence
of the product as an archetype. Such is epiphylogenesis.
Three types of memory should thus be spoken
about […]:
—genetic memory
—epigenetic memory
—epiphylogenetic memory
Epiphylogenesis, a recapitulating, dynamic
and morphogenetic (phylogenesis) accumulation
of individual experience (epi) designates
the appearance of a new relation between
the organism and its environment, which is
also a new state of matter. If the individual
is organic organized matter (une matière
organique et organisée), then its relation
to its environment (to matter in general,
organic or inorganic), when it is a question
of a who, is mediated by the organized but
inorganic matter of the organon, the tool
with its instructive role (its role as instrument),
the what. It is in this sense that the what
invents the who just as much as it is invented
by it. (185)
The concept of epiphylogenesis develops the
reflective complex who-what in terms of memory,
which complex both accounts for the empirico-transcendental
division within traditional analyses of the
human and shows that analyses informed by
this division forget in an originary act
of forgetting (epimetheia) its material transcendental
ground. Hence this conclusion to the first
volume of La Technique et le temps. (We will
return to the emerging importance of the
relation between memory and originary oblivion
at the end.)
Technology, thought as epiphylogenesis, is
a transcendental concept. However, this concept
puts itself into crisis (se met lui-même
en crise): it suspends the whole credit of
the empirico-transcendental divide. (248)
Second axis : what I called earlier, following
Lacoue-Labarthe and for reasons which will
now appear, Heidegger’s ‘faute’. First, however,
a word on the place of Heidegger’s thought
in La Technique et le temps.
The very title of the work indicates its
author’s wish to inscribe the concerns of
Being and Time within a more comprehensive
thinking of the relation between time and
technics. A genealogy of ‘matter’ precedes
and re-arranges the Heideggerian destruction
of metaphysics, pointing constantly to a
disagreement with Heidegger’s separation
of thinking from technology. This inscription
of Heidegger is complex. When arguing for
a philosophy of technology, which ‘thinks’
technology but thinks it technically, refusing
the ‘abyss of essence’ between logos and
techne, Stiegler is both working within a
Heideggerian problematic and overturning
it. The issues are the same (calculability,
the incalculable, indifferentiation, temporal
ecstasis); the way of situating and confronting
these issues is, in the end, almost totally
different. An awareness of this twofold relation
is important to an understanding of the strategies
of the book.
Stiegler’s overturning of Heidegger takes
into account the full philosophical force
of Heidegger’s thinking only to show that
this force is effective if this thinking
is simultaneously re-inscribed into an epiphylogenetic
genealogy of matter. Thus, the third part
of La Technique et le temps: Tome 1. La faute
d’Epiméthée (Part II, chapter II) shows the
weight of Heidegger’s philosophy of time
by, precisely, re-aligning Heidegger’s analyses
with a thinking of the constitutive role
of technics. The re-alignment has, however,
radical consequences for all of Heidegger’s
themes, methods and articulations. In other
words, Stiegler sticks close to Heidegger
(over sixty pages of dense interpretative
commentary on the 1924 lecture ‘The Concept
of Time’ and Being and Time) in order to
say something different from Heidegger, something
which nevertheless comprehends Heidegger’s
philosophical gestures and concerns. 18 It
is this ‘logic’ which characterizes the nature
of Stiegler’s break. 19
The following reading considers this break
in the light of Heidegger’s political engagements
of the 1930s and with an eye to his subsequent
theorization of Gelassenheit
(‘releasement’) from the 1940s onwards. It
does so for two reasons.
The Heideggerian desire to untangle an originary
temporality from the time of technical calculation
‘authorizes’ both Heidegger’s nostalgia of
place and the political and theoretical consequences
of this nostalgia. It is therefore clear
that the consequences of Stiegler’s re-inscription
of the axiomatic Heideggerian distinction
between originary temporality and ‘scientific’
exactitude cannot fail to have political
implications for the whole of Heidegger’s
thinking (above and beyond an early Heidegger/
late Heidegger distinction—his reflections,
for example, on technology and Germany in
the thirties to those on technology, language
and poetry in the fifties).
The second reason follows on. If Heidegger’s
move from a philosophy of the will to a thinking
of radical passivity is in fact being rethought,
and its co-ordinates transformed, by Stiegler’s
re-inscription, then La Technique et le temps
is inevitably developing a new reflection
of the political. The terms of this reinvention
go beyond Heidegger’s understanding of the
distinction between thinking and acting as
well as recent engagements with this distinction—Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy’s ‘withdrawal of the political’
(Le Retrait du politique), Derrida’s more
complicated ‘quasi-politics’ (Spectres de
Marx).20 In other words my orientation has
the objective of stressing that Stiegler’s
transformation of Heidegger has major consequences
for the thinking of the political today.
In what way, then, should the third part
of La Technique et le temps be read as a
radical reading of Heidegger’s understanding
of the political?
For Stiegler, Heidegger’s attempt to demarcate
originary temporality (whose essence is the
ecstasis of the future in Being and Time)
from concern (which remains fixed to das
Man) repeats the Epimethean forgetting of
the prosthetic which characterizes the metaphysical
tradition. The Heideggerian destruction of
metaphysics does indeed throw the individual
into the ‘already-there’ of the world as
Mitdasein. Much more importantly, Being and
Time shows that this world is factical, always
already made up of entities that are ‘ready-to-hand’
(Zuhandensein). And yet, these innovative
analyses of the factical fail simultaneously
to measure up to their own consequences since
they make Heidegger’s accompanying understanding
of (authentic/inauthentic) Dasein and of
the hermeneutic circle impossible.
Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics remains
within the epimetheia of metaphysics. At
the very moment of thinking the ‘already-there’
in terms of materiality, Heidegger continues
to forget the constitutive role of technical
entities for temporalization. As a result
(the first important point), Heidegger’s
disentanglement of originary temporality
from exactitude is a flagrant disavowal of
the link between time and inscription. For
there is no time without its being set down.
This setting down (ex-actitude) is the condition
of temporalization prior to the subsequent,
misplaced distinction between ecstasis and
scientific calculation. In the previous terms
of this article, Heidegger’s destruction
of metaphysics does not truly interrogate
the radical structure of ‘matter’. Indeed
(the second important point), Heidegger’s
metaphysical disavowal of ‘matter’ is evident
in the distinction he makes between the who
and the what. For ultimately, as Stiegler
succinctly puts it, ‘the what has no other
dynamic than an inverse one to the ‘authentic’
dynamic of who’ (TT, 249). Disentangling
a primordial temporality—with its priority
of futural ecstasis (that is, Being-towards-Death)—from
the leveling everydayness of das Man means
nothing less than to disentangle the who
from the what of the originary complex who-what.
The oppositional logic of authentic/inauthentic
follows. Forced, the disentanglement is legislative.
In Hegelian terms, it is a Sollen. It is
in these terms (Heidegger’s continuation
of the Epimethean ‘fault’ precisely when
he wishes to think technics) that the whole
ambiguity of Heidegger’s thought concerning
technics and modern technology (from the
thirties to the sixties) is to be understood.
Heidegger’s politics (and the philosophical
terms of his later disengagement from it
from the Nietzsche lectures onwards) should,
I stress, be understood in these terms as
well. For, it is from this metaphysical lack
of attention to the constitutive role of
technics, when wishing to address the modern
age as the age of technology, that Heidegger’s
complicity with Nazi politics can best be
understood. I will give a brief indication
of how, expanding upon a decisive note of
La Technique et le temps (TT, 212, note 1).
Stiegler’s ‘deconstruction’ of Heidegger
in terms of ‘matter’ implies that the forgetting
of the originary prosthetic is the condition
of the Promethean heroism of finitude which
Heidegger advocates in the renowned chapters
on historicality in Being and Time (§73-75),
in his commentary on deinon, dike and techne
in the Antigone chorus in An Introduction
to Metaphysics, and in the Rektoratsrede.
21 It is precisely because facticity is not
constitutive of temporality that Heidegger
can go on to entertain the idea of a politics
of ‘place’ (Ort). Thus, although tekhne provides
the basic trait of the deinon of the human
(An Introduction to Metaphysics ) ‘tekhne
is never the source itself of uprooting as
good uprooting, not that of being torn up,
but that of the return to the strangest,
the farthest as the most familiar hidden
under its everydayness’ (TT, 212, note 1).
By separating the who from the what in this
way, Heidegger separates the deinon of the
human from the deinon of Being, as a result
of which dike confronts techne. The institution
of the Ort , as the ‘unheimlich’ carrying
of the worlding of the world (polemos), ends
up opposed to technicization. The confrontation
assumed at first voluntaristic
(1930s) then pious proportions (1940s onwards).
Heidegger’s originary forgetting of the constitutive
role of technics for ecstasis as such made
him unable to think modern technology beyond
the terms of calculation, destitution and
decline. As I suggested at the very beginning
of this article, Heidegger’s itinerary is
a telling example (for how many on the Left
or on the Right have escaped an instrumentalist
thinking of techne?) of the lack of reflection
on the relation between the human and the
technical.
It should be clear from the above that the
thinking of the ontological difference turns
the prosthetic already-there into an existential
stake which concerns Dasein’s ontological
status because Heidegger has placed Dasein
outside matter despite his original thesis
on ‘equipmentality’ (Being and Time, ‘Origin
of the Work of Art’). His philosophy of the
will is comprehensible within this reading;
it is the precipitate (a Sollen) of the anthropological
refusal to think technology technically,
or ‘epiphylogenetically’. Heidegger’s inability
to think the ‘nullity’ of the factical world
(Being and Time) in terms of the evolution
of ‘matter’ leads in other words to a heroic
politics of Being. La Technique et le temps
thus suggests that the most suitable way
to comprehend this politics (to mourn and
transform it) is to inscribe the aporia of
‘nullity’ in Heidegger’s thinking of the
ontological difference within an aporetic
history of the complex who-what.
This inscription has enormous consequences
for Heidegger’s understandings of resoluteness,
debt, tradition, inheritance, the gift and
Gelassenheit from Being and Time right through
to Time and Being. For, if the prosthetic
already-there undercuts (from the beginning)
Heidegger’s desire to retrieve an originary
temporality unaffected by technicity, then
the world of facticity (or nullity) is neither
a given of existential analysis nor, later,
a determination of Ereignis, but a history
of differentiations. Given shortness of space,
we will look at one concept only—the existential
of Schuldigsein (Being and Time: §54-60,
esp. §58), which cuts across the topology
of a chronological reading of Heidegger’s
thought. 22
Schuldigsein is to be translated in various
ways: as being-at-fault, being-guilty, being-indebted
or being-responsible-towards. It is a structure
of radical lack which precedes and accounts
for moral or religious conceptions of human
facticity, forming a major part of Heidegger’s
‘destruction’ of ontology which returns what
are considered to be ontological understandings
of human lack to a radical structure of Schuld.
Moral conscience is derived from a radical
Gewissen towards the undetermined other of
the ‘lack of ground’ (‘nullity’).
Now, for Stiegler, the ‘fault’ of Heidegger
is not to have abandoned ethics, as contemporary
humanisms have argued (often suspiciously
too loudly).23 Derrida’s writings have repeatedly
shown that this kind of argument is philosophically
incoherent and inadequate if one takes the
structure of Schuldigsein seriously. 24 The
fault is not to be understood either, however,
in terms of Heidegger’s abandonment of the
‘Jewish’ source of obligation towards the
other (Levinas, Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard).25
More radically, it is to be understood in
terms of Heidegger’s Epimethean fault: the
determination of the prosthetic défaut of
origin as the originary fault (indebtedness,
Schuldigsein) of being-without-ground. The
fault of Heidegger’s understanding of fault
is its forgetting of ‘matter’. Its singularity—Heidegger’s
fault/mistake (à la Lacoue-Labarthe)—is the
Promethean act of resistance to what he had
already uncovered as an irrecoverable ‘already-there’.
It is the non sequitur of his desire to hang
on, at all costs, to the individuality of
Dasein. This was made possible—and Heidegger’s
philosophical conservatism is to be located
at this level (not earlier, compare Habermas’s
reading of Heidegger’s transcendental arrogance)26—by
his refusal to mediate his understanding
of ‘historicality’ in historical (epiphylogenetic)
terms. As a result, his philosophy became
willful and doctrinaire.
Here again we can see the originality and
contemporary force of Stiegler’s thesis—his
thinking of the ‘other’ of metaphysics, not
in terms of the Other (or, indeed, autrui),
but in terms of (the history of) ‘matter’.
The consequences of this re-inscription of
alterity are radical.
I argued earlier that, in terms of Stiegler’s
genealogy of ‘matter’, the concepts of philosophy
were the logical precipitate of the disavowal
of ‘matter’. As Stiegler’s rewriting of Schuldigsein
implies, this means that man’s cultural relation
to technology should be thought through—in
contrast to an oppositional logic of Epimethean
forgetting, then Promethean resistance—in
terms of Epimethean delay and Promethean
foresight; what Stiegler calls the ‘redoublement’
of this originary delay (TT, 238-242). Before,
however, concluding with Stiegler’s ‘politics
of memory’, we should first sort out the
difference between his deconstruction and
Derrida’s. To do so will make it all the
more clear why and how Stiegler’s historical
(non-conceptual) understanding of différance
reinvents politics whereas Derrida’s quasi-concept
différance leads in turn to a quasi-politics,
one made in the name of the radical ‘im-possibility
of invention’.27
Third axis: On pages 147 to 153 of La Technique
et le temps Stiegler opens an explicit debate
with the philosophy of Derrida. I say ‘explicit’
because the whole analysis of the second
chapter is of course in dialogue with the
deconstruction of Rousseau in Of Grammatology.
In this text Derrida describes the aporia
of origin as an event which, in its very
eventness, never takes place as such. This
im-possibility of the event of the origin
has become a familiar theme in Derrida’s
works, one with which Derrida has always
argued for the radical anteriority of the
law. It is an argument, of course, in which
the Heideggerian existential of Schuldigsein
finds its place in Derrida’s work. 28 In
the context of Rousseau—it is precisely where
Rousseau has a certain exemplarity for Derrida
in the philosophical tradition—the aporia
of the origin (the origin as a non-event,
the im-possibility of the aporia) concerns
the passage from nature to culture, of the
birth of society, or, in the terms of Derrida’s
penetrating reading, of incest. 29 Rousseau
narrates this passage, respectful of the
fictional genre which the non-event of the
pas-sage calls for, as a fête. The pages
in which Derrida analyses this fête as the
rigorous expression of the desire for presence
are well-known, thanks in part to the scrupulous
readings of Rousseau by Paul De Man and Geoffrey
Bennington. 30 I will assume knowledge of
these readings to go straight to the passage
which interests me. It is a passage which
gathers together several Derridean motifs:
There is a point in the system where the
signifier can no longer be replaced by its
signified, so that in consequence no signifier
can be so replaced, purely and simply. For
the point of non-replacement is also the
point of orientation for the entire system
of signification, the point where the fundamental
signified is promised as the terminal-point
of all references and conceals itself as
that which would destroy at one blow the
entire system of signs [....] That point
does not exist, it is always elusive or,
what comes to the same thing, always already
inscribed in what it ought to escape or ought
to have escaped, according to our indestructible
and mortal desire. The point is reflected
in the fête [...], when ‘pleasure and desire
were mingled and were felt together.’ The
fête itself would be incest itself if such
a thing—itself—could take place; if, by taking
place, incest were not to confirm the prohibition:
before the prohibition, it is not incest;
forbidden, it cannot become incest except
through the recognition of the prohibition.
We are always short of or beyond the limit
of the fête , of the origin of society [...]
that which passes (comes to pass) always
and (yet) never properly takes place. It
is always as if I had committed incest. This
birth of society is therefore not a passage,
it is a point, a pure fictive and unstable,
ungraspable limit. 31
It is this limit which La Technique et le
temps: Tome 1. La Faute d’Epiméthée has given
us a genealogy of. Stiegler narrates the
aporetic passage of hominization
(passage from the genetic to the non-genetic)
and determines it aporetically as the indeterminacy
of the who-what. Refusing to dwell within
the ‘im-possible logic’ of the aporia, considering
this logic still too philosophical, he therefore
replaces the ‘point of non-replacement’,
the ‘fictive point’ by (a history of) the
aporia of originary technicity, organized
inorganic matter.
In contrast, considered in terms of a ‘fictive
point’, the quasi-transcendental logic of
the complex origin has always encouraged
Derrida to disrupt the boundaries between
philosophy and literature and speak, as most
explicitly in ‘Before the Law’ and Mémoires
for Paul de Man, of an aporetic law of law
before all determinations of law, one which
simultaneously calls for and prohibits a
narrative (récit) of the origin. 32 As Derrida’s
most recent writings have insisted (from
Mémoires for Paul de Man to Specters of Marx)
this law of all laws is undeconstructible;
it is thus both the irreducible condition
of all deconstruction and the immemorial
source of memory and the future. Unnarratable,
it gives time and space. This understanding
of what Derrida has consistently called,
since Psyché. Inventions de l’autre and Of
Spirit, a radical ‘promise’, can be considered
in part as a re-organization of the Heideggerian
theme of the gift of time (Time and Being)
which precedes all ontology. The structure
of the promise, however, places literature
and philosophy in a necessary relation of
fictional contamination, rather than, as
for Heidegger, opposing thought to literature
(What is Called Thinking?).
The above paragraph from Of Grammatology
makes sense of Derrida’s strategies in philosophy.
It also makes sense of the literary reception
of deconstruction in the Anglo-saxon world
in the 1970s and 1980s. The aporia of origin
leads to a thinking of the ‘quasi-transcendental’
which emerges most productively in Derrida’s
work in the chiasmus between philosophy and
literature. In this chiasmus ontological
logic is mourned, and literature is given
a certain privilege in the re-arrangement
of the human sciences which ensues from the
Derrida’s deconstruction of the empirico-transcendental
divide (compare my note 13). Now, for Stiegler,
in the context of a ‘genealogy of matter’,
the law of law already prejudges too much;
it is to be re-inscribed in a differentiated,
complex narrative of ‘matter’ which is nothing
but a history of the differances of différance.
Stiegler’s genealogy leads therefore to more
of a negotiation between philosophy, the
sciences of life and the cognitive sciences.
To put it too simply (for I am concerned
with general orientations here), it is now
that the difference between a Derridean and
Stieglerian-type deconstruction of the empirico-transcendental
divide comes to the fore. It is one, on the
one hand, between philosophy and the human
and social sciences, and one, on the other,
between philosophy and the sciences of life
and technosciences. The former thinks invention
in terms of the ‘im-possible’ and the irreducible
gift of time; the latter thinks invention
in terms of the technical giving of time
and, therefore, in terms of a ‘politics of
memory’.
In the pages to which I have just referred
Stiegler examines the way in which Derrida
himself reads the paleontology of Leroi-Gourhan
in the preceding, poorly known chapter ‘Of
Grammatology as a Positive Science’. Derrida
is here disentangling the concept of arche-writing
from the paleontological perspective on hominization.
The passage is of decisive importance for
Stiegler and interests us for several reasons:
Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity
of man and the human adventure by the simple
possibility of the graphie in general; rather
as a stage or an articulation in the history
of life—of what I have called différance—as
the history of gramme. Instead of having
recourse to the concepts that habitually
serve to distinguish man from other living
beings (instinct and intelligence, absence
or presence of speech, of society, of economy,
etc. etc.), the notion of program is invoked.
It must of course be understood in the cybernetic
sense, but cybernetics is itself intelligible
only in terms of a history of the possibilities
of the trace as the unity of a double movement
of protention and retention. This movement
goes far beyond the possibilities of the
‘intentional consciousness’. It is an emergence
that makes the gramme appear as such (that
is to say according to the new structure
of nonpresence) and undoubtedly makes possible
the emergence of the systems of writing in
the narrow sense. Since ‘genetic inscription’
and the ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating
the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid
up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing
to the orders of the logos and of a certain
Homo Sapiens, the possibility of the gramme
structures the movement of its history according
to rigorously original levels, types and
rhythms. But one cannot think them without
the most general concept of the gramme; That
is irreducible and impregnable [imprenable].33
For Stiegler, in contrast, if the concept
of the gramme is indeed irreducible, its
irreducibility must at the same time be articulated
in terms of its (historical) differentiations
in different ‘systems of writing’. Derrida’s
quasi-transcendental concept of différance
as arche-writing can be seen to freeze these
articulations. I would add that the ‘freeze’
ends up as the very concept of ‘quasi-transcendental’,
a term which Derrida coined in the seventies
(Glas), but one which is already implicit
in the ‘textual’ negotiation with Saussure,
Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology.
Let me quote Stiegler’s argument concerning
this articulation of gramme:
One must, in addition, determine what conditions
hold for the emergence of the ‘gramme as
such’, and what consequences follow regarding
the general history of life or the gramme.
This is going to be our question. The history
of the gramme is also that of electronic
files and reading machines: it is a history
of technics. The invention of man is, in
other words, technics [l’invention de l’homme,
c’est la technique]. (148)
Concerning Derrida’s well-known definition
of différance (as differing and deferment)
in the article of the same name, Stiegler
continues:
it designates, above all, life in general:
there is time as soon as there is life, even
though Derrida had also written [in Of Grammatology]
that ‘the trace is the différance which opens
appearance (l’apparaître) and signification
[which articulates] the living onto the nonliving
in general, [which is the] origin of all
repetition’. To articulate the living onto
the nonliving, is this not already to have
passed over the break, not already to be
no longer in pure physis? There is something
like an indecision concerning ‘différance’:
it is the history of life in general, but
this history is (only) given (as dating)
after the break, even though this break is,
if not nothing, at least a lot less than
what the classical division between humanity
and animality means. The whole problem has
to do with the economy of life in general,
and the meaning of death as the economy of
life when the break has come. The question
of ‘différance’ is death. This after is ‘culture
as nature different and deferred, differing-deferring;
all the others of physis—tekhne, nomos, thesis,
society, freedom, history, mind, etc.—as
physis different and deferred, or as physis
differing and deferring. Physis in différance’.34
Now, physis as life was already différance.
There is then an indecision, a passage which
remains to be thought. The question is the
specificity of the temporality of life when
life is inscription in the nonliving, spacing,
temporalization, differentiation, and deferring
through, from and in the non-living, in death.
To think the articulation is also to think
the birth of the relation to time which we
name ‘to exist’, it is to think anticipation.
Let me bring my commentary towards a conclusion
through this quotation. Stiegler’s wish to
differentiate the concept of différance—specifically
in relation to the historically traceable
differentiation(s) ‘human-technical object’—has
several major consequences with which we
should now be familiar:
i) a genealogy of matter replaces quasi-transcendental
analyses, bringing with it a new understanding
of inter-disciplinarity and new negotiations
between philosophy, the arts, the sciences
of life and the cognitive sciences;
ii) it brings to a definitive close the specificity
of the ‘Humanities’;
iii) in specific relation to the engagements
and strategies of the philo-sophy of Jacques
Derrida, it rethinks the trace (worked out
in Of Grammatology through the notion of
non-worldly ideality in Saussurean linguistics
and Husserlian phenomenology) in terms of
the ‘différances’ of life and of the reflective
complex human-matter.
iv) in terms of this rethinking, and if the
differentiation of différance makes the passage
to the human knowable in terms of technicity,
then a politics of technics is possible.
What is the logic of the last point? I will
conclude here.
In situating in historical terms the aporia
of the passage, Stiegler, in contrast to
both Heidegger and Derrida, calls for an
understanding of the gift of time in terms
of originary technicity. The gift of time—a
crucial concept for Heidegger and one with
which Derrida has remained faithful to Heidegger’s
path of thinking in his development of the
‘promise’ of aporia—this gift gives itself
as organized inorganic matter, without which
there would be neither access to time nor
anticipation. This determination of the gift
opens up the possibility of an active development
of the relation between the human and the
technical. Stiegler calls this type of reflection
‘redoublement epochal’ (see TT,
191ff.). It is an active remembering of the
originary défaut of origin, one, precisely,
which can be considered to re-inscribe recent
and contemporary efforts to get behind the
distinction between thinking and acting (Heidegger’s
Gelassenheit, Derrida’s logic of ‘double
affirmation’, Lyotard’s ‘radical passibilité
’).
This is important, since for many, notably
those working within a thinking of aporia,
one can imagine the following reception of
Stiegler’s work:
In determining the gift of time, in re-inscribing—be
it aporetically and in a gesture of complexification
regarding the concept of différance—the law
of law in a history of ‘matter’, Stiegler
ends up losing an aporetic understanding
of human facticity. The loss finds symptomatic
expression in Stiegler’s wish to consider
the horizon of technics as ‘speed’ (TT, 29)
and, concomitantly, to see time and space
as differentiations of speed. By differentiating
the quasi-transcendental ‘différance’ and
inscribing a differentiation of its movement
within an aporetic articulation of the complex
living-nonliving, Stiegler simplifies the
movement of différance and runs the risk
of narrating a history of increasing acceleration
which loses, in its history, the aporias
of finitude. In other words, Stiegler’s account
of technics ends up infinitist.
When at several points in the book (and Stiegler’s
reflections will take on fuller form in the
second volume) he looks forward to a politics
of memory, the suspicion concerning the dangers
of determining the gift may well be increased.
Derrida has been the most important philosopher
to ‘mourn’ the possibility of political philosophy
at what he calls the ‘closure’ of metaphysics.
Although the complexity of Derrida’s argument
is often underestimated concerning his relation
to the political, it is nevertheless well-known
that Derrida’s relation to politics is thought
in terms of aporetic impossibility (even
if the logic of this im-possibility is little
rehearsed). From within Derrida’s philosophical
strategies, it would be wrong to conceive
of a politics of deconstruction. Such a proposal
makes nonsense of his refusal to determine
the law of law. Rather, the im-possibility
of narrating the origin (or of accounting
for the law) leads to an aporetic relation
to institutions: on the one hand, one cannot
escape determination (the trace is only in
this world); on the other, all determination
engenders an ‘economy of violence’ (since
there is no logic adequate to the trace)
which prevents identification with any one
determination. Hence Derrida’s understanding
of the political is always couched within
terms of the relation between undecidability
and decision, aporia and judgment, alterity
and form. This relation must remain itself
undetermined and aporetic for there to be
the chance of a future (l’à-venir). For the
door to events to remain open, one must not
anticipate event-hood. If there is a process
within the acceleration of contemporary technicization
that renders time and space homogeneous,
that abolishes the experience of events,
that reduces singularity to indifference,
one cannot, in contrast, anticipate the ‘surprise’
of events without determining them in turn.
This would be, in Derridean terms, a politics
of the promise or of the event: Heidegger
is, for Derrida, the example of this confusion—the
wish to appropriate/figure the aporia of
nullity.
From a Derridean perspective, therefore,
Stiegler’s desire for a politics could look
like another (highly sophisticated) recuperation
of an absolute past which elides the aporia
of origin within the figure of, let us say,
a voluntarist politics of deceleration. I
believe that some such reception of Stiegler
is possible in the years to come. I also
believe, however, that it would be erroneous.
Let me finally conclude by suggesting why.
As I anticipated in my introduction to this
long review, everything preceding this conclusion
leads up to what Stiegler understands by
a ‘politics of memory’. I can, therefore,
be brief. I also look forward to the appearance
of the second volume of La Technique et le
temps which will have much more to say about
these terms. It is then that detailed debate
can be engaged. At least, this article may
have served to say where we have come from.
1) For Stiegler, politics is to be understood
in terms of the défaut of originary technicity.
In other words, politics can only be understood
in terms of the ‘faute technique’ (TT,
202). The political forms part of the same
movement out of originary technicity as thinking
and reason. The political, the technical
and the symbolic cannot, therefore, be separated.
This does not mean, however, that they are
to be identified— the risk Heidegger ran,
ironically, by wishing to philosophize the
politics of his age. If one separates thinking
from the political, then one runs the risk
of either politicizing thinking or ontologizing
politics. If one does not, then one is always
already in the political; but this political
is, precisely, not yet a genre. Stiegler’s
rewriting of what precedes the distinction
between thinking and acting is actively epiphylogenetic.
Rather than repeat the Epimethean forgetting
of the delay of man in relation to the ‘prosthetic
already there’ in terms of the politicization
of thinking or the ontologization of politics,
memory doubles up on the human-technical
défaut of origin as a politics of memory.
Our ‘delay’ upon the ‘prosthetic already-there’
(to go quickly: doubling up the past as the
possibility of the future) is re-marked as
a doubling of the differentiation of différance.
2) This politics is nothing but the struggle
to remember, actively, the relation between
the technical and the human. The struggle
is pitched against all affirmations of either
the inhuman or the human. It also questions
the philosophical rigor informing the affirmation
of anamnesis as other than political citizenship
(Lyotard, Inhuman. Reflections on Time, etc.).35
Stiegler re-inscribes the task of thinking
back into active citizenship. He does so,
however, without developing an idea of citizenship
which would re-engage the classical or modern
axiomatic of the political. For the relation
between the human and the technical is, precisely,
originarily aporetic, to be constantly
(re-)invented. Thus, the community Stiegler
is concerned with (the ‘communauté du défaut’
of the ‘défaut de communauté’, TT, 234-6)
is the re-cognition of the trace as the doubling
of the differentiation of différance. In
this sense, Stiegler is looking forward to
a politics of memory articulated in terms
of multiple, heterogeneous sites of invention.
These sites are, in this multiple, experimental
sense, and in this sense only, institutions
of aporia.
3) Thus, whilst aporia leads Derrida (contra
Heidegger) to invention as the im-possible
promise of invention, for Stiegler (contra
Heidegger and Derrida, although, precisely,
in almost opposing ways), aporia is the possibility
of invention; the aporia of who-what shapes
the very pos-sibility of (a) politics. Since
politics has always disavowed its possibility—Socrates’
treatment of the slave in Meno, reproduced
again and again throughout the history of
the West (there is no invention, only memory,
that is, forgetting)—then a politics of the
memory of the aporia of memory calls for
a recasting of the West’s thinking of the
political as well as that of its ‘closure’.
The implications of La Technique et le temps:
Tome 1. La faute d’Epiméthée are, I believe,
clear (to some they will appear, initially,
scandalous): we have mourned the ontologization
of politics enough; it is just, in active
memory of epimetheia, to re-invent our understanding
and practice of dike.
And, each time one remembers, one is already
inventing. La Technique et le temps is already
aporetically engaged in a future of political
imagination.
Notes
* My thanks to Howard Caygill, George Collins,
Michael Scollen and Bernard Stiegler with
whom I have had memorable conversations on
the subject of matter.
1 All references to the work will take the
form TT and will be placed in the text. Translation
forthcoming Technics and Time: Vol. 1. The
Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth
and George Collins (Stanford University Press,
Meridian Series).
2 A word of definition is called for concerning
the recurrent terms 'technics', the 'technical'
and 'technology' in the following. I understand
by 'technics' (techne, 'la technique', 'die
Technik') either the thought, practice, or
phenomenon of technical objects. The term
'technical' is used to designate the domain
(not essence) of technics in general; hence
my substantival use of the adjective (in
analogy with contemporary use of the term
'the political' in distinction to the term
'politics'). Following Stiegler, I understand
by 'technology' the specific amalgamation
of technics and the sciences in the modern
period. It is this amalgamation which makes
the modern age an essentially technical age.
The Anglo-saxon translation of Heidegger's
"Die Frage nach der Technik" as
"The Question concerning Technology"
unfortunately loses the importance of these
distinctions. For a detailed account of the
implications of Derrida's deconstruction
of ontology and logic for the thinking of
the political, see my forthcoming Derrida
and the Political (London: Routledge).
3 One can surmise from this perspective that
the wish to guard philosophy from political
thinking not only betrays a refusal to think
historical inscription; it is also, perhaps
above all, a refusal to think material inscription
(technics).
4 Since Stiegler's work on Husserl is to
be found in the second volume, I will concentrate
here on his relation with Heidegger and Derrida's
philosophies. In this context I wish to anticipate
the possible remark, concerning my own approach,
that Stiegler's major focus in this volume
is really with Heidegger, especially since
the second part of the book is a detailed
reading of his philosophy of time. Thus,
four pages (out of approximately three hundred)
on what could be seen as a principled, but
ultimately minor disagreement with Derrida's
concept of arche-writing hardly constitutes
matter for a 'decisive' break. It is one
of the purposes of this article to show that,
on the contrary, the relation with Derrida's
philosophy is constant in La Technique et
le temps. Tome 1: La faute d'Epiméthée and
that it should be articulated, if the complexity
of the work (and the complexity of its negotiations)
is to be suitably appraised. The second volume
of La Technique et le temps will undoubtedly
carry this necessary articulation further.
5 For a detailed account of the implications
of Derrida's deconstruction of ontology and
logic for the thinking of the political,
see my forthcoming Derrida and the Political
(London: Routledge).
6 P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, art, and
politics: the fiction of the political, trans.
Chris Turner (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.,
USA: B. Blackwell, 1990), 43 and 51.
7 'Disavowed' in the Freudian sense, that
is in the sense of a refusal to perceive
a fact which impinges from the outside. Freud's
example in his use of the term is the denial
of a woman's absence of a penis (see 'The
Infantile Genital Organisation' in Pelican
Freud Library, vol. 7, 303-312, esp. 310,
n°1). The term, however, is appropriate for
the way in which the tradition of philosophy
has 'denied' finitude. It is all the more
appropriate (hence my constant use of the
term in what follows) to describe the relation
between philosophy and technics. This is
perhaps the occasion to express one serious
regret concerning La Technique et le temps:
the lack of a confrontation between its thinking
of memory and inheritance and Freud's theory
of the unconscious. The terms of the confrontation
are so complex, however, that one can understand
Stiegler's reticence in this regard. As we
shall see, he has at the very least opened
up a major field of inquiry for the future
theoretical work of psychoanalysis.
8 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Spivak (John Hopkins Press, 1974), 27.
9 For an excellent development of the relation
between recognition and aporia, to which
my own reading of Stiegler is, obliquely,
indebted, see G. Rose, The Broken Middle.
Out of our Ancient Society (Blackwell, 1992).
10 Whilst this is also a central thesis of
Derrida (especially in terms of his own reading
of Heidegger) we shall see later that Stiegler's
genealogy of 'matter' demands a rethinking
of the logic of invention such as Derrida
has recently expounded it in Ch. 1, 'Psyché,
Invention de l'autre', Psyché. Inventions
de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987),
17-62.
11 At the risk of repetition, this understanding
of matter-in terms of its historical differentiations,
and, therefore, with regard to man, in terms
of its organization as organized inorganic
matter-is radically innovative in the philosophical
tradition. An alert reader will also be aware
that Stiegler's articulation of organized
inorganic matter announces a re-reading of
Marx's materialism after the phenomenological
disentanglement of time from logic. The consequences
for a new thinking on the Left of the relation
between the social, the technical, and the
economic are, I believe, profound.
12 The argument in fact throws into question
the politico-philosophical orientation of
aporetic thinking which Derrida outlined,
for example, in his major writing on the
relation between philosophy and history 'Cogito
and the History of Madness' (Writing and
Difference (Routledge, 1978), 51-98). For
a statement on Derrida's related readings
of Nietzsche in terms of the law of différance,
see my interview with Derrida, 'Nietzsche
and the Machine' in Journal of Nietzsche
Studies, Issue 7, Spring 1994, 7-64. See
also my note 29.
13 We will come to the philosophical implications
of Derrida's (highly coherent) refusal to
give a history later. Let it be said here
(in the context of Stiegler's elaboration
of 'matter' prior to the philosophical distinction
between matter and form) that the concept
of organized organic matter cuts through
Derrida's re-reading of khôra in the Timaeus
as an unplaceable, unnarratable crypt prior
to, but constitutive of, the genres and logics
of the Western tradition (Khôra (Paris: Galilée,
1993)). It therefore cuts through the 'ultra-philosophical'
purchase which Derrida gives to fiction and
literature to describe, in a simulacrum of
narrative, what precedes the difference between
philosophy and myth, truth and fiction. We
should also point out in this context that
Stiegler's genealogy of 'matter' shows Lyotard's
recent elaboration of the term matière
(from Heidegger and "the jews",
trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts
(Minnesota University Press, 1988), onwards),
as an immemorial other of/to the philosophical
concept, to be unmediated and a-historical.
Lyotard's thinking of the relation between
the 'philosophical', the 'political' and
the 'aesthetic' needs to be rethought accordingly.
Stiegler's genealogy provides indeed a welcome
opportunity for contemporary French thought
to look again at the relation between philosophy
and history and Hegelian mediation (despite
the fact that Hegel is not a thinker of 'matter'
in Stieglerian terms). This can only be done
however-and this is why things are complex
and why it is important to go slowly-in recognition
of all that contemporary French thought has
done to mourn metaphysical logic, including
all logic which informs the concept of history
(hence its refusal of the term 'a-historical',
understandable in its own terms). This mourning
is without doubt infinite; however, the differentiations
of history (and what goes with them-above
all the importance of 'experience' and 'struggle')
have been unnecessary victims of the terms
of this mourning. Consequently, it is in
questioning its terms that one can question
contemporary French thought's desire to 'get
behind' (the logics of) history. If history
has no logic, and if this can be elaborated
in terms of a genealogy of 'matter' without
the ever-present risk of re-engaging the
axiomatic of ontology (and all that goes
with it-the fetichization of experience and
struggle as political avant-gardism and terror),
then the terms of the 'post'-metaphysical
break with philosophy are untenable (whatever
the differences, which are considerable,
between the philosophies of, for example,
Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze).
What is at stake here is, ultimately, the
question of the exact relation between écriture
and technics. We will come back to the this,
at least in the context of Derrida, in the
last part of the article. On the importance
of the 'French' mourning of the ontological
for political invention, see, again, my Derrida
and the political, esp. chapter Two 'The
Political Limit of Logic and the Promise
of Democracy: Kant, Hegel, Derrida', op.
cit. B. Gilles, Histoire des techniques,
Enclyclopédie de la Pléïade (Gallimard, 1978).
Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d'existence des
objets techniques, L'invention philosophique
(Aubier,
1989); L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique
(PUF, 1964), L'individuation psychique et
collective, L'invention philosophique (Aubier).
14 B. Gilles, Histoire des techniques, Enclyclopédie
de la Pléïade (Gallimard, 1978). Gilbert
Simondon, Du mode d'existence des objets
techniques, L'invention philosophique (Aubier,
1989); L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique
(PUF, 1964), L'individuation psychique et
collective, L'invention philosophique (Aubier).
15 A. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech,
trans. A. Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993).
16 The story is narrated in Protagoras (321c-322d).
Although placed at the beginning of the second
section of the book (what I am in fact calling
its 'third part'), in Part II, Chapter 1:
'Prometheus's Liver', the themes of this
chapter are crucial for an understanding
of the book as a whole. Given the general
conception of the work, it would be difficult,
however, to see the chapter coming earlier.
The story is as follows: The gods had charged
the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus
with the task of 'equipping [mortal creatures]
and allotting suitable powers to each kind'.
In a gesture typically unthinking and rushed,
Epimetheus wished to do the distribution
himself, leaving his brother Prometheus to
review it when he was done. Having given
all the available qualities to the animals,
Epimetheus had, however, none left for the
human species. As a consequence of Epimetheus's
error, Prometheus, when he came to review
the work, was 'at a loss to provide any means
of salvation for man, [and] stole from Hephaestus
and Athena the gift of skill in the arts,
together with fire-for without fire it was
impossible for anyone to possess or use this
skill-and bestowed it on man.' (321d)As the
title La Technique et le temps: Tome 1. La
faute d'Epiméthée indicates, Stiegler structures
humanity's relation to technics in terms
of this 'double [supplementary] origin' of
man. Prometheus's 'fault' (stealing the gift
of technicity) supplements the fault of Epimetheus
(forgetting the human species). These two
faults form the double 'duplicity' of man.
On the one hand, Epimetheus's forgetting
(precipitation) is constitutive of man, just
as man's tardy reflection (reflection in
the après coup) is a consequence of the initial
forgetting. Man is thus both distracted and,
distracted and empty-headed, he is at the
same time inheritor of all the faults of
distraction. This is the structure of epimetheia.
What is most important here is the logic
of forgetting and retrospective delay. On
the other hand, Prometheus's review of his
brother's error (which leads to the subsequent
theft) foresees that man will need skill
(itself foresight) in order to survive. Man
is thus, also, an animal of anticipation
and technique. This is the structure of prometheia.
As both epimetheia and prometheia, Man is
doubly at fault; that is, his finitude (compared
to the gods) is to be understood as his being-always-too-late
and always-too-early, in delay and in anticipation,
in need and artificially empowered. It is
the double structure of this finitude which
Stiegler wishes to re-cognize and, as we
shall see, it is in terms of this double
duplicity that he develops a thinking of
political invention. This said, both structures-especially
that of epimetheia-need to be articulated
with Freud's understanding of psychic inheritance
in Moses and Monotheism; that is with the
sexuality of the human species (the ego is
(also) deferred 'body') and with the consequent
'tradition' of 'disavowal' (for Freud, religion).
This is, of course, an immense project. Stiegler's
work on temporal delay and on the human cortex-organized
inorganic matter prepares the way.
17 Compare J. Derrida 'Donner la Mort' in
L'Ethique du don, eds. J.-M. Rabaté and M.
Wetzel (Paris: Transition, 1992).
18 M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans.
William McNeill (Blackwell, 1992); Being
and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Blackwell, 1967).
19 The violence of the break becomes explicit,
in negative mode, at one juncture, when Stiegler
argues that the late Heidegger's move to
think Being without reference to beings is
an overcoming of Dasein (in 'Time and Being',
'The End of Philosophy and the Beginning
of Thinking' and related essays). Rather,
the late Heidegger's move is to think Being
without reference to its being grounded in
beings: which is not the same thing; it does
not amount to thinking Being without reference
to man. Stiegler should be less cautious
here and announce explicitly his own totally
justified wish to dis-anthropologize Heidegger's
thinking of Ereignis (for this is what is
at stake). My point is not trivial. Stiegler's
wish to push Heidegger in a non-anthropological
direction speaks eloquently of the kind of
violence he is inflicting upon Heidegger's
thought. For it is done in order to retrieve
an 'unthought' within what Heidegger thinks.
Hence my term 'violence' (just as Heidegger
speaks of violence in his productive interpretation
of the Critique of Pure Reason in the Kantbuch).
My fear is, however, that, unarticulated,
the violence of the latter appropriation
of the late Heidegger loses the double relation
to his path of thought which is so carefully
maintained throughout most of the book. It
thereby covers over Stiegler's clear belief
that the theme of Ereignis is another panic
before 'matter'. For the coherence of his
own thesis, Stiegler must elaborate the difference,
however difficult this elaboration promises
to be.
20 P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy (eds.),
'Préface' of Le Retrait du politique (Paris:
1983); see also JLN and PLL (eds.), Rejouer
le politique (Paris: Galilee, 1981); J. Derrida,
Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Routledge,
1994).
21 M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Ralph Manheim (Yale, 1987), 146-165;
M. Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion [Self-Affirmation]
of the German University", trans. K.
Harries, The Review of Metaphysics, March
1985, vol. 28, n° 3, 470-480.
22 See, in this respect, the long (and now
notorious) note on debt, engagement, promise
and affirmation preceding the 'Greek' authority
of the questioning attitude, in J. Derrida,
Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, note
2, 129-136, esp. 133. Derrida has recently
further radicalized the originary structure
of acquiescence in terms of the peut-être
of the arrivant; see J. Derrida, Politiques
de l'amitie (Paris: Galilee, 1994), esp.
43-66. This is not the occasion to go into
this radicalization here. Suffice it to say
the following: if epiphylogenesis re-articulates
Schuldigsein as 'matter', the re-articulation
has important implications not only in the
context of Heidegger's politics of the questioning
attitude, but also in the context of Derrida's
above 're-writing(s)' of this attitude. As
we shall see, the issue here-- one which
traverses again the terrain of Nietzsche--
is the 'logic' of possibility.
23 Such outcries flooded the academic market
in the 1980s after the historical 'revelations'
of Victor Farias' Heidegger et le nazisme
(Verdier, 1987), often repeating humanist
reactions or appropriations of Heidegger's
thought of the 1950s when a humanist Marxism
and Existentialism were institutionally in
place. See, for example, L. Ferry and A.
Renaut Heidegger et les Modernes (Paris:
Bernard Grasset, 1988). In other words the
'Heidegger Affair' is more serious than a
humanist answer to Heidegger's error implies.
For the terms of such an answer are invariably
already put in question by Heidegger's Abbau
of metaphysics. They cannot, therefore, hold
authority over the way in which Heidegger's
complicity with National Socialism is considered.
This does not excuse Heidegger; it makes
the complicity all the more scandalous.
24 See, for example, "Ulysses Gramophone:
Hear Say Yes in Joyce" in J. Derrida,
Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (Routledge,
1992), 253-309; and, obliquely, "At
this Very Moment in This Work Here I am",
trans. Ruben Berezdivin in Re-Reading Levinas,
ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
For comparative work on the radicality of
this existential, see, also, Christopher
Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986) and Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book:
Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
(Lincoln: Nebraska Press, 1989).
25 E. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond
Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1991); P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger,
art, and politics: the fiction of the political,
op. cit.; J.-F. Lyotard, Heidegger and "the
jews", trans. Andreas Michel and Mark
S. Roberts (Minnesota University Press, 1988).
(It should be noted in parenthesis that the
singularity of Jewish suffering is in fact
lost in the above (eminently philosophical)
type of generalization. For a detailed analysis
of this point, see my Derrida and the Political.
For sympathetic recourse to Levinas concerning
the relation between Heidegger's separation
of thinking from the sciences and his political
engagements, see, nevertheless, the accompanying,
important article by Jean-Michel Salanskis
'Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht'.)
26 J. Habermas, "The Undermining of
Western Rationalism through the Critique
of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger" in
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 131-158,
and Martin Heidegger. L'Oeuvre et l'engagement,
trans. Rainer Rochlitz, (Paris: Cerf, 1988),
13-26 and 56-62.
27 See note 9.
28 See J. Derrida, "Before the Law",
trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature
(op. cit.), 181-220.
29 For the aporetic im-possibility of the
aporia as such (in distinction to Heidegger's
figuring of the aporia), see J. Derrida,
Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford University
Press, 1994). The informed reader will know
that we are doing nothing here but turning
in and out of this profound text.
30 P. de Man, "The Rhetoric of Blindness:
Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau"
in Blindness and Insight, Second edition
(Routledge, 1993), 102-141 and Allegories
of Reading, "Part II-Rousseau"
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
G. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel.
Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth Century
Fiction
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), "Part
IV-Sententiousness and the Law"; Dudding.
Des noms propres de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée,
1991); "Postal Politics and the Institution
of the Nation" in Narration and Nation,
ed. Homi Bhabha (Routledge, 1990), 121-137;
and "Mosaic Fragment: If Derrida were
an Egyptian" in G. Bennington, Legislations.
The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso,
1994), 207-228. It is, I hope, clear that
the writing which the most concentrates the
various types of deconstruction
(from Jacques Derrida to Bernard Stiegler)
of the philosophical, the technical (as technics
in general or as literature in particular)
and the political is that of Rousseau. The
proper name of Rousseau in contemporary critical
debate serves as a good guide to many of
the questions we are dealing with in this
article.
31 Of Grammatology, op. cit., 266-267, translation
slightly modified.
32 See again "Before the Law",
op. cit.
33 Of Grammatology, op. cit., 84-85.
34 J. Derrida, "Différance" in
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago,
1982), 17.
35 J.-F. Lyotard, Inhuman. Reflections on
Time, trans. G. Bennington and Rachel Bowlby
(Stanford University Press, 1992).
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Evans Experientialism 
