Dillet, Benoît - During, Elie - Stiegler, Bernard - Philosophising by Accident - Interviews With Élie During-Edinburgh University Press (2017)

Philosophising by Accident
Interviews with Élie During
Bernard Stiegler
Edited and Translated by Benoît Dillet
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© Philosopher par accident: Entretiens avec Élie During, Bernard Stiegler, 2004
English translation © Benoît Dillet, 2017
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Contents
Notes on the English Translation vi
Translator’s Introduction: Radiographing Philosophy 1
Philosophising by Accident: Interviews with Élie During

1 Philosophy and Technics 29
2 Technics as Memory 45
3 Consciousness in the Age of Industrial Temporal Objects 58
4 Consciousness, the Unconscious and the Unscience 81
Appendix 1: The Technologisation of Memory: Interview with

Élie During, 2001 96
Appendix 2: Becoming the Quasi-Cause of the Accident:
Interview with Benoît Dillet, 2014 105
Index 121
Notes on the English Translation
The set of radio interviews that compose this book do not pose a lot of
problems for the translator since Bernard Stiegler purposefully used
a plain language to make his philosophical ideas available to a larger
audience. However, I did have to simplify some sentences, or split them,
to make them more fluent in English. Stiegler’s language is quite logical
as it moves by blocks; each concept or neologism refers to a specific
philosopher or period in his thought, making it easy for the reader to
witness the development of his thought.
I avoided adding too many endnotes to clarify specific points but I
would like to draw the attention of readers to the translation of spe-
cific words or expressions that could help in understanding the text.
Following Christopher Johnson, I have used ‘externalisation’ for extéri-
orisation since ‘external’ is commonly used in English and not in French,
and it also flows much better. I have translated esprit as ‘spirit’ but it
should also be understood as ‘mind’ in the English sense, related to the
intellect and cognition. For Stiegler, esprit is larger than the domain of
the understanding (in Kantian terms), and his use of the term is a con-
scious move to reintroduce older questions, to relate his own work to
other, older, traditions in philosophy. This move is aligned with that in
Derrida’s book on the concept of spirit/mind in Heidegger.1 I have used
‘medium’ to translate the French word support which can be translated
in English by a multitude of words depending on the context: support,
prop, stand, aid (like visual aid but also teaching aid) and medium.
Medium is more polyvalent than the other options, so I kept this, but
the other meanings should be recalled when this term is used. I have
translated parole as ‘speech’ and paroles sometimes as ‘speech’ or ‘words’.
1
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Notes on the English Translation vii
I draw attention to this since for structuralists (influenced by a certain

reading of Saussure) the opposition between langue and parole, language
and speech, was central; Stiegler is arguing after Derrida, however, that
single language speech production (parole) is conditioned by and in conti-
nuity with the written word that corresponds to a system of signs (langue).
I have translated inconscience as ‘unawareness’ or ‘unconsciousness’, but
the polysemy present in the French word should also be kept in mind.
Stiegler is using the word inconscience to refer to the psychoanalytic con-
ception of the unconscious, but it also bears a normative edge when he
denounces the thoughtlessness or reckless dimensions of science and
other practices (especially in Chapter 4). He implicitly calls for a deeper
understanding that takes into consideration the unconscious but it is also
a call to take responsibility. ‘Unawareness’ is insufficient and perhaps
even misleading since he explicitly rejects the Marxist conception of
awareness. In this sense there is no awareness or consciousness that
could save one from this condition of inconscience. I have also marked out
words in English in the original with italics and with a star (*).
Finally, I would like to thank Bernard and Caroline Stiegler for their
help and trust, Carol Macdonald for agreeing straight away to publish
this translation with Edinburgh University Press, the two anonymous
reviewers for their comments and corrections, Gerald Moore for the
initial support, Anaïs Nony for her suggestions and the camaraderie,
and Julia Elsky for her interest and for reading early drafts. Finally,
shukriya Tara for helping me immensely throughout, especially in the
final editing stages.
Translator’s Introduction:
Radiographing Philosophy
This series of interviews between Bernard Stiegler and Élie During

was first broadcast in 2002 on France Culture, a renowned French
public radio station that serves as a platform for academics and non-
academics (cultural journalists) to discuss at length extremely diverse
topics: from the most recent political news to the most esoteric and
specialised topics. Élie During, who was writing a PhD dissertation on
Bergson and Einstein at that time at the University of Paris 10 Ouest
Nanterre, was fascinated with ‘the speculative ambition of Stiegler and
the breadth of his philosophical project’ and felt in the position of a
‘participant observer’ during these interviews, to use the ethnographic
expression.1 The purpose of these interviews was to introduce to a wider
audience the philosophical ideas and concepts worked out in the three
volumes of the Technics and Time series. This book, first published in
French in 2004, closed the first period of Stiegler’s philosophy and
together with Passer à l’acte (2003) and Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer (2003)
commenced a second period.2 As Stiegler notes in the 2014 interview for
this English edition, this second period worked at producing a new cri-
tique of political economy for the digital age. This new critique of politi-
cal economy and his elements for an aesthetic theory developed in the
Symbolic Misery series (2004–5) are directly derived from his fundamental
thesis about tertiary retention (or third memory). While putting on hold
the project of Technics and Time, he continued to draw from his working
hypothesis and wrote his deconstruction of philosophy from the point of
view of technics but in relation to contemporary political, economic and
cultural events.
2 Philosophising by Accident
Radiographing Philosophy
‘Philosophising by accident’ is both the expression that best defines
Stiegler’s own approach in philosophy and the philosophical practice on
radio in general. Undoubtedly, relations between philosophy and radio
have a long history in the twentieth century, both in France and in other
countries; depending on the traditions, philosophers have invested in or
resisted the pedagogical and political possibilities of the medium. The
intentions of radiographing philosophy differ from those of writing books
of philosophy. The transmission of philosophical debates and discourse
on the radio waves hopes to reach audiences beyond the lecture theatres
and the library lovers. Radio ‘delocalizes philosophy from within’3 by
seeking the accidental listener who will synchronise for a moment his or
her own time to the radio programme and the ideas at stake.
As the cultural theorist John Mowitt notes, radio was a problem
discussed widely in different philosophical traditions – in particular by
Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht,
Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre.4 While it was an object of philo-
sophical reflection, the cultural studies of radio were quickly devalued in
the twentieth century, eclipsed by television and cinema studies.
In the case of philosophy in the French language, France Culture
has a singular role to play in instituting philosophy as a living discipline.
First created in 1963, France Culture as a radio station has produced
a parallel space or institution, and woven contiguous relations with the
virtual space of readers. There is a maieutic process at work between
the flow of philosophical radio programme and the flow of the listener’s
consciousness. Listening is not passive but an active selection of elements
from the point of view of psycho-collective memories and expectations.
The listener is thus always potentially a reader as well as a speaker or a
writer of philosophy; he or she can act out this potential from the radio-
graphical impulse.
In evaluating the significance of this book by Stiegler in his larger
corpus, one needs to take into consideration the institutive and con-
stitutive significance of France Culture for French philosophy as an
academic discipline and a form of thought. France Culture is defined as
a ‘supply-based radio’,5 at least in its official mission statement. It does
not aim at running after ratings but at providing access to academic
disciplines and knowledge that are otherwise confined within the walls
of French Republican institutions (the Sorbonne, Collège de France,
Radiographing Philosophy 3
EHESS and ENS amongst others). France Culture also differs from
the pedagogical model of Radio-Sorbonne, created in 1947 as a proto-
MOOC that broadcast in Paris university lectures from the Sorbonne.
The role of radio stations for philosophy in the French language is
quite exceptional but absolutely ignored and understudied; it is as if the
radio form were not as respectable as the book form for academic dis-
course. The history of philosophy on radio is much longer than that of
blogs or online groups (such as on Facebook), and its audience is more
diverse and accidental in constitution.
In an important study in French intellectual history, Tamara
Chaplin examines the role of television for philosophy in France,
where she turns to key philosophical moments that took place on tel-
evision, and how French philosophers tried to repurpose television for
pedagogical aims or for relaying their theses.6 By providing a unique
platform for authors and publishers to advertise their latest books,
cultural shows broadcast on television and radio may partly be seen as
marketing. Indeed, marketing became a central strategy particularly
with the cultural show Apostrophes, created in 1975 and presented by
Bernard Pivot (the last show was broadcast in June 1990). During one
of its most memorable episodes, devoted to the work of new philoso-
phers Bernard Henri-Lévy, André Glucksmann and Maurice Clavel,
presenter Pivot held the books of his guests one by one in front of the
camera and admitted, in response to Xavier Delcourt (co-author of
Contre la nouvelle philosophie), that if showing books on television is adver-
tising, then he is entirely for it. New philosophy was nothing other
than the introduction of marketing in philosophy.7 Yet the effects of
France Culture on philosophical debates go far beyond the commerce
of books, and the interviews with Stiegler contained in this book testify
to this. Chaplin argues convincingly that televised philosophy should
be considered as an integral part of the history of French thought, to
avoid commonsensical arguments that flatten out differences, such as
it is a French particularity to give philosophy a space on television
and so on. These banal arguments fail to distinguish philosophi-
cal moments from the all-purpose intellectuals who talk endlessly on
topics outside their area of expertise. Television and the radio feed on
these all-purpose figures who have to comment on everything and give
their positions on everything (and if the guests are male, the position-
ing seems even more convincing). On the contrary, to understand
how philosophical discourse has metamorphosed in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, it is productive to follow the movements of

philosophy in different media.
The specific technological condition of philosophy in France has been
essential in establishing debates and organising differential transmissions
of philosophy. Stiegler’s concepts provide some elements to account
for the contiguous relations between philosophy and the media, espe-
cially as these analogical and digital technologies condition the trans-
mission of knowledge. Stiegler’s radio lectures compiled in this volume
are anchored in a long-standing history of radio lectures or interviews
given by famous French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth
century: from Sartre’s early radio shows on La tribune des temps modernes
from October to December 1947 or Merleau-Ponty’s World of Perception
in October and November 1948, to the regular interviews with major
French philosophers where Emmanuel Levinas, Marcel Gabriel, Jean-
Toussaint Desanti, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Alexandre Koyré, Raymond
Aron, Gaston Bachelard, Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Althusser
presented their latest books.8 It is extremely difficult to assess the recep-
tion or the significance of these interviews and radio appearances, but
the radio created the conditions for philosophical dialogues (though
overwhelmingly Parisian and male-centred) outside the usual academic
organs (lectures, conferences, journals, books). However, the effect of
radio on French thought should not be overemphasised and exaggerated:
its role has remained minoritarian, and philosophy on radio is a marginal
and exceptional phenomenon. Its official function is to provide strata of
the general public with access to the words of these professors or philoso-
phers; it attempts to integrate and reach out to territories that are poor in
cultural and intellectual life. The possibility of listening, of tuning in, gives
France Culture and philosophy radio programmes their pedagogical role.
The relationship between those in the radio studio and the listeners differs
radically from that of classrooms. The audience of the radio programmes
is by definition unknown and not physically present or immediately rec-
ognisable, but the programmes and their cultivated relationship are not
devoid of heuristic processes. Radio is particularly fit for philosophical
practice as a self-training exercise, since ‘philosophizing is first and fore-
most an autodidactic activity’.9 The intended audience differs from tradi-
tional monographic publications: it is not necessarily more democratic or
diverse but accidental in constitution, probably more so before the inven-
tion of podcasts and the creation of vast archives in the early 2000s (where
radio shows can be listened to sometimes years afterwards).10
The very practice of ‘radiographing philosophy’ in these interviews

with During is doubled by a philosophising of radio. The cadence and
the tonality of Stiegler’s words are already conditioned by the techni-
cal infrastructure of social and individual life, what Simondon called
the ‘associated milieu’. More importantly, by radiographing Stiegler’s
arguments and words, these interviews serve as an introduction or as a
road map to his other, longer, works. Instead of being an abbreviated or
washed out version of the arguments from the substantive Technics and
Time series, the orality of the medium gives a particular rhythm, tone and
effervescence to these interviews. While Stiegler repeats his arguments
throughout his books, each time he adds one more element to continue
to develop his project of deconstructing metaphysics from the point of
view of technics – it is the repetition of difference and not repetition of
the same.11 It is with this technical apparatus that philosophy can take a
new dimension and participate in everyday life beyond the book form;
it is a different way of writing and circulating philosophical discourse.
Radiographing philosophy means that philosophers supplement their
discourse and open it to the work of translators and mediators, not to
adapt the philosophical discourse to the radio temporality but to adopt
the technical apparatus, with all its incompressible constraints, to create
accidentally and incidentally new circuits of individuation. A radio of
philosophy always already works at a philosophy of radio, where the
border between one sphere and the other withers away. It is not that
by going in the radio studios philosophers have finally accepted to be
more concrete and in the real world, as if philosophy was opposed to
reality, as its big Other. This is an illusion to conceive the possibility of a
knowledge independent from reality itself. Reality does not exist outside
philosophy and philosophy is written in the present; even new readings
of old texts attempt to reactivate something for the present condition.12
Radiographing philosophy is therefore not disseminating philosophical
reflections packaged especially for the radio format, with all its edito-
rial and technical constraints, but it is a continuation of philosophy by
other means. It is one more way to philosophise for different purposes
and with different expectations. As mentioned earlier, the movement
of philosophical thought in France today is partly constituted by this
radio space. It is a space that is not reducible to academic discourse – to
the domain of academic journals, conferences, books, letters and other
practices – but that is not accessible to all either, at least de facto. Stiegler
refers to the listeners of France Culture as a privileged few, those that are
proletarianised but who are trying to fight it, or at least think that they
are working in this direction.13
An entire social life of concepts takes place on radio, participating in
the constitution of philosophy as a situation of object, places and prac-
tices. As the French sociologist Jean-Louis Fabiani rightly argues, ‘major
philosophers only exist through the minor ones, who are both an audi-
ence and a double, that is, well-founded social anchors’.14
It is a different kind of writing, a writing without hands15 or an aug-
mented gesture, that is paced according to the recording device. Until
the invention of tape recorders and podcasts, radio was a continuous
flux with no possibility for the listener to return to the previous sen-
tence or the previous paragraph. The linearity of radio brought new
cadences into philosophy as a living practice, especially after the Second
World War. Radio also changed quite fundamentally with the arrival
of television, and then with computers and the internet; it had to find
a new place in this new reticularity. While readings and live drama
performances were much more common before television and the inter-
net, those formats became quickly outdated as the demand for more
interactive and original content grew. We find traces, both digital and
analogue, of the platform that France Culture was, has been and, to a
large extent, continues to be. While a few studies have been published
on France Culture as a public service, as an institution, and the evolu-
tion of its radio programmes, none of them have really accounted for its
influence on ‘French’ philosophy.16 A whole history of radio philosophy
in France remains to be done. It is another space for philosophy to live
and prosper, relaying one philosopher after another, one theme after
another, in the movement of a desire that cannot be fully relayed. The
listeners’ expectations (or their psycho-collective protentions) are pro-
duced and shaped in different ways from the community of readers, or
maybe they become readers after being listeners, or they become inter-
mittently both readers and listeners.
Radiographing philosophy means to create the possibility for the
eruption of the inessential, the extra or the supplement in the everyday.
The question interrupts the banal gestures and activities of the everyday.
The contact on the radio with philosophy is not immediate and given,
but it is cultivated with the help of its intercessors. Turning on the radio
to find the exceptionality and the accidentality of thought – in fact we
always turn on the radio by accident (even when it is programmed by
the alarm clock) – the programmes converge into a seamless stream.
The role of France Culture has metamorphosed over the decades: some
regret the good old times and the decline in quality, others find it elitist
and out of touch with current realities.17 No doubt listeners have diver-
gent opinions about the ethos of the radio station, but many amateurs
engage with specific shows during their free time, they write about them
on blogs and (more recently) in the comment sections on the France
Culture website, they upload them on YouTube or Soundcloud, others
transcribe whole discussions from radio shows on amateur websites,
and even mailing-lists of listeners were formed.18 When the detractors
call France Culture elitist, patronising, paternalist, idealist or, worse,
archaic, it is assumed that other forms of short-circuiting of thought
are deemed more realistic and ‘modern’. But on the contrary, by being
‘supply-based’ it intends to avoid the logic of the market without falling
into its other extreme, complete independence and autonomy, since it
intends to remain on air and open to everyone in an accessible language
and format. For instance, Adèle Van Reeth, who has led the daily
philosophy programme Les Nouveaux chemins de la connaissance (‘The New
Paths of Knowledge’), explains this objective:
I have such a curiosity towards what I want to discover, learn, transmit, and
I work so much in choosing the right possible means to communicate [faire
entendre] this thought that I want to give a voice, that there is not much room
for deception. Had a programme lacked some technical rigour? Maybe, but
then we would have reached the audience who is put off by the jargon. Another
programme, on the contrary, turns out to be too dry, technical and exclusive for
those who do not know the topic? Then perhaps I would have brought some-
thing to the most advanced [aguerris] listeners, and I would have reminded the
others that philosophy is both an eloquent and a demanding exercise. . . . My
only goal: to make thought as lively as possible.19
Stiegler envisages radio as a technical milieu with the capacity to

transmit knowledge, experience or spirit in general. This technical
milieu is the condition and the support for individual and collective
memories. It is a hypomnesis that allows for anamnesis, following his under-
standing of the relation between hypomnesis and anamnesis: ‘anamnesis is
the good way of practising hypomnesis’.20 Though derived from the same
root (mneme in Greek means ‘memory’), hypomnesis and anamnesis are often
opposed in the history of philosophy. In simple terms, hypomnesis is dead
memory carried by diverse material supports (also called hypomnemata)
and anamnesis, or reminiscence, is living memory. These two concepts
are crucial for Stiegler in his dialogue with Plato’s discourse on writing
as well as with Derrida, and his work can be read as a long-standing
explication of Derrida (his doctoral supervisor) but also Gérard Granel.
Philosophers forget about hypomnesis in arguing for a purer and more
noble technique of thought, anamnesis. This opposition, which Derrida
started to deconstruct in Of Grammatology and ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, runs
as an Ariadne’s thread in philosophy: philosophers have repressed the
question of technics (or hypomnesis) in philosophical discourse (as anam-
nesis).21 This repression or forgetting of technics and technical objects is
extremely problematic for Stiegler since humans have no qualities and
no interiority but find a sense of purpose through their external relations
with tools and hypomnemata. Technical objects are everywhere, making
up an associated milieu that humans can only escape intermittently.
This supplemented milieu can also become dissociated when the tech-
nical individuation dissociates itself from the individual and collective
individuation, necessitating a readjustment between the technical and
the cultural systems. Even before computers and the internet, any given
writer has always been surrounded with biblia, material supports of spirit
that open it to other memories, minds and thoughts that preceded her/
him. Stiegler is deeply interested in biblia as material objects but also in
all the techniques that writers have developed to materially annotate,
correlate, classify and organise their thoughts and their fallibility. He
called this organisation of space that took place before the writing and
the publication of books ‘a retentional and virtual space’.22 Immersed
in this retentional and virtual space, the writer can therefore convert in
all improbability his or her lack into necessities by producing singulari-
ties and add to the diversity of ideas (or consistences). But writers are
only one example of uses of hypomnemata; Stiegler explains that technics
has always had a central role for humans as a palliative for the lack of
human origin, which can never be filled.23
He often refers to this in relation to his interpretation of the myth of
Prometheus and Epimetheus:
This accidental forgetting, generator of prostheses and artifices making up for
a lack of origin, is equally the origin of hypomnesis, to which Plato will later
oppose the anamnesis of the origin.24
In the myth, it is precisely because Epimetheus forgets to give humans

qualities that Prometheus steals fire (hence technics) from Zeus to pal-
liate for this lack of qualities. This accidental forgetting is overcome by
an accidental production of prostheses and artifices. Following Derrida,

Stiegler argues that writing and hypomnemata in general, although in dif-
ferent ways, are pharmaka, both a poison and a cure. He reminds us that
late in his life and work, from The Republic onwards, Plato left the tragic
culture by trying to eliminate the pharmacological aspects of writing as
well as all technics in general (music and poetic arts) by submitting them
to the power of dialectics.25 This is partly why radio is a well-suited tech-
nical milieu for Stiegler to outline some of his main theses and hypoth-
eses about technical objects and memory, the origin of philosophy, the
synchronisation of consciousnesses and the technoscientific unconscious
of contemporary science. By ‘philosophising by accident’, Stiegler means
that accidentality was decisive in his own ‘becoming-philosopher’ – as
he called it26 – but beyond the self-centric narration of his trajectory in
philosophy, he attempted to define philosophy in general as always begin-
ning with the accident. Accidentality is not only astonishment, or even
the disposition or passion that started all philosophising for Aristotle. It is
perhaps Stiegler’s astonishment at converting a working hypothesis into
a thesis, into a fully fleshed out position in the philosophical domain,27
that led him to repeat his arguments book after book in order to find
the originary impulse that led him to philosophise. This is a hypothesis
since it is fallible and im-probable. Stiegler’s thought is a philosophy of
fallibility, what he calls ‘the necessary default’ (le défaut qu’il faut). This
surprise has not left him, and his desire to share this original accidental
impulse is not to self-proclaim his status as philosopher but, by publicly
remembering it, to find again in himself and his traces, in his thought
and his memory, as an anamnesis, to recover the path by which he arrived
at the practice of philosophising. This thesis is itself a pros-thesis, a new
transductive support constituted for a critical reader that comes after,
since philosophising always takes place too late, as an after-thought
after the accident. This retroaction is what psychoanalysts call deferred
action or afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit in German or après-coup in French).28
Stiegler emphasised the accidentality of his ‘becoming-philosopher’, but
this accidentality is also at work in the radiographing of philosophy,
when one tunes in by accident to discussions and dialogues inviting a
philosophising.
To sum up the first part of this introduction: the radiographic dispositif
in philosophy can be used in a positive manner to reach out to territories
and lives that struggle against today’s proletarianising tendencies. Large
territories have been turned into deserts, where thoughts cannot grow.
In these interviews, Stiegler participates in a certain project of France

Culture, which is of course not a singular project, but a platform com-
posed of a multiplicity of projects that are often contradictory, to give
consistency to philosophy through its programmes on philosophy. He
joins the journalist-academics who, even in other cultural programmes
that are not strictly devoted to philosophy but where philosophers are
often referred to and have a ghostly presence, resist the present state of
affairs.
The Birth of a Philosophy

For Stiegler, the question remains ‘what is philosophy?’ since Philosophising
by Accident is first and foremost an introduction to his conception of phi-
losophy. He begins to philosophise outside certain French Republican
institutions that participate in the atrophying of thought, and that, in
the name of tradition and classicism, vacuum away the rest of society.
Everyone can philosophise – there is no strict prerequisite, to have
studied at Oxford, Cambridge or École Normale Supérieure – yet many
have an interest in keeping philosophy out of reach of the masses. This
elitism and classicism is fought by Stiegler in his very bastardisation of
philosophy: accessing by accident a domain which he should never have
been invited to. It is through developing a technique of reading (Ian
James calls it ‘technique of thought’29) that he re-appropriated philoso-
phy so as to open it to the technical conditioning of life. I will analyse
here how his entire philosophical thought is based on developing a
technique of reading that will allow him to approach difficult texts and
thoughts (Mallarmé, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida). There is a technicity
and a desire to gather thoughts and compile elements of other spirits. I
use ‘spirit’ here deliberately since Stiegler attempts to reactivate, after
Derrida, this outdated notion that was surpassed by ‘mind’ or other
rational lexicon. Stiegler’s entire thought is technical or prosthetic, using
different concepts to reconsider the transductive relations between tech-
nics and thought.30 In every respect, it is dealing with the complexity of
technics and what it does to thought: it unthinks thought, every technical
and technological shock overshadows thinking, reconfigures the oper-
ating field of thought. There is no inside or outside of philosophy but
a co-constitutive enterprise of thinking and living: the large corpora-
tions and engineers making and designing technical objects capitalise
on twenty-five centuries of philosophy. The project of Technics and Time
begins in the trauma of the divide between technē and epistēmē, between
practical knowledge such as craftsmanship or art on the one hand, and
science or knowledge in general on the other. According to Stiegler,
this divide began with metaphysics and Plato, and we can call this the
first epistemological break of philosophy, insofar as Plato and Aristotle
attempted to found philosophy as a science (epistēmē) purified from its
non-dialectical and tragic origins in pre-Socratic thought. This led to a
division of labour between intellectual work and manual work, reinforc-
ing oppositions and dualisms in individual and collective bodies.
Like many other philosophers, for Stiegler, philosophy is both
a psychic and a collective process of anamnesis to the extent that one
reads oneself to remember who one was at the time of writing but also
to produce new singularities or diachronies in the repetition of differ-
ence. After discussing Plato, Leroi-Gourhan and Husserl, developing his
hypothesis about third memory or tertiary retention, and the technical
constitution of the already-there and a past not lived but co-existing with
the living in the first two interviews, Stiegler explains at length in Chapter
4 the notions of synchrony and diachrony that he develops in the second
phase of his work after Philosophising by Accident – these notions are also
called synchronisation and diachronisation since he understands these
as tendencies rather than opposites. Synchrony is a necessary terrain for
the cultivation of diachronies and to keep a tension between those two
tendencies. These are rooted in post-Saussurian structuralism as well
as Simondonian philosophy, and particularly the concepts of stability,
instability and metastability.
Yet the relation between anamnesis and hypomnesis as discussed above
is perhaps what distinguishes him from other philosophers. Stiegler’s
main task is to deconstruct philosophy and show how philosophers and
philosophy repress technics, and to argue his hypothesis that humans
are transductively made by technics. He calls this practice ‘[his] philoso-
phy’.31 This main project, a prosthetic deconstruction of philosophy, is
always in the background, even in his recent and more politicised works.
His conception and execution of critique is quite specific: he draws from
moments of philosophy to find concepts and tools to think the present
condition but always ends on the technological blindspots of these great
thinkers, what they cannot and could not think.
This has huge consequences for Stiegler’s own approach to philoso-
phy in terms of periodisation and historicisation. By periodising the
thought of specific thinkers, he seeks punctual interests and problems
that are epokhal de jure, since they become suspended in the very corpus
under study, in Plato, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and others, but that can
return to the present, as an improbable haunting trace. This is con-
stantly acknowledged and emphasised in his writings, a strong phenom-
enology of reading that drives his entire method and project, a reading
that is always already a writing waiting to be read and written in the
future. Once again, this is why the notion of après-coup or deferred action
is central, given the bi-directionality of philosophy, retrogressive and
progressive, the retentionality of the original letter that carries potenti-
alities (or protentions) beyond itself and towards the future. It is tertiary
retention (the technical support of memory) that provides ‘the possibil-
ity of resuming an interrupted piece of work: which, for the phenom-
enologist, is always the work of the time of “filling-in” on the part of an
intention intending an eidos’.32 It provides the possibility to begin again
one’s work (of a past self) or the work of a previous philosopher with a
fresh perspective. For example, in the third volume of Technics and Time,
he executes a close reading of the ‘Transcendental Deduction’ section
and in particular the triple synthesis in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(apprehension, reproduction and recognition) and shows how they are
conditioned by schematism. Kant does not see, according to Stiegler,
the transformation of his own thinking in the first Critique between the
first and the second editions (respectively 1781 and 1787) and how his
own hypomnemata and idiotexts have altered the order of the synthesis
itself, changing the course of his argument and obscuring the question of
hypomnesis or technics.33
Stiegler’s practice of critique inherits from the philosophers he reads,
and particularly from structuralism and poststructuralism, but at their
limits. In other words, he attempts to reactivate their thoughts not by
simply repeating the same arguments but by exposing their limits and
thinking at their limits. I called his philosophy prosthetic since he writes
on to the philosophies that he reads, but the opposite is also true: he
keeps in his language the concepts of other philosophers that he read
and analysed in detail in other works. These close readings left marks on
his own language (or idiolect). By trying to keep all these concepts, his
writing sometimes makes for tortuous sentences – and many of his late
works are also transcribed from oral dictation using a piece of software.
His work bears the mark of this accumulation of readings and neolo-
gisms, making it difficult for the reader to approach his later and more
recent work without understanding epiphylogenesis, tertiary retention,
pharmacology, general organology, transindividuation, grammatisa-

tion, discretisation, quasi-cause, synchrony-diachrony, proletarianisa-
tion, the play of subsistence-existence-consistence, composition versus
opposition, hypomnesis and idiotext.34 All these concepts are introduced
in these interviews in relation to their contexts and how they are used to
dialogue with other philosophical traditions. In a sense, Stiegler is can-
nibalising other philosophies, reintegrating them as his own, carrying
their traces in his own prose, welding them into new prosthetic forms,
for new purposes. To remain faithful to philosophy is to participate in it
and to show its relevance, how its tools (the concepts) can be reworked
and reactivated for particular struggles in the present. The archive of
philosophy should therefore not be seen as inert, as simply a hypomnesis,
but it can be individuated, through processes of psychic and collective
anamnesis, a remembering or recollection that is always dia-logical:
One cannot be faithful to the unity and the identity of what remains con-
stant throughout the alterities of the diverse characters one will have been and
played, sometimes without knowing it, without noticing it, and which results
from the accidental character of existence.35
Stiegler sometimes calls this ‘différant identification’, to reflect this process

of differed identification that is mobilised. Two concepts that he has not
yet developed but always announces in passing are those of context and
idiotext. He explains in different places that the idiotext is imagined and
speculated in the last volume of Technics and Time as a memory-flux since
it appears as a spiral, a whirl-like figure prosthetically supported. His
books are conceived as a single dorsal space which one can navigate,
where every book is an introduction to a last volume to come, but which
never comes. These series of interviews from 2002 are no exception, and
commentaries on the virtual subsequent volumes of Technics and Time,
aborted since 2001, haunt the dialogue between Stiegler and During.
Serge Trottein is not entirely wrong when he refers to Stiegler’s work as
a collection of introductions and suspense, building up to the publication
of The Necessary Defaut (Le Défaut qu’il faut) that continues to be delayed
and may never be known.36
To give other examples of his critiques of philosophers: while
Heidegger opened many avenues in thinking technics, Stiegler also
critiques his denigration of technics to preserve ‘traditional language’
in his late texts.37 More recently, in States of Shock, in a posthumous
dialogue and homage to his friend Lyotard, Stiegler continues this
rosthetic d
p econstruction by showing how the essay ‘Logos and Techne, or
Telegraphy’ (delivered in one of Stiegler’s seminars in 1986 at Collège
international de philosophie) opposes in a classical manner anam-
nesis and hypomnesis when it comes to new technologies (that Lyotard
calls telegraphy – related to the technologies of reading that Stiegler
was beginning to conceive during exhibitions at the Centre Georges
Pompidou and then at INA).38 Based on this reading of this text, Stiegler
goes so far as to compare Lyotard’s position to Heidegger’s nostalgia
for authenticity and cultural heritage. While perhaps opposing art and
modern technology too starkly, Lyotard however ends at a position
remarkably close to Stiegler’s in a lesser-known lecture given at the
Sorbonne in October 1985 where he discussed what new technologies
do to art, especially in transforming the audience and the We.39
Stiegler’s thought is more commonly discussed in dialogue with
Derrida’s work, especially on the question of his reading and bor-
rowing of Derrida’s concepts. By drawing extensively on Derrida’s Of
Grammatology, he repeatedly argued that he felt more faithful than Derrida
himself to the very project of grammatology. This already appears in an
important moment in the second volume of Technics and Time when he
questions the role of the originary trace – that was there all along. It is
on this aspect that Stiegler begins to conceive of his work as a crucial
bifurcation from or excrescence on Derrida’s thought, with the grafted
notion of grammatisation (from Sylvain Auroux). For Derrida, gram-
matisation is what the project of grammatology should have been, the
history of supplements rather than the interpellation of arche-writing or
arche-trace. Here is an early interrogation worth quoting at length:
Grammatology lays out a logic of the supplement in which supplementary acci-
dentality is originary. The history of the supplement must be understood as
awkward, accidental history whose result would be an essential-becoming of the
accident – but which would also require speaking of an accidental-becoming
of essence. But is the grammatological project not weakened in advance in fre-
quently blurring phonological writing’s specificity, in suggesting that most of the
time virtually everything that takes place in it was always there beforehand, and
in not making this specificity a central issue (and does all of grammatology not,
in a certain sense, necessarily banish just such a question)? Does this not bring up
the possible objection that in the end, the supplement will really not have been?40
The originary trace to all traces, or arche-trace, prevents the

grammatological project from being a history of supplements and their
occurrences. This also leads to fundamental disagreements on the status

of history in philosophy, leading many scholars to debate Derrida’s and
Stiegler’s positions vis-à-vis différance, temporality, the nonliving and the
nonhuman. The debate on Derrida and Stiegler is crucial and gravitates
around questions of empiricity and transcendentality (leading Stiegler to
imagine an atranscendental philosophy).41 It also led to disagreements
about whether Stiegler is guilty of anthropocentrism and giving prior-
ity to humans over animals in their relations to tools and their techni-
cal constitution. Geoffrey Bennington, Tracy Colony and Nathan Van
Camp argue that Derrida’s concepts of gramme, différance and trace allow
us to think beyond the animal-human opposition, while Stiegler reaf-
firms the exceptionality of the human.42 These authors, however, fail
to take into account his processual approach to the ‘human’; he would
even avoid the term (‘human’) due to the association with humanism,
preferring the confusing double negation the ‘non-inhuman’ to refer to
actions rather than to an essence or ontology. What interests Stiegler is
less the human than the noetic processes of life. Far from being ‘posthu-
man’ or ‘posthumanist’, his philosophy attempts to leave these debates
behind to focus on tendencies and processes of life, distinguishing for
instance between entropic and negentropic orientations.
These are but a few examples of a long list of readings contained in his
books. His later thought, especially since the third volume of Technics
and Time, has sometimes been read as being catastrophic, pessimistic
or alarmist. Stiegler turned to political economy with the Disbelief and
Discredit series (2004–6) and more importantly with For a New Critique
of Political Economy (2009), to aesthetics with the Symbolic Misery series
(2004–5), to politics more openly with the Constituer l’Europe series (2005),
Télécratie contre démocratie (2006), De la démocratie participative (2007) and
Pharmacologie du Front national (2013), and finally to the question of the
youth and educational systems with Taking Care (2008) and L’École, le
numérique et la société qui vient (2012). Élie During anticipated Stiegler’s
political turn in his work when he asked a question about synchronisation
of consciousnesses in a decisive moment of Philosophising by Accident, in the
first question of the fourth interview (but also in the 2001 interview in
the appendix). During voiced his disagreement about the uniformisation
of behaviour and the theme of alienation ‘even when it is dressed in
a phenomenological register’.43 Others, like Rancière in 2008, would
distance themselves from Stiegler’s supposedly classical Marxist (and
therefore resentful) position that no longer suits the present. Rancière
writes in an extremely provocative sentence that these resentful critical

theorists portray ‘the image, totally hackneyed and yet endlessly service-
able, of the poor cretin of an individual consumer, drowned by the flood
of commodities and images and seduced by their false promises’.44 If
this is partly aimed at Stiegler, and there are good reasons to think so,
in this polemical but important chapter, Rancière entirely misinterprets
Stiegler’s diagnosis of the technical constitution and conditioning of
critical thought (and also denies in other works the consequences and
the significance of the technical reproducibility of art on aesthetic and
art production). For Stiegler, however, the constitution and conditioning
of technics is understood in a transductive way, and not simply in a uni-
lateral and deafening way. Contrary to Richard Beardsworth’s reading
of Stiegler’s politics, his position cannot be reduced to technological
determinism.45
At one point, in the third volume of Technics and Time and relevant for
us here, Stiegler is cautious to warn against demonising the US culture
industry for the destruction of European consciousness. In his study of
television and cinema, he emphasises the US domination in order to
appreciate the inventive technological dispositif that this industry has
created and that Europeans accept too passively.
Delegation of the operations of understanding to machines has taken place
essentially under the influence of American industry. Yet we see nowhere in the
current industrial brutality any consequences of this fact of a sudden alteration
of consciousness, and even less a monstrous event. But consciousness is altera-
tion. This does not mean that alteration might not lead to a monstrous state of
things in turn leading toward the annihilation of this consciousness; we cannot
exclude such a possibility – quite to the contrary. On the other hand, this pos-
sibility of destruction is already contained in, is already a part of, consciousness
itself: consciousness is this possibility, as a cinematic flux projecting its phantoms
onto many screens.46
Stiegler’s political thought is related to accidents and the potential for

societies and civilisation to collapse. Emergencies also create the neces-
sity for philosophising; Socrates began to philosophise after the defeat
of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and it is this deferred action or
afterwardness that I referred to earlier. ‘Philosophising by accident’ is
therefore the expression that sums up Stiegler’s personal philosophi-
cal experience as well as a call to take into consideration the accidents
in noeticity, against hyper-rationalist projects that do not make room
for the improbable, the inessential and the fallible. The facticity of the
accident requires the development of techniques to convert it into a
necessity, following Deleuze and Bosquet, as he explains once again
in the interview from 2014 included as an appendix. Stiegler has good
reasons to associate accidentality and facticity based on the philosophical
anthropology of technical life presented in Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The
Fault of Epimetheus. While humans and life are not born philosophising or
making tools, they have the disposition or the potential to do so. This
becoming-philosopher is in fact never fully realised but always in the
making and processual. His work begins against the generally accepted
idea that philosophy requires a professionalisation, first a classical train-
ing and then a career deemed successful by peers and the accepted
norms: thinking always takes place with accidentality. Socrates’ acci-
dent, that is, the Athenian decision to condemn him to death, had huge
consequences for the history of philosophising.
Jean-François Lyotard in some introductory courses on philosophy
given at the Sorbonne in 1964–5 displaces the usual question ‘what is
philosophy?’ on to the more challenging one ‘why philosophise?’. This
new question also suits Stiegler’s project that starts with knowledge as
desire, or desire as knowledge (and both go back to Plato’s Symposium and
the relation between Alcibiades and Socrates).47 In giving a social role to
philosophy Lyotard warns his students against a retreat from the world
and its transformations since there can be no escape from communica-
tion, exchange and desire.48 Philosophising for Lyotard is to respond to
the movement of desire that always resists and escapes theories of con-
sciousness, mind or reason. It starts in the refusal of unity and purpose;
questions about the purpose of philosophy always aim at killing desire
and reinforcing the powers that be.
When Stiegler asks the question ‘what is philosophy?’, he presents at
least two answers. First, in his work, philosophy is closely associated with
the practice of teaching, since to philosophise is to individuate philoso-
phy itself, to contribute by adding one more element: this can be done
through the creation of concepts or neologisms, and by reactivating
classical concepts to respond more directly to the present state of affairs.
Stiegler has a singular understanding of the beginning of philosophy
and metaphysics. He considers Plato the first one to have broken away
from pre-Socratic thought and tragic culture by creating dialectics and
inventing metaphysics (in Derrida’s sense of the term). Hence when
Stiegler discusses Plato’s Lesser Hippias, regarded by specialists as Plato’s
first written work, he reads it as the first philosophy book. Commenting

on the opening of Lesser Hippias, Stiegler writes: ‘The first question phi-
losophy asks . . . is not the question of being, [nor] is it that of becoming,
nor technics . . . [it] is not about the law nor power, nor certainly about
poetry. The first question that is not the first question (being generally
made secondary) regards teaching.’49 Philosophy is closely tied to the
collective practice of teaching that leads both teachers and students
to axioms and aporias, which are not accessible to rational or dog-
matic approaches. It cannot be reduced to an autonomous discipline of
expertise and tight-knit research communities. As the experience of the
aporia, the impasse or the cul-de-sac, philosophical teaching is however
neither straightforward nor guided by a telos, it is closer to an experiment
and a way of life.50 In this sense, the teacher and the student cultivate
desire and a libidinal economy.
Second, philosophy is born according to him with Socrates, who
developed his famous maieutic method of asking questions, and more
specifically the question ti esti?, ‘what is . . .?’.51 France Culture can there-
fore be called the ‘radio of questions’, a good place for interviews and
exchanges, triggering the very desire to ask questions. The value of phi-
losophy decreased with the end of modernity and the transformation of
institutions; the role of philosophy (questioning) is untimely since in the
time of capital, the possibility of questioning is captured. The fact that
the Google search engine is often a point of access for questions shows
the conditioning and the discretion of philosophy. Google could not
have existed without philosophy, mathematics and other disciplines. The
practice of questioning (philosophy) has been inscribed and captured
by the algorithms of the search engine itself. Think for instance about
our collective stupor at the predictive function of this search engine, as
if it revealed a secret, a collective unconscious. By typing in the search
bar, we could have access to this immense collective raw data pro-
cessed by Google’s phenomenal algorithmic power and therefore find
in this automated writing something meaningful about society, and the
thoughts as well as the desires of our fellow comrades who use the very
same tool in their everyday life. The indeterminacy of the future is cap-
tured, our dreams are ‘cancelled’ – as one of Banksy’s murals in Boston,
Massachusetts, reads. What the 1980s Punk movement called ‘no future’
should be understood less as a motto than as a symptom of the time.
To philosophise today for Stiegler means to confront the fact that new
generations hold ‘no future’ as their motto.52 No future is the symptom
of a post-revolutionary generation that knows that their future will be

worse than their parents’ but any attempt to envisage utopian projects or
the good life is deemed idealist, naive, patronising or, worse, totalitarian.
The impossibility of questioning constitutes philosophy’s milieu, where
thinking begins in the realisation of this suffocation.53 Such are the con-
ditions of possibility and impossibility of philosophy for Stiegler, and the
very practice of philosophy amounts to an endless hermeneutic process
that interprets philosophers to the letter, not to repeat them and find the
exactitude of their thought but to interpret their words or concepts in
their spirit. The regime of law in philosophy is not made of contracts and
laws that are set once and for all (even when they are written in stone) but
it is a jurisprudence.54 Philosophy is akin to a conceptual jurisprudence;
each concept is an ensemble of traces recording particular moods and
living conditions, both healthy and sick ones. In this hermeneutic and
jurisprudential conception of philosophy, accidents are omnipresent,
creating wounds (and ‘traumatypes’) waiting to be cured, even if provi-
sionally. Yet the regime of law in society, and possibly also in philosophy,
is not Kantian but Kafkian, as Laurent de Sutter notes:55 in societies of
control, sources and causes of the regime of law are largely diffused and
disoriented, and the tools invoked (human rights, security) are reduced
to palliating symptoms and anxieties. This situation, partly driven by the
constant drive for automatisation, brings jurisprudence into crisis.
Accidentality was also central to Deleuze. In an unusual historicist
move, Deleuze refers to modern art as signalling the shift from essence
to accidents, something that for him is echoed more largely in thought,
and particularly in philosophy: ‘Modern painting begins when man no
longer experiences himself as an essence, but as an accident.’56 The rise
of specific intellectuals and the explosion of academic disciplines into
micro-topics and hyperspecialisms also redistributes the conditionality
of philosophy today. Although Stiegler generalises the accidental factic-
ity of thought and philosophy, the degree and intensity of this acciden-
tality has changed with the multiplication of technological shocks, and
the task of philosophy today is to talk about the accident and not the
essence.
Our fundamental relation to history has changed, much like the
place of philosophy as a social discipline, as a knowledge and a prac-
tice anchored in society. The title of the chapter from which Deleuze’s
quotation was extracted reads powerfully: ‘every painter recapitulates
the history of painting in his or her own way . . .’. Deleuze would have
certainly agreed that this statement can be extended to philosophy itself,

that every philosopher indeed recapitulates the history of philosophy.
Reading philosophers is to read them read other philosophers.
Notes
1. Personal communication with Élie During, 5 June 2015.
2. These two short books published respectively in June and October 2003
were translated and compiled in Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans.
David Barison, Daniel Ross and Patrick Crogan (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008).
3. John Mowitt, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), p. 76.
4. Mowitt, Radio.
5. Philippe Meyer, ‘Il faut stopper la dérive à Radio France’, Le Monde, 27
March 2015.
6. Tamara Chaplin, Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
7. ‘[The new philosophers] do have a certain newness about them: rather
than form a school, they have introduced France to literary and philo-
sophical marketing.’ Gilles Deleuze, ‘On the New Philosophers (Plus a
More General Problem)’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews
1975–1995, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 141.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London:
Routledge, 2004). Sartre’s radio shows have not yet been compiled into
a single volume; see Alys Moody, ‘“Conquering the Virtual Public”:
Jean-Paul Sartre’s La tribune des temps modernes and the Radio in France’,
in Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead (eds), Broadcasting
in the Modernist Era (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 245–65.
A useful overview of this rich archive is to be found in the compilation
in six CDs of some of these interviews in Anthologie sonore de la pensée fran-
çaise par les philosophes du XXe siècle (Paris: Fremeaux, 2002), or the recent
book series Audiographie published by éditions EHESS.
9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children, trans. Don
Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate and Morgan
Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 100.
10. Stiegler together with his association Ars Industrialis created their
own podcast between October 2008 and June 2012 to broadcast their
talks and debates. See <http://arsindustrialis.org/podcast.xml> (last

accessed 14 September 2016).
11. In response to his critics who accuse him of setting up a nineteenth-
century-style philosophical system, Stiegler writes that his repetitions
are meant ‘in the same way that maps may be used to take stock’
and to ‘write a new chapter in an adventure begun a long time ago’.
Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Vol. 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible,
trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), pp. 1–2.
12. Pierre Macherey, ‘En matérialiste (1981)’, in Histoires de dinosaure: Faire
de la philosophie 1965–1997 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1999), pp. 96–9.
13. See p. 86.
14. Jean-Louis Fabiani, Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? La vie sociale des con-
cepts (1880–1980) (Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2010), p. 18.
15. ‘Handless writing is perhaps what we are doing now as we record our
voices.’ Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 21.
16. See Hervé Glevarec, France Culture à l’oeuvre: Dynamique des professions et mise
en forme radiophonique (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2001); Patrick Broguière,
France Culture: La destruction programmée d’une université populaire (Paris: Les
Éditions Delga, 2007); Anne-Marie Autissier, ‘France-Culture: Rôle et
programmation d’une radio à vocation culturelle’, PhD dissertation in
sociology, University of Paris 5 Descartes, 1997, and the special issue
on ‘France Culture: A French Singularity’, Le Débat, 95 (May–August
1997).
17. Jean-Louis Jeanney, ‘France-Culture’, in Lawrence D. Kritzman
(ed.), The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 703–6.
18. Some useful documents on the evolution of France Culture, espe-
cially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, can be found on the ‘Défense
de France Culture’ website: <http://ddfc.free.fr> (last accessed 14
September 2016).
19. Adèle Van Reeth, ‘Actualité de la philosophie’, Strass de la philosophie
(blog), 12 February 2015, <http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.
co.uk/2015/02/actualite-de-la-philosophie-adele-van.html> (last
accessed 14 September 2016).
20. See p. 61.
21. ‘At the very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed tech-
nics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought.’ Bernard
Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard
Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), p. ix.
22. ‘Much before the hypertext and electronics, an entire retentional and
virtual space, static but perfectly operative, physically surrounds [encadre]
the writer working at her/his desk. Subtle techniques of annotation,
correlation and classification organise from the very origin the writing
of works [œuvres], that can now be transposed to the domain of the digital
media for the benefit of the reader-scribe: these works have become
incommensurably dynamised.’ Bernard Stiegler, ‘Machines à écrires et
matières à penser’, Genesis. Revue internationale de critique génétique, 5 (1994),
<http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/documents/MACHINES_A_
ECRIRE_ET_MATIERES_A_PENSER_1994.doc> (last accessed
14 September 2016).
23. Technics here are to be understood as instruments or tools but also
techniques, in Marcel Mauss’s sense of ‘techniques of the body’ that
Stiegler sometimes refers to. See Bernard Stiegler, ‘La lutherie électro-
nique et la main du pianiste’, Cahiers du Centre International de Recherches en
Esthétique Musicale/Collège International de Philosophie (Mont-Saint-Aignan:
Institut de musicologie, 1989), p. 234.
24. Stiegler, Acting Out, p. 16.
25. Bernard Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front national (Paris: Flammarion,
2013), p. 131.
26. The expression ‘becoming-philosopher’ was used by Stiegler to refer
to this conversion in the 2003 conference ‘Acting Out’ (Passer à l’acte),
which was contemporary to the radio interviews published here. This
was discussed in response to Marianne Alphant’s question ‘how does
one become a philosopher in the intimacy and the secret of one’s life?’,
referring implicitly to Stiegler’s secret, his incarceration in Toulouse
between 1978 and 1983. See Stiegler, Acting Out, p. 1, pp. 10–11.
27. Stiegler always comes back to the etymology of thesis as ‘position’.
This probably explains the recurrence of the term ‘position’ in works
of French philosophy (for example, Positions is the title of at least two
books, one by Derrida in 1972 and one by Althusser in 1976).
28. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-
Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books,
1973), pp. 111–14.
29. Ian James, The New French Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012),
pp. 61–82.
30. A transductive relation is a relation that constitutes the terms.

32. Bernard Stiegler, ‘Derrida and Technics: Fidelity at the Limits of
Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith’, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques
Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 246. Here eidos refers to the essence of the
object, broadly equivalent to the Platonic Idea.
33. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the Question
of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011), pp. 40–73.
34. Victor Petit has written an insightful glossary of some of these concepts.
See ‘Vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis’, in Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front
national, pp. 369–441.
36. Serge Trottein, ‘Technics, or the Fading Away of Aesthetics’, in
Christina Howells and Gerald Moore (eds), Stiegler and Technics
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 95. Trottein calls
Stiegler an illusionist, a magician or even a manipulator, and his phi-
losophy a slide show or a cinema.
37. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen
Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 177–80.
38. See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy’, in The
Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 47–57; Bernard Stiegler,
States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century, trans.
Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), pp. 96–9. For a compara-
tive study of Lyotard and Stiegler on technics, see Ashley Woodward,
Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and Art
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), particularly chapter 3.
39. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Enframing of Art. Epokhe of Communication’,
in Textes dispersés 1: Esthétique et théorie de l’art/ Miscellaneous Texts 1:
Aesthetics and Theory of Art, ed. Herman Parret, trans. Vlad Ionescu, Erica
Harris and Peter W. Wilne (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012),
pp. 176–93. For instance, he calls for ‘new “epokhal” communities, new
practices of the epokhe, that are necessarily instrumental (the technicisa-
tion of teckne is thus not in itself the problem)’ (p. 193).
40. Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2, p. 30.
41. See the excellent article by Javier de la Higuera, ‘Paris et les montagnes,
au sommets du monde: Sur l’ontologie événementielle’, in Benoît Dillet
and Alain Jugnon (eds), Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler

(Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2013), pp. 167–87.
42. See in particular: Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Emergencies’, in Interrupting
Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 162–79; Tracy Colony,
‘Epimetheus Bound: Stiegler on Derrida, Life, and the Technological
Condition’, Research in Phenomenology, 41 (2011), pp. 72–89; Nathan Van
Camp, ‘Negotiating the Anthropological Limit: Derrida, Stiegler, and
the Question of the Animal’, Between the Species: An Online Journal for the
Study of Philosophy and Animals, 14.1 (2011), pp. 57–80; Ben Turner, ‘Life
and the Technical Transformation of Différance: Stiegler and the Noo-
Politics of Becoming Non-Inhuman’, Derrida Today, forthcoming.
43. Personal communication with Élie During, 5 June 2015.
44. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2008), p. 46.
45. Richard Beardsworth, ‘Technology and Politics: A Response to Bernard
Stiegler’, Cultural Politics, 6.2 (2010), pp. 181–99, partially reprinted in
Howells and Moore (eds), Stiegler and Technics, pp. 208–24.
46. Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 3, p. 81.
47. Jean-François Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, trans. Andrew Brown
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
48. ‘Our answer is this: you will not evade desire, the law of presence-
absence, the law of the debt, you will find no refuge, not even in action.’
Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, p. 122.
49. Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen
Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 107.
50. Stiegler, Taking Care, p. 109.
51. See the third part, ‘The Pharmacology of the Question’, in Bernard
Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living, trans. D. Ross (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2013), pp. 99–133.
52. The last sentence of Technics and Time, Vol. 1 reads as a promise and
aide-mémoire for the next volumes: ‘Whence the excess of measure in
this exceptional phrase inscribed on the wall of time: no future.’ Stiegler,
Technics and Time, Vol. 1, p. 276.
53. Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living, p. 108.
54. ‘Political individuation is regulated by a legislation founded on the
possibility and the duty to interpret the law, since the law makes up
a preindividual found charged with potential that is fundamentally
jurisprudential. In other words, political individuation is constituted by
a hermeneutic jurisprudence.’ Bernard Stiegler, La Société automatique,
Vol. 1: L’Avenir du travail (Paris: Fayard, 2015), p. 260. Further on,

Stiegler reminds us that the very young Marx, who first studied law,
‘wanted to make jurisprudence the true philosophy’ (p. 282).
55. Laurent de Sutter, Deleuze: La Pratique du droit (Paris: Michalon, 2009),
p. 66.
56. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 125.
Interviews with Élie During
1. Philosophy and Technics
Élie During (ÉD): Bernard Stiegler, the expression ‘philosophy of technics’, often used
to describe your work, is exact yet perhaps insufficient. It is exact since the three volumes
that you have published these last ten years as part of the series Technics and Time
are indeed books of philosophy, and their main object is technics: The Fault of
Epimetheus was first published in 1994, followed by Disorientation in 1996,
and more recently, in 2001, Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise.
It is also insufficient since ‘philosophy of technics’ does not account for the atypical
relation that you maintain with the philosophical institution. At the moment, you are
director of the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM),
before this position, you were the adjunct general director of the Institut national de
l’audiovisuel (INA) for three years, and you have also been teaching for many years
now at the University of Compiègne, which is a technological university with its own
unique model. Before beginning to teach there, you were the programme director at the
Collège internationale de philosophie (Ciph) in Paris.
Additionally, while not being an engineer yourself, you have always had a very
close relation to technics – to technological rationality, to the modes of technical
organisation, to both scientific and industrial questions of ‘technoscience’. We can see
in this a certain necessity for philosophy to maintain a philosophical relation with a
non-philosophical outside. But I think that, more deeply for you, it is also a matter of
a personal relation to technics – and this is my first question: how did you arrive, not
only to philosophy of technics, but to technics itself?
Bernard Stiegler (BS): I indeed began being interested in technics for

itself and not only as a philosophical object long before becoming a
philosopher with an interest in technics. I expressed an interest in tech-
nics and technologies long before turning to philosophy. I’ve always had
this spontaneous interest, this inclination and this curiosity for technical
objects. They always appeared to me as a kind of mystery. This perhaps
explains why in some of the oldest societies, technics and magic are one
and the same, while in Greece, technē is both the possibility of excessive-
ness [démesure], the famous ubris, as well as what we today call art.
I suppose this inclination comes from several factors that I cannot
fully refer to here – and without doubt the main ones have slipped my
mind. Among other things that appear to me as the most striking and
significant is this one: I am first the son of Robert Stiegler, a technician
and electronics engineer, who initiated me from a very young age to
these technical and technological questions, for which I later expressed
a great passion. It is without doubt this admiration for my father that
led me to read, long before my teenage years, a short book for the
general public which was also used by my father, if I remember well:
the title was La radio, mais c’est très simple! [Radio, there is nothing easier!],
and it was published before the war. I learned about the operating of
valves, pentodes and others as well as the functioning of transformers,
elements, condensers, amplifiers, beat frequency oscillators (BFOs), etc.
In short, I was introduced to everything from the invisible world of elec-
trons used to produce and receive electromagnetic waves. I met these
electronic tubes again only thirty years later, in the work of Gilbert
Simondon and the morphodynamic analyses. Then I began making
small electronic circuits such as balances, oscillators and small ensem-
bles of objects with the components that I got from my father. I was
doing this at a time before the introduction of integrated circuits and
micro-electronics, but after the time of electronic tubes. I was around
twelve years old.
The role that I have given to technics in my thought was influ-
enced by the materialist vision of the politico-philosophical thing that
I adopted in secondary school at a very young age. I joined the French
Communist Party (PCF) after 1968 when many decided to leave it for
other groups on the Left. The path I took was in the reverse direction:
I went from the extreme left-wing groupuscules to those whom I, with
my comrades, called ‘the Stalinians’, mostly because this popular party
claimed a philosophical framework to guide its actions. A thought of the
‘modes of production’ was inscribed at the heart of the Party’s theory. I
deeply admired what I believed then to be the project of allowing each
and every one to think as part of a formal consideration and a collective
theorisation: from the point of view of a philosophy exposed to both
public criticism [critique publique] and the course of things, in other words,
from the thought of work and production. I admired the existence of
Nouvelle Critique,1 where we could read Lacan rereading Freud, debat-
Philosophy and Technics 31
ing structuralism and Barthes, and that Picasso was loved by so many
workers.
Even though later on I left the Communist Party together with its
superficial materialist view, I continue to consider myself a materialist.
But I see in ordinary materialism an archaic and vulgar form of meta-
physics. I continue to belong to those who believe – after Marx – that
instruments of production play a decisive role in the mode of human
living. And of course, I’ve always thought that these very instruments of
production were above all technical organs. Yet I do not think that Marx
allows us to go far enough with this question, precisely because he fails
to think the complex relation between technics and time even when he
conceives in an essential way modern technics as a measure of time. My
current relation to philosophy is deeply affected by this Marxian ques-
tion of technics but also by this second question that is closely linked to
it: praxis as a practice of thought, as well as a thought in and of practice.
In my properly philosophical story, which started relatively late, and
somewhat by accident,2 I did not first question technics but memory
and, through Plato, anamnesis as the possibility of knowing and as the
origin of knowledge itself (what is called in a Kantian language the con-
ditions of possibility of experience). Besides, I continue to believe that
there is no other possible way to arrive at philosophy than by questioning
the origin of knowledge, which also constitutes the very possibility of
knowledge.
It was on this path of memory that I found ‘technics’: I realised much
later that technics was in fact at the heart of the philosophical question
of memory. I do not consider myself a ‘philosopher of technics’, but
rather a philosopher who contributes with others in establishing that
the philosophical question is, and is through and through, the endurance of
a condition that I call techno-logical: both technical and logical, always
already forged on the cross that forms language and tools, that is, that
allows the externalisation [extériorisation] of the human.
In my work, I attempt to show that, ever since its origin, philosophy
encounters [fait épreuve] this techno-logical condition, but by repressing and
disavowing technology. Such is the difficulty of my enterprise: to show that
philosophy begins in repressing its own question. To put it differently, my ambi-
tion is to take the philosophical question to its roots. I think that today
this is possible – not because I am the chosen one (or the damned)
to execute this mission, but because our contemporary times call for
it. Today we live in the time of technology, which emerged from the
Industrial Revolution, and so the question of technics is raised anew, as

everyone can now perceive.
However, the history of metaphysics as well as the quasi-totality of
academic philosophy is marked by the ignorance of this question. Due
to this ignorance, a large part of academic philosophy therefore remains
abstract and isolated from the becoming of the world; it is cut off from
the world.
The fact that, from Plato onwards, the relation between philosophy
and technics manifests itself essentially, originally and durably as a con-
flict is only one part of the story. Indeed, after the nineteenth century,
the situation becomes more complex: with industrialisation, technics
comes closer to science (and becomes technology sensu stricto), and the
world composed of those we now call ‘the intellectuals’ distances itself
from technics that turned into technology, from science, from economy,
and, eventually, from political economy.
This established relation – or, to be more precise, this non-relation
– is terrible: of course one can find exceptions; the picture is not all
dark. At the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of this
twenty-first century, we can often hear philosophers say, either with
fright or with complacency, with an enjoyment close to that of Mr
Homais in Madame Bovary, ‘Personally, I have never understood a thing
about technics’, which is another way to claim ‘and I will never do anything
to understand it even a little’. ‘I have a computer and a mobile phone,
and I absolutely don’t understand how they function’: we often hear this,
expressing self-gratitude which is entirely stupid and, to some degree,
miserable. As if we could ever feel proud of not understanding how a system
functions. How can we claim to understand anything about Hegel if we
do not feel capable of understanding the functioning of a diode? Hegel,
who himself wrote on electricity, would have undoubtedly found this
ludicrous.3 Technics and technology are often subject to these kinds of
clichés, although of course at times they are expressed in a more sophis-
ticated manner, but nonetheless for me they appear as small symptoms
(as Freud speaks of ‘small differences’) of the disavowal and repression
of the question of technics – which is itself the originary question of
philosophical thought. Philosophy has never ceased to think technics in
the negative form (and maybe, without knowing it, as the negative per
se, or even as the negative of the negative – in all the diverse senses that
this word can have). But its non-thought becomes today both evident
and manifestly desolating; it is the sign of a tragic powerlessness [impuis-
sance], if not a great impertinence, that sometimes takes a hysterical and

perfectly untenable shape.
Amongst these clichés, there is a firm belief that knowledge of the
functioning of an automobile motor is not required in order to know
how to drive it, and, more generally, that we do not need to know what
is happening in technics to know how to think. Yet this cliché overlooks
the question of knowing what it means to drive. Obviously, one can get
into one’s car to drive just like any other driver on a Sunday, and this
is how I personally drive. But to really drive is not only this. Driving
an automobile, regardless of one’s use, requires to account for its full
capacities: whether one can drive, for instance, at 250 kph with a vehicle
without breaking this vehicle and killing oneself. This phantasm of speed
and power is without a doubt responsible for many accidents and behav-
iours that are intolerable and degrading for those behaving this way
– these consumers of the automobile industry are highly representative
of the contemporary degradation of all being-together [être-ensemble].
But precisely, besides thinking of driving as a way to produce phantasms,
driving at the limits of the machine should also be thought indepen-
dently of these phantasmic dimensions. The machine is primarily the
opening of new possibles, and it is always in relation to this opening that
it is in use – even for those who, like me and like most people, live in
the mediocre average of those possibles. To put it differently, thinking
‘driving’ is knowing that driving also includes the possibility of carrying
the machine to its limits and therefore, one way or another, being familiar
with these limits in theory. Consequently, one should know what happens
in the motor.
To philosophise is always, one way or another, ‘to carry the machine
to its limits’, and this should be understood not only metaphorically. To
philosophise is always to desire to go to the limits of questions – to their
originary limits, that is, to the root of questions. Radical thinking intends
to uncover the root of things, and during my own philosophical journey
I thought I found technics as this root. And with it, the machine.
Rather than taking questions by their roots, we can take them by
their ends (by their purposes [motifs], these last extremities). We can
argue, like Aristotle, that the end is already contained in the origin. In
this sense, conducting a radical analysis of what constitutes the origin
of a being also tells us something about its end, since, after all, both the
origin and the end make up the essence of this being – what makes it
identical across time. To use reason this way is to miss the problem of
time and becoming (besides, time does not only equate to becoming).
Contrary to Aristotle and to all metaphysics – to all ‘onto-theology’, as
we call it after Heidegger – I believe that an accidental process takes
place between the origin and the end; we cannot speak only of an essential process
for there are occurrences that disturb the metaphysical illusion that the end is already
there in the origin. Philosophy should learn how to think this accidentality (together
with its genealogy).
Yet this accidentality is precisely the first sense of technics – which
I also refer to as prostheticity. We can attempt to think this way with
Aristotle as well: the ‘prime unmoved mover’ (God) is for him the end as
motive [motif], that is, reason (of all things). Therefore, the movement, and
the accidental journey [parcours] that it consists in, would be what counts
the most, together with the traces produced, since the mover is acciden-
tal (accidents are at the origin of scars that are traces and marks) and
these traces are also linked as traumas, phantasms and fetishes to the ‘prime
motor’ that is the determinant of desire.
ÉD: We are now in metaphysics. But we are also about to break the circle that it makes
together with its critique – without having to produce a difficult critique of critique. By
following you, it would seem that we need to radically raise the problems, but only once
we have changed our mind about what ‘radical’, ‘the origin’ and ‘originary’ mean.
Yet, you explained that a radical thought could only go to its limits by interrogating
the limits of the machine, by carrying the technical dispositive to its limits – instead
of tracing in an a priori manner the split between the mechanical and what exceeds it,
or envisaging the meaning of technics only in relation to the essential or constitutive
role it plays in the destiny of metaphysics. This idea or demand for a radical thought
is striking in your work. It is as if your books are marked by a tension between this
singular interest that you have in technics and what traditional philosophy pretends to
say about it. Behind technics as a fact, there is what technics does and what is at stake
concretely: in your view, this is what it means to think. Yet, paradoxically, this concern
is translated in your writing as a certain technicity or technicality that is not linked
to the specificity of the vocabulary of technics itself, but to a properly philosophical
technicality. There is a rigour in the conceptual elaboration, the necessity of reworking
concepts and therefore using language itself to displace and recover certain problems,
but in a radical way. This comes into play concretely in the invention or the borrowing
of neologisms (earlier you mentioned ‘prostheticity’), but also in your close dialogues
with Husserl’s phenomenology, in your commentary on On the Phenomenology
of the Consciousness of Internal Time,4 or the rereading of Critique of
Pure Reason and the three syntheses of the ‘Transcendental Analytics’, or in the
play of constant references to the Greek tradition, to the Heideggerian analyses, etc. A
superficial reading would give the impression of a ‘hyperphilosophical’ approach that,
in order to push the limits of technics, would have to re-interrogate the history and the
foundation of the entire philosophical tradition. The question that should then be raised
is how it is possible to relate to technics, its singularities and its accidental nature,
while producing at the same time a discourse that is much more classically philosophi-
cal than for instance Simondon, who wanted to follow the internal dialectic of technics
by cultivating a certain distrust regarding all things that could take the shape of a
‘philosophising’ philosophy of technics. Maybe this is not a paradox, but this first
image allows us to get a better sense of how these two threads are tied in your work: the
interest in technics and the work of philosophical memory.
BS: I am interested in grounding again and entirely the question of tech-

nics. Entirely, since I consider the philosophical question is the question
of technics. I do not write a philosophy of technics like those who write
on the philosophy of art, moral philosophy or political philosophy, as
regions of knowledge belonging to a broader and more general philo-
sophical knowledge. Technics for me is not a regional object, but a
philosophical object in itself. I raise the question of technics as the philo-
sophical question, and from this point of view I am in a hyperphilosophy. I
attempt to elaborate once again, and in full, the philosophical question,
and therefore to revisit in the most general way the founding concepts
of philosophical thought in their entirety, but always on the basis of the
technical question. I consider this project an uncovering of a forgotten
origin of all these questions, and also my question is what I call the default
of origin. This is what leads me to readings that are technical, philosophi-
cally speaking. Lately I undertook very close line-by-line readings of
Kant, at the moment I am reading Plato again, and in the past it was
Heidegger and Husserl.
Yet these reading experiences are often, and maybe even always,
founded directly or indirectly on technical or technological experiences.
Questions about prehistory had as much of a crucial role in my thought
as works on extremely recent technologies, undertaken at the univer-
sity of Compiègne. I organised there, around 1992, a seminar that
joined these questions; it was called ‘From the Flint to the Hypertext’,
and it was intended for an audience specialised in artificial intelligence.
My research into prehistory led to a collaboration with a team that
was close to the palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan. This team
conducted what is known as experimental technology: reconstituting
in a laboratory the gestures of carving a flint and, with these gestures,

gaining access to human worlds (in this specific case, the Neanderthal
world). These sorts of things led to a problematisation of technics from
an anthropological point of view, and this has partly fed into the ideas
I developed in Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, when
I was attempting a new reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time. But I
also undertook, around the same time, research on digital technology
applied to the text when I conducted the exhibition Memories of the Future
at the Georges Pompidou Centre in 1987. Around 1990, I worked on a
system of computer-assisted reading with the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, in collaboration with the University of Compiègne. I drew on
these works when I wrote Technics and Time, Vol. 2: Disorientation.
But this is also true for the book on Kant, Technics and Time, Vol. 3:
Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, which was conceived when I
was directing the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA). This posi-
tion allowed me to think the industrial problems linked to television,
digitisation and cultural industries, and the relation between television
and society. This forced me to problematise the politics of industry, the
role of politics vis-à-vis cultural industries, and to confront the emerging
technoscientific problems linked to the future of images in their digital
form. To think thoroughly the future of images requires us to revisit
the Kantian question of the schematism and the three syntheses of
imagination.
ÉD: But, once again, how can we make sure that this radical questioning of technics
does not entirely fall back into questioning the relation of philosophy itself with tech-
nics, and therefore producing more philosophy from philosophy? You mentioned the
significance of technical experiences for thinking technics. But philosophers are lazy,
like everyone; they do not always want to take the time to really learn about technics.
Some even feel a form of paradoxical enjoyment in not getting interested in technics;
they even sometimes consider this lack of knowledge of the workings of machines (a
computer or a fax machine) as a sign of distinction. This behaviour is perhaps encour-
aged by the university-based habitus. Beyond the anecdotal, this brings us back to
the interesting problem of the philosophy symptom regarding technics: this tension or
complex has been expressed ever since the origin of philosophy, and has revealed itself at
times more violently than other times, by repressing technē itself in all its forms. This
problem was raised in the twentieth century with Heidegger, for example, who envis-
aged a radical thought of technics only from the history of being, and he was therefore
condemned to miss the specific determination of technics, in their diversity.
BS: In a certain way, the process of repressing the question of technics

by philosophy has increased all the more today, now that we live in an
outburst of technical forces, an outburst of ‘impersonal forces’, using
Blanchot’s terms. Reactive forces produce this outburst; I refer to ‘reac-
tive’ in Nietzsche’s sense, which strangely echoes the motto of ‘being
reactive’ used by managers in private companies. This extraordinary
acceleration of technical development, which has become technologi-
cal, produces today, in the totality of the world’s population, a feeling of
huge disorientation.
Yet I believe that if we want to evaluate this contemporary situation
of disorientation – and how, by becoming technology, technics plays a
dominant role – the birth of philosophy should be reinterpreted from
the point of view of the appearance of technicity in Greek thought. It is
worth noting that this question is particularly an Athenian question, and
that by ‘birth of philosophy’ I mean the appearance of Plato as a figure.
Plato is the one who makes Socrates, his master, speak. In my view,
Socrates is not yet part of philosophy – he is there at the beginning, but
he is still in what is not yet philosophy: he remains a tragic, he is standing
in between the tragic era and the philosophical one. On this particular
point, I believe that Nietzsche made a mistake. To put it differently,
Socrates is still very close to the pre-Socratics, the poet-thinkers who are
above all city-state founders. It is crucial to note that these first tragic think-
ers are jurists as well as poets, and they expressed themselves poetically
and produced this singular experience of language for an essential reason:
it is from this poetry that they think the foundation of their city-states,
while also being concerned by the simplicity of geometrical evidence –
they are mathematicians, geometricians, as much as poets.
In the case of Socrates, we can never affirm with enough strength and
resonance that he claims an experience of the shaman that is constantly
occulted by Plato (except in the wonderful dialogue Symposium). He is by
himself a turning point in history.
Philosophy sensu stricto is Plato, manifestly inspired by Plato; unlike
Nietzsche, who believed that Socrates led to the exit from the tragic
era, I believe that it is Plato who made this gesture, at the same time
that he occulted Socrates’ thought. Philosophy then begins both in this
withdrawal [effacement] and in the condemnation of technics identified as
sophism: it is, however, one and the same gesture.
One of the great tasks of our time remains to exhume Socrates’
speech from its burying by metaphysics, which was born with Plato.5
Philosophy began as metaphysics – and for me, metaphysics is an origi-

nary occultation that leads the critical position to ineluctably turn sour,
much like milk – in a dogmatism grounded on simple oppositions, by
reducing the elementary complexity where the element is not only ‘simple’
precisely because it is always already ‘supplementary’,6 that is, technical,
or ‘prosthetic’.7
Plato and philosophy appeared at a time of deep crisis in the Greek
city-state. During this time, sophists appeared, and these figures embod-
ied the essence of the crisis (but this crisis cannot only be reduced to
them; there are, of course, many other elements to take into consid-
eration, such as monetary factors). According to Plato, with sophists,
the idle talk of those who know everything reigned; they were ‘poly-
maths’ (or polytechnicians8) to whom Socrates soon opposed his non-
knowledge, his default of knowledge from which Diotima, in Symposium,
draws the very principle of philosophy as love and gift of what she does
not have: knowledge.
The Greek city-state, emerging between the seventh and sixth cen-
turies bc, transfers the polemos of arms to language itself: the conflictual
relations between individuals become relations of language, and they
are played out (as much as possible) in the universe of symbols. The city-
state is the takeover of the human community by logos: it is a real passion
for logos, speech as an experience of thought, and a thought that is intrin-
sically tied to the question of collective decision. Thought is therefore
essentially, as a passionate experience of speech, and even when it is a
geometrical speech, the thought of being-togetherness [l’être ensemble].
We cannot understand anything of this period if we forget that Thales
practises geometry while founding a city-state, and that all this was only
possible thanks to a fundamental and primordial passion for language,
which was first of all poetic language (and, against all expectations, logic
proceeds from this poetics; this is what Parmenides means). As Jean-
Pierre Vernant has taught us, this poetic language was closely linked to
its writing: the alphabet that we continue to use today was invented at
that time.
From Thales to Socrates, Greece was in the tragic era, produc-
ing Hesiod’s poetry, Aeschylus’ great tragedy, the pre-Socratics and
Sophocles. But, at the end of these two centuries, a crisis took place, and
it was from this crisis that the figure of the sophist emerged. Finding the
path of a new truth (that is, a good decision) in the experience of lan-
guage was less central to the sophist than using the language with skill,
as a device of domination to control the spirits of the city-state, to seize

power in the city-state (with an effective decision). Here, the poeticity of
language, in this case rhetoric, became a technicity of the pithanon: the
force of persuasion, the control of the doxa, the manipulation of public
opinion.
Plato and Socrates identify this change that occurred in speech as a
technicisation of language and thought, but they also perceive in this
technicisation a destruction. For the philosopher, the technician who
undoubtedly has knowledge – that we now call ‘know-how’ or savoir-faire
but that the Greeks at that time called technē – cannot explain this know-
how. The sophist only had a kind of false knowledge that generated
shams [faux-semblants], even though it appeared as real knowledge due
to its efficiency. This real knowledge was considered dangerous given
its limitlessness and excessiveness [démesure] and self-confidence – the
famous hubris. Even though it was real, it could not have been true since
it was unlimited.
However, hubris haunted the city-state long before the sophists; it
is at the very heart of the tragic experience (and it is still at the heart
of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King). Hubris was without a doubt, for Greek
tragedy, irreducibly there as a destiny or as an originary condition that
needed to be contained but that could not be avoided. With Plato and
philosophy, the question of excessiveness becomes the question of tech-
nics, artifice in general, mimēsis, art, poetry and music, since, to him, all
this belonged to the technical savoir-faire (this leads him to condemn the
poetic language of the pre-Socratics). And to be overcome, this immod-
eration [démesure] needed to be subjected to a moderation [mesure]: the
moderation of the Idea.
ÉD: It is therefore the excessiveness of language that disquiets philosophy and puts
it in danger. Yet this is also translated paradoxically as a possibility to enrol and
instrumentalise language . . .
BS: Once the sophists seized language, such an excessiveness turned

language into the milieu of insignificance, the overwhelming ordinary idle
talk finally leading to scepticism, disappointment and cynicism. This was
not a moment in philosophy but the sinking of the common (what is
the most precious for the city-state) into vanity. At the beginning of the
Greek experience of speech, at the beginning of the polis, language was
on the contrary the experience of discovery, the famous wonder that
Aristotle would later raise as the philosophical posture par excellence,

but also of affect and knowledge, that is above all the desire for knowledge
and knowledge as the essential fruit of desire, a knowledge which is in a
way delightful [savoureux].9
The technical question was raised this way at the origin of philosophy,
with Plato’s discourse: in denouncing a sophistic becoming of speech.
But, in fact, it was not presented as the technical question as such. It was
presented both as a question of rhetoric, in denouncing the rhetorical
usage of language by the sophist (particularly in Gorgias), and, above all,
as the question that Plato calls hypomnesis, that is, the technical memory.10
Hypomnesis means ‘artificial memory’. Yet anyone who studied even a
little philosophy in secondary school would know that the great Platonic
question is that of reminiscence, or, in Greek, anamnesis. They would
have also heard of the famous dialogue, Meno, in which Socrates discusses
with a young Athenian slave (Meno): Meno is on his way to a class given
by a sophist, where he hopes to learn ‘to be virtuous’. Socrates interrupts
his walk and roughly tells him this: ‘Are you sure that it is worth your
time and your money to go listen to a sophist telling you what is virtue?
Before getting there, let us try first, you and I, to think together, by our-
selves and without any “generally accepted idea”, without pretending to
know already what virtue is, without claiming any knowledge, and even
in affirming a non-knowledge, let us make an effort to dialogue, in other
words to use dialectics, to think together what is virtue.’
Meno, who is honest and respectable, agrees to participate in this
exercise and suggests examples of virtue through examples of virtuous
people.11 But Socrates tells him that precisely every time that he takes
the part for the whole, that is, he reduces virtue to one of these cases, on
the contrary the unity of these cases should be found. This unity cannot
be an empirical example and, in all logic, it should therefore precede the
diversity of all the possible cases of virtue. To put it differently, virtue (the
unity of all the cases of being virtuous) is not a reality that can be found
by itself in experience. Hence, it is about searching for what cannot be found in
experience: searching for an a priori essence. The discourse on being and
its essences, or ontology, is invented in this manner; it constitutes the
basis of – what Kant calls in the eighteenth century – the transcendental.
Socrates puts forward his method (dialectics) to attempt to find
what is virtue, that is, to define the essence of virtue. All of a sudden,
Meno interrupts him to say something along these lines: ‘But my dear
Socrates, you are not in earnest. There are two possibilities: either you
do not know what virtue is and, if such a thing is possible and we find
it, you will not recognise it. You will let it pass by without knowing that
you found it. Or, in the case that you will in fact recognise it, this means
that you had known it already. Therefore, you were not really looking
for it. You were pretending to search for it.’ This is an extraordinary
and famous aporia; it is known in the philosophical tradition as Meno’s
aporia, and it gives expression to the radical scepticism that many soph-
ists used.
I believe that it is in front of this aporia that Socrates recognises the
true dimension of thinking (since we begin to think from this sceptical
moment), but also the most dangerous dimension of thinking: if we allow
ourselves to remain in this sceptical moment, we cease to think even
before having really started to think. We need to find the resources to
overcome this moment. In front of this power of thought that can make
thought powerless, Socrates answers with a myth. He introduces the
myth of Persephone:12 ‘You are right, Meno, your discourse is entirely
coherent and I cannot be against what you have just said. In fact, if I
recognise virtue, this means that I already knew it: I knew it in a previous
life, but I have forgotten it.’ Anamnesis is in fact a recognition.
Later on, in Phaedrus, Plato made Socrates say that his soul, in this
previous life, did not have a body – also was even less surrounded by
prostheses or artifices – and therefore had a direct contact with truth.
Instead, the soul has forgotten everything when falling on Earth, into
the body (soma) that is also sema, the prison. The original fall of the soul
into the body is also the fall of the knowledge of essences (and the unity
of being that they make up) into the world of becoming and multiplicity,
the world of matter and therefore the world of passion and corruption.
The opposition between the soul and the body begins.
It should be emphasised that the world of becoming is the world
of technics, for the Greeks. The philosopher reproached technics for
expressing the ineluctable development of the unstable and contingent
becoming, while he himself is searching for the world of stability, being,
ideal identities and enduring essences. Plato first discovered in Meno the
question of anamnesis, which designates the remembering [ressouvenir]
of forgotten essences, awakened by the exercise of dialectics. And in
Phaedrus, this question is taken up again, but Socrates warns Phaedrus
against the dangers of hypomnesis, that is, technical or prosthetic memory
– a memory that is aided by writing. Here, hypomnesis is both technics and
the cause of oblivion, but it is also the cause of lies and manipulation.
At this point, aletheia (truth) and anamnesis (reminiscence) become

almost synonymous. It is also why Heidegger allowed himself to translate
a-letheia as ‘unconcealedness’, ‘unconcealment’ or ‘clearing’, translating
a as the negative of the root lethe, ‘oblivion’.13 Truth is reminiscence.
But forgetfulness engenders lies, and falsehood is the fruit of technics
(hypomnesis).
In the myth of Epimetheus, told in Protagoras, it is striking to observe
that, on the contrary, technics comes to the rescue of forgetfulness [oubli].
In attempting to oppose the vision of the sophist Protagoras, Plato estab-
lishes between Meno and Phaedrus a chain of correspondences between
becoming, technics, oblivion and trickery, opposed to the chain of living
memory, being and truth.
This is what leads me to articulate the question of memory and tech-
nics and to attempt to rethink the problem of time from this position: to
affirm, against Plato, that memory is originally technically constituted.
Notes
1. Monthly review of the French Communist Party.
2. See Bernard Stiegler, ‘How I Became a Philosopher’, in Acting Out,
trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross and Patrick Crogan (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–35. At the time that these
interviews with Élie During took place, Acting Out (first published in
2003) had not yet been published, therefore my philosophical path –
which began in the Saint-Michel prison in Toulouse in 1978 – could
not have been known. I could not have talked about this in these inter-
views: it seemed to me indecent to introduce in this setting, through a
radiophonic programme and the sensational comments that can come
with it, the singular narrative of a philosophical story that is, like all
philosophy, intimately existential. Yet this philosophical story, as I have
lived it, from its origin until today, is the question of accident, and the
acting out [passage à l’acte] as accident. I have called this accident ever
since 1983, my first interpretation of the myth of Epimetheus, the default
of origin. This is why, when Élie During and I talked for the first time
about this project of interviews, I told him this particular episode of my
life, since it seemed impossible not to talk about it, and I also did not
hesitate to share this information given the trust that he showed me: this
narrative was immediate and with no return. But I also told him that
I did not want him to ask during the interviews about the origin of my
relation to philosophy and my practice as a philosopher, but all this is

now known. I would have rather explained all this in another setting,
when I could have in front of me an audience, who could address me
personally. A few weeks later, I gave the conference ‘How I Became a
Philosopher’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
3. While Hegel did not allow for a new thought of technics, nonetheless he
asked for the first time the question of exteriority in a way that engen-
dered a new manner of interrogating technics. I inherit this particular
point from Hegel.
4. Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, Vol. 4: On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Bernet, trans. John
Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
5. I will devote a part of the forthcoming fourth volume of Technics and
Time, Symbols and Diabols, or the War of Spirits, to this project.
6. I owe this word, this critique of oppositional schemes and many other
things to Jacques Derrida.
7. This is not exactly Jacques Derrida’s point of view; undoubtedly we
diverge on this central point.
8. [Trans.] Stiegler is here referring to the elite French higher education
institution for engineering, École Polytechnique; students and alumni of
this School are called polytechniciens.
9. [Trans.] Stiegler is playing on the proximity of savoir (knowledge) and
saveur (savour). Roland Barthes also noted in his Collège de France
inaugural lecture in January 1977 that these two words in French share
the same Latin root. Roland Barthes, A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan
Sontag (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 464.
10. On these questions of insignificance and hypomnesis, see respectively
Stiegler, Acting Out, pp. 26–8, 15–16.
11. Plato, ‘Meno’, in Meno and Other Dialogues, trans. Robin Waterfield
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79a–80e, pp. 110–13.
12. [Trans.] See Bernard Stiegler, ‘Perséphone, Œdipe, Epimethée’,
Tekhnema, 3 (1996), pp. 69–112, and Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The
Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 97–8. Also called Korē
(the young girl), Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter in
Greek mythology. One day, the God-king of the underworld, Hades,
who was enchanted by her, opened the earth and abducted her. From
then on, she is said to spend half of the year in the underworld and the
rest on earth. Hence the myth of her abduction represents the cycle of
vegetation, coming out for spring and withdrawing in Hades after the
harvest (realised by her mother Demeter).
13. [Trans.] Stiegler takes this important element from Heidegger’s
reading of Plato. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, in
Pathmarks, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), pp. 155–82. See also Bernard Stiegler, Technics and
Time, Vol. 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008), pp. 32–5.
2. Technics as Memory
ÉD: After explaining your relation to technics, and more broadly the complex rela-
tion that philosophy has with technics, it might be useful to orient ourselves in your
work by following the central question of trace, inscription and materialised memory.
Continuing with the reference to Meno, Plato presents through Socrates a demonstra-
tion of the reminiscence thesis. He allows Meno the slave to rediscover or recollect a
truth by the simple play of the dialogue, or what is also called the dialectical method.
He invites the young slave to find once again the solution to a geometrical problem in
tracing figures in the sand, in other words, to find again in the inscription the trace of a
truth that he had forgotten. Was it the question of trace contained in this dialogue that
led to your own work on technics as memory?
BS: It was indeed by reflecting on this second important moment in

Meno that I began to formulate what was my working hypothesis [mon
hypothèse de travail] and became, strictly speaking, a thesis.1 In this second
moment, Socrates tries to demonstrate that every time I come to know
something, I, in fact, recollect it, I find it again in myself and by myself.
This introduces a major thesis: the only knowledge that exists is produced by
the one who enunciates it and it can never be received from the outside. Again, this
is the question of the transcendental that was raised some two millen-
nia before the invention of the word (by Kant), but it is above all the
philosophical position par excellence: no idea can be received; it should
be conceived by the person who inhabits it; concept has no other meaning.
In analysing this second moment, I was therefore struck by the role
of drawing and by the necessity of graphein (‘to inscribe, to write, to
draw’) that I formulated in my hypothesis. Plato does not say anything
about graphein; he simply accepts it as a given, even though it is already
a hypomnesis.2
This thesis is my Ariadne’s thread in the maze [dédale] that I have been
following for the last twenty-five years: memory is always hypomnesic or
technical, even when it is living memory. Anamnesis (reminiscence) is

always supported and inhabited by a hypomnesis (a mnemotechnics), but
most of the time this happens in an occult manner since this hypomnesis
has become ‘naturalised’: in erasing the technicity, the facticity, the
prostheticity and the historicity, and in becoming a ‘second nature’,
memory cannot be perceived – in the same way that a fish cannot see
the water, even though it is its element.
I am of course here referring to human memory. In conducting the
demonstration with a slave, Plato wants to show that every human is
potentially a philosophising being – even though most of the time his
being is not actually philosophising. I am in complete agreement with
Plato on this point. But, contrary to Plato, I believe that we are poten-
tially philosophising to the extent that we are endowed with precisely an
artificial memory that supports the transmission of questions from generation
to generation. This is made possible since it allows the materialisation of
time, its spacing and its spatialisation, its preservation, its reactivation,
its retemporalisation, its retransmission or its reconstitution, which is
also and more generally its re-elaboration and its transformation (what
Jacques Derrida calls its différance) – through which knowledge ‘is pro-
gressing’ and ‘spirit’ deploys its historicity. I use ‘spirit’ here in the sense
that knowledge is constituted by a primordial return [une revenance]; but I
refer also to the materialisation of time as a condition of this spirit and, in
this sense, I continue to consider myself a materialist. It is undoubtedly
an atypical materialism: it is a kind of ‘spiritualist’ materialism. This
‘spiritualist’ materialism does not claim that the spirit/mind [esprit] is
reducible to matter, but that matter is the condition of spirit, in all the
nuances of the word ‘condition’.
In order to ‘reconstitute’ or to re-member geometrical reasoning,
Meno the slave has to trace a figure, that is, to externalise the problem. In
my work, I have attempted to show that this necessity of externalisation
that seems trivial is already contained in everything that I have said. It
is all this content that I have tried to formulate, always in reading and
rereading Plato, always coming back to him, and, as I told you earlier,
I am currently writing a book on Plato and Socrates. Besides, the title
of my Masters dissertation [maîtrise] was ‘Capitalism, Cybernetics and
Textuality’. In this early text, I tried to show that Plato, as the thinker of
the head against the body, was the first great thinker of capital (against
work, that is, praxis), and, paradoxically, he programmed with his meta-
physics the cybernetic project, when cybernetics means the science of
Technics as Memory 47
government,3 or, in today’s vocabulary, management and logistics. He

programmed it particularly by trying to eliminate the idiomatic charac-
ter of language and the corporeality of thought.
Everything that I have written and have published since 1994 is an
attempt to introduce a text, of which I wrote a first draft around 1980,
and that I reformulated in 1992 as the last part of my doctoral thesis.
This text is therefore my starting point and, eventually, the only thing
that I am really interested in publishing (and which should become
the fifth and last volume of the Technics and Time series). I wrote its first
version at the time when I was already working on Plato. If I have not
yet published it, it is precisely because the four preceding volumes are
required to make this last work accessible. This fourth volume is pre-
cisely devoted to Plato (but also to Freud and Derrida); all this is due
to the fact that my ‘discussion’ [explication]4 with Plato is essential to my
goal.
Yet the question that I initially explore in Platonism and the birth of
philosophy – memory – only became a question of technics per se, and
not only that of hypomnesis, when one day I read Protagoras and began
to meditate a myth narrated by the sophist Protagoras to his friend
Socrates. It is the myth of Epimetheus; I believe that the central question
of this particular dialogue is to know who can partake in the political
decision, and what is political wisdom or knowledge – if there is such a
thing.
Protagoras revisits the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus, in a
version inspired by both Hesiod and Aeschylus, to support his thesis that
anyone can have access to political knowledge. He recounts that one
day Zeus asked Prometheus the titan, and Prometheus’ twin brother,
Epimetheus, to ‘bring [the mortal] out into the light of day’:5 animals
and ourselves, humans. As Prometheus is set to do this, Zeus decides to
give him for this task dunameis, ‘qualities’ or, literally, potentialities [puis-
sances], which give shape to the unformed clay, giving the light of day to
these beings that we are, humans, but also to animals.
Yet Epimetheus asks his brother to let him ‘distribute’ the dunameis,
and Prometheus allows his brother. Epimetheus is often distracted and
does things all too quickly; he is a kind of rash fool [gribrouille] who
commits all sorts of stupidities. But he meditates afterwards, and this
eventually gives him a form of knowledge: the knowledge of experience
acquired by those who had a life filled with errors, ended up recognising
those errors, and, above all, took time to meditate over them. Eventually
they end up becoming ‘savants’ – as the adjective epimethes means in

Ancient Greek.
In distributing all the qualities that Zeus confides to him, Epimetheus
finally notices that he forgot us, the mortals, those that we call ‘humans’
(but the Greeks preferred the mortals, since they referred to gods as the
immortals). After giving other species their qualities, Epimetheus forgets
to give light to mortals, being left with no qualities to attribute that will
give them form. He does not have any more dunameis in the basket he
is using for the distribution (moira). He confesses to his brother that he
has committed a serious mistake [faute]: an oblivion. Prometheus goes to
Olympia to make another mistake: to steal technai from Hephaestus and
Athena to give to the mortals, in order to fill in [suppléer] their default of
quality, but this also means that the destiny of the mortals is precisely to
remain prosthetic and without qualities.
Mortals are beings without qualities, contrary to animals, to whom
qualities were distributed: Plato describes how an equilibrium was pro-
gressively established between the species – to some velocity, to others
strength, etc.
Since they have no qualities but those by default established prostheti-
cally, so unlike animals, mortals are condemned to incessantly search for
their fate, or, in other words, for their time. This temporality is founded
on this fact: the origin of the mortals is a default of origin, therefore the
mortals have no origin. Humans are in a certain way only by default; they
are only what they become. But we will see how this myth claims that
this default of origin can and should be raised to its de jure status: how
this default can be necessary [qu’il faille ce défaut], how this default can
become what is needed [ce qu’il faut] – what is needed like the law.
By being without qualities and by not agreeing about their ends, these
failing beings go to war against one another until Zeus realises that they
are threatening each other and are about to self-destruct. Thus Zeus
asks Hermes to compensate the default of qualities by inscribing in their
soul two feelings: dikē and aidos. Dikē is justice. Aidos is often translated
as ‘modesty’ or ‘shame’ but also as ‘honour’, though undoubtedly it
also means ‘reserve’ or ‘restraint’; it is almost synonymous with metron,
‘measure’. Nietzsche translated as ‘shame’ what I would instead call the
feeling of finitude, the experience of mortality, or rather the experience
of non-immortality, of radical fragility. This essential dwelling between
the error and the fall [la chute] is what Heidegger calls ‘facticity’, but also
the feeling of vanity, decay or decline (Verfallen).
Aidos would be a knowledge of the limits. I call this ‘reserve’ [vergogne].6

The human is a being without limits, since he is a thief, an artificial
being, a being of trickery, mimēsis and technics. For this reason, Zeus
gives humans a feeling of limits, which can only be assigned positively,
by itself – and not only as a feeling – by exercising dikē and aidos, without
having assigned any rules to them in advance. The human can only
assign himself his limits with the interpretation of the law. This interpreta-
tion, which is a juridical and ethical question, is not arbitrary, and it can
never be given in advance. The law is neither a rule nor a regulation but
above all a question, which should be interpreted.
Not only does Hermes bring to mortals the feelings of dikē and aidos
but he is also the god of writing. The passion for logos that I spoke about
earlier was born with writing, and eventually the question of hermeneia,
interpretation, is at the heart of the philosophical question.
The question of interpretation is a question of time, and this myth
shows that time is made of decisions and interpretations, thus beginning
from an originary technicity or a prostheticity, that is, a default of origin.
Human beings are guileful [artificieux] and technical since they do not
find their being inside themselves but in the milieu composed of prostheses
that they make and invent. This means that humans are free and des-
tined to wander; this is what I called the originary disorientation. They
have to invent their being-there, their existence. This is why Heidegger
calls the ‘to-be’ (Zu-sein) the freedom or the responsibility of the self. But
contrary to Heidegger’s point of view, it is not alienated but constituted by
technics, and made possible by technicity.
This mythological formulation finds an extraordinary scientific coun-
terpart in André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, published in two
volumes in 1964 and 1965.7 This magnum opus is taken from the human
prehistorical and palaeontological works that Leroi-Gourhan conducted
after working for a long time in ethnography, especially in ethnography
of technics mainly in the Pacific and in the Orient. It is from explor-
ing these questions of ethnography of technics that he was led to study
human fossils. Nowadays, he is mostly known as a prehistorian, and he
worked particularly on the consequences of the discovery of what we
called at that time Zinjanthropus, from 1959 in South Africa by Mary
and Louis Leakey.
The Zinjanthropus is an Australopithecus, dated at 1.75 million years
– and whose bipedal ascendants could go back to 3.6 million years.
She weighs thirty kilos and is a real biped: she has an occipital hole
exactly perpendicular to the tip of her skull. She has freed her anterior
members of motivity, and they are now essentially devoted to making
and expressing, or generally for externalisation. Her skeleton was found
with her tools in the Olduvai Gorge. It is from these facts that Leroi-
Gourhan shows what makes the human a rupture in the history of
life: the apparition of a new type of living being. We call this progres-
sive apparition a process of ‘hominisation’. The humanity of humans
is, for Leroi-Gourhan, a process of technical externalisation of the living. In
other words, something that until now belonged to the living has moved
outside the realm of the living, for instance, the conditions of predation
and defence, like the struggle for life – although this last point is under-
developed in Leroi-Gourhan; this is why I have emphasised this point in
my work more strongly than him.8 The human is a being who conducts
his struggle for the life of non-biological organs, since technics is made
of artificial organs.
Another argument that Leroi-Gourhan raises, and this is crucial, is that
he shows that technics is a vector of memory. From the Australopithecus
to the Neanderthal, we have moved from the split pebble that we make
by hitting a pebble with another pebble to get a splinter, to the hundreds
of types of objects from the Neanderthal times. While for the former tool
we get a sharp spike in a few gestures (but a great technicity is already
required to get a splinter), in the latter group of tools the most successful
are true jewellery of flint, requiring hundreds of series of gestures that
make up vast operational sequences and constituting a technicity of an
extremely refined craftsmanship, from three hundred thousand years
ago.
A biological differentiation is produced between the Australopithecus
and the Neanderthals at the level of the cerebral cortex: this is what we
call the opening of the cortical fan [l’évantail cortical]. But it is with the
Neanderthal, Leroi-Gourhan argues, that the cortical system has almost
stopped its evolution. This means that the neuronal equipment of the
Neanderthal is quite similar to ours. Yet, even since the Neanderthal,
technics has evolved immensely. This means that the technical evolu-
tion no longer depends on biological evolution.9 The technical concept
is not inscribed in advance in the biological brain. In this sense, we can
argue that ‘hominisation’ is a process of externalisation: the space of
differentiation is produced outside and independently of the strictly bio-
logical space, outside the ‘interior milieu’ in which, according to Claude
Bernard, the constitutive elements of the organism are immersed.
Yet this process of externalisation is also the process of constitution

of what I call the third layer of memory. Since the neo-Darwinian
molecular biologists, and after the works of August Weismann at the
end of the nineteenth century, it is accepted that human sexual beings
are constituted of two memories: the memory of the species that we now
call the genome, and that Weismann called the germen, and the memory
of the individual, that is, the so-called somatic memory, preserved in
the central nervous system, which is also the memory of experience.
This exists from the great pond snails from Geneva’s lake studied by
Piaget10 all the way to chimpanzees, and, in between, insects and all the
vertebrates. It is for this reason that we can train [dresser] a dog, a hawk
or a cow: since there is a margin of indetermination in the individual
memory, there is neuronal plasticity that makes learning possible. But
in human beings, there is a third memory that animals do not have:
technics that both supports and constitutes this third memory. A sharp-
ened flint is a form in an inorganic matter that is nevertheless organised
by sharpening it: the technical gesture ‘engrams’ an organisation that
transmits via the inorganic, opening for the first time in the history of life
the possibility to transmit knowledges that were individually acquired,
but by a way that is not biological. This is why technics is indissociable
from human memory: what makes this memory human is its spirituality
as well as the possibility to transmit from generation to generation. It is
this direct transmission of individual experiences between generations
that is forbidden in the animal kingdom, and this is why there is neither
an animal ‘culture’ nor an animal spirit – or, to put it more simply, there
is no heredity possible for acquired characters. But if you show me that
certain apes have such cultures, I include them in the human world. To
put it differently, given the first nascent factors of this third memory, I
undoubtedly let them enter into human history. This is also why they
give the impression of being so close to us.
Human memory is indissociable from technics as it is epiphylogenetic; I
use this term since this third type of memory is the product of both indi-
vidual experience, which we call epigenetic, and a phylogenetic medium
[support], which constitutes a real intergenerational cultural phylum. This
accumulation of knowledges can no longer be called human species, but
rather humankind.
The knowledge of the slave in Meno begins in this primordial exterior-
ity of memory to draw or trace a figure in the sand: to think his object,
right away he needs to externalise this object by organising the sand, by
organising the inorganicity of the sand, which then becomes the space
and the medium of projection of the geometrical concept – the sand is
here a plastic surface that can receive and, more importantly, retain an
inscription. No matter how short-lived [éphémère] it is, the drawing on the
sand can preserve a character of an element of the figure longer than
the spirit of the slave, since the spirit of the slave is by essence changing
[mouvant]: his thoughts do not cease to pass and to fade away; he is reten-
tionally finite (and I will come back to this word ‘retention’). In other
words, his memory always fails [flanche], his attention is always diverted
to new objects, and it is difficult for him to ‘intentionalise’, as Husserl
would put it, the geometrical object –intentionalising means here to
keep in sight [le prendre en vue] in his organic identity, in his necessity, in
his intimate essence. Drawing is therefore indispensable to this potential
philosopher (the slave), and the acting out of this potential, that is, his
anamnesis. This drawing constitutes what I have called elsewhere a crutch
of the understanding [une béquille de l’entendement], and a space of intuition
that is entirely produced by the gestures of the slave who traces in the
sand, throughout his reasoning, the figured effects of this reasoning, the
sand preserving them as the results that the slave, together with his intui-
tion and his understanding, has ‘under sight’ and upon which he can
extend and construct geometrical reasoning.
Yet this is possible for the slave only because of his immersion in a lan-
guage that guides him: it provides him with terms that he has previously
conceived in his usage and his practice of language, for instance, ‘line’
or ‘surface’. This linguistic immersion [bain] that precedes the slave’s
geometrical reasoning overdetermines the manner in which he traces
and interprets the lines in the sand. Considering these lines, and before
developing further this crucial point of the relation between language
and the tracing that it overdetermines, we need to recall that, in a prop-
erly geometrical sense, the point does not exist – when we understand
by existing something that stands in space and time. Although a point is
not spatial, it is a condition of space. Indeed, we cannot say that a point
is spatial, otherwise in this case it would already be a surface. As Euclid
argues, a point is that which does not have any parts, and a line is a
length without any width. Neither does the surface, in the geometrical
sense, exist since it is a dimension without volume: it is an ideality consti-
tuted by other idealities, which are points and lines . . . that do not exist.
A point is the possible intersection of two lines, a line is constituted of
points, and a surface is constituted by the intersection of at least three
lines; all these are idealities. Only with idealities is it possible to construct
the geometrical figure. But this figure is only an image projection that is
intuitive of ideal elements in real space. It constitutes in turn the possibil-
ity to think space, but these idealities are not themselves spatial, neither
real nor existing as such [existants]. These concern the apriority of experience;
they are a condition of experience (in existence). These constitute, as
Kant would put it, the a priori elements of the pure form (without any
content) of the intuition of space.
It is however required to figure the point in order to conceptualise it
as a mathematical ideality, it is required to intuitively project it to project
reasonings, and it is also in this sense that externalising is necessary to
the figure: this figure is an image that allows the projection of what
Kant calls a schema, what allows the unification of the understanding
and intuition. The thought of space as this a priori form supposes this
capacity of projection that represents the figure. What is crucial for us is
to note that this projection is an externalisation: it allows a projection for
intuition, but more importantly it constitutes a retentional space. This
space is a medium of memory that supports progressively the reasoning
of the temporal flow (what reason is when it thinks).
Husserl developed all of this at the end of his life in The Origin of
Geometry, and in obvious contradiction to the entirety of his phenom-
enological oeuvre that preceded this late short text.11 Husserl called the
person who instituted geometry the ‘protogeometer’, the person who for
the first time had the apodictic evidence of a geometric reasoning before
his eyes, who had access for the first time to geometric ideality (we can
think of Thales, poet and founder of a city-state, and the famous author
of the theorem bearing his name). In discussing the memory of this pro-
togeometer, he concludes that his memory is therefore finite – much like
his life. And this bears two consequences:
1. To fix his reasoning on a figure, the geometer needs the power to fix
it in the letter: step by step. Since the geometrical object is not exactly
found in experience – it is a priori – it is constructed from the flow of
thought. It should be considered as a flow of thought. But this flow is,
as it implies, essentially changing [mouvant]: reasoning is a course, an
unstable stream where thoughts are sequenced; it is an identity that
these thoughts attempt to apprehend. What is sought by thinking is
precisely the definition of the object’s identity, that is, its stability,
beyond the diversity of its successive appearances, occurring in the
stream of thought. The geometer thus needs both to draw and to

write to be able to objectivise and to fix his own reasoning, to recon-
sider afterwards in critical distance, to interrupt it and to take it up
again where he has left it and, as Leibniz puts it, ‘to examine it at a
leisurely pace’.
2. Yet writing is the technical condition but also the transcendental
condition of possibility to constitute the we [le nous], it is reason as
science: the ‘subject’ of geometry, which constitutes an infinite task,
notes Husserl, is not an I [un je], but a transcendental We [nous]. This
We is only possible according to the conditions of the epiphylogenetic
media, as I called it earlier. In the case of geometry, all things are con-
ditioned by ortho-graphic writing. Geometry is de facto a dialogue between
geometers – beginning with the isolated geometer who can dialogue
with himself through time; in this sense he can think dia-lectically, both
dia-chronically and hermeneutically, giving a difference in the repeti-
tion. The old reasonings can be taken up again and confronted with
current reasonings, to address messages to himself as it were, and to
submit his own work to the principle of non-contradiction, by unify-
ing the flow of successive thoughts.
The drawn figure and writing are two indispensable conditions of

geometry, as the two dimensions of exteriority. There can not be geo
metry without the figure; its elements (point, line, surface, angle, hypot-
enuse, etc.) are defined by a language that raises them as idealities. But
this language can posit them as definitions only if this language can record
itself ortho-graphically. This allows one to engram the work of thinking
step by step and to the letter, without losing any semantic substance.
There is a history of epiphylogenesis, and it is impossible to account
for the possibility of knowledges without specifying the epiphylogenetic
stages inside which these knowledges are produced. This epiphylogenetic
immersion contains both language and technics, both the symbol and
the tool: language and technics come from the same process of externali-
sation; they are, as Leroi-Gourhan puts it, two aspects of an absolutely
new and unique reality in the history of life. But what it is essential to
remember is that this externalisation does not precede any interiority,
on the contrary, it immediately produces an internalisation – it is always
at once and the same time internalisation and externalisation. Language is
partly essentially related to the technical reality, when we understand
it as a social product that is not constituted by a genetic determination,
but by being a structure, it bears its own dynamic, making it a system. I

inherit this system that I can internalise and modify – in the case of lan-
guage, it is as a game of rules, and in the case of technics, it is as a func-
tional organisation. I call these two faces of externalisation techno-logics [la
techno-logique]. The moment of internalisation is often forgotten, which
leads one to overlook the primordial exteriority, as the water that the
fish can never see – since it can only see inside water. Thus Kant seems
to believe that number 5, or number 1,000, are concepts that my mind
[esprit] can have an a priori access to, by neglecting the fact that number
1,000 is strictly unconceivable without a system of written numeration,
whose advent is very recent in the history of the human spirit.12
Plato puts these words in Socrates’ mouth: the soul is immortal and
has already contemplated the essences in an earlier life; the soul can
therefore re-gain [re-trouver] essences. Hence the examples previously
introduced: the calculation of the square by the slave, or the search for
the knowledge of the essence of virtue by Meno. Plato already posits
that there is some already-there, and that it is in this already-there that one
finds both questions and solutions. But contrary to Plato, I think that
this already-there is essentially an outside and that this outside, that is, the
world, is submitted, in his organisation, to the epiphylogenetic condition
that modifies, throughout its evolutions, the life of the inside. Regarding
this ‘inside’, it internalises the outside, but in internalising it, it forgets it:
it forgets its own operation and thus naturalises its own knowledge. For
instance, numeration, which is first and foremost a motor and corporal
system: a set of gestures that have been learned at length (to use fingers
to count, then abacuses13 or multiplying tables, and finally the mind) and
that have later become embodied under the form of a mental calcula-
tion, in forgetting that it all began with the hands.
Kant’s mistake was to believe that this ‘mentality’ (its mental charac-
ter) of calculation precedes the possibility to calculate manually, ‘digi-
tally’. Consciousness needs de facto what Kant calls a schema: this takes
an a priori form; it is a form that the stream of all consciousness neces-
sarily takes, to be able to conceive a number. But the realised conception
of this number is supposed by its externalisation and, simultaneously, its
internalisation under the form of a numeration system. In other words,
an external image supports the production of the schema, which is in
turn supposed by motor behaviours, gestures. Kant’s mistake continues
to be made by cognitivism, for instance with the theory of ‘mentalese’,
proposed by Jerry Fodor, who draws from Noam Chomsky, where it is
argued in short that there is a ‘language of thought’ that is pre-inscribed

in the brain. What is neglected as much by classical metaphysics as by
contemporary cognitive metaphysics is the question that we will now
turn to, that of tertiary retention. I have created this concept in a contradic-
tory dialogue with the phenomenology of time.
Notes
1. [Trans.] Stiegler uses thèse to mean both a thesis (as in ‘position’ in
philosophy) and also a doctoral dissertation, referring to the physical
scholarly work.
2. [Trans.] Stiegler’s main argument regarding Plato makes use of the
chronological order of Plato’s work. Meno is considered by Plato spe-
cialists as an early work, written before Phaedrus, in which a certain type
of writing as pharmakon is denounced. Stiegler follows Derrida’s famous
analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus in Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in
Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), pp.
67–186.
3. [Trans.] Cybernetics comes from the Greek kyvernitiki, meaning ‘gov-
ernment’, and kyverno also means ‘to steer’, ‘to pilot’ or ‘to govern’.
4. [Trans.] The quotation marks here denote the deliberate ambiguity
that Stiegler adds to the text. In French, explication means not only
‘explanation’ or ‘analysis’ but also ‘argument’ or ‘fight’.
5. Plato, Protagoras, trans. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 320d, p. 13.
6. On this specific point, see Symbolic Misery, Vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial
Epoch, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), pp. 11–12,
and Technics and Time, Vol. 4: Symbols and Diabols, or the War of Spirits,
forthcoming.
7. [Trans.] These two volumes were translated into English as a single
book: André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock
Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
8. See Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard
Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), chapter 2, pp. 82–133.
9. [Trans.] This leads Stiegler to develop a post-Darwinian position,
referring to ‘technical selection’ as a transformation and a supple-
ment of Darwin’s theory of natural and artificial selection. Stiegler
defended this position in his 2013 seminars at École d’Épineuil-le-
Fleuriel (see <pharmakon.fr>), in reading Charles Darwin’s The Descent

of Man (1871). See Gerald Moore, ‘On the Origin of Aisthesis by Means
of Artificial Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Traces in the
Struggle for Existence’, boundary 2, 44.1 (2017).
10. Jean Piaget, ‘Les Limnées des lacs de Neuchâtel, Bienne, Morat et des
environs’, Conchyliologie, 5 (1912), pp. 311–22, and ‘L’Adaptation de
la Limnaea stagnalis aux milieux lacustres de la Suisse romande. Étude
biometrique et génétique’, Revue Suisse de Zoologie, 36.17 (1929), pp.
1–268.
11. Edmund Husserl, ‘The Origin of Geometry’, in Jacques Derrida,
Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey
Jr (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 157–80. This
obvious contradiction at first surprised the young Jacques Derrida until
he made it the first argument of his own philosophy.
12. On this particular topic, the question of schematism in Kant, see
Technics and Time, Vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans.
Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 49–54.
13. ‘Apart from the most primitive languages, all languages know a system
of numeral words to designate prime numbers (in general until 9) and
superior units (in general a few powers of 10); with them we make
names for other numbers by procedures that need to reflect addition
and multiplication. Let us note however that at times we encounter
the formation of numerals of subtractive principles; thus in Latin: duo-
deviginti, two of twenty, for 18. These systems of formation of numeral
names are limited by the restrained number of names of superior units.
On the contrary, the representation of natural numbers on an abacus is
more algorithmic and is limited; numbers are given according to tokens
following a positional principle: the value of a token is determined by
the row where it is placed. A small number is given by the correspond-
ing number of tokens in the first row; in the next row (on the left), the
value of a token equals the next unit of the system (for instance 10), and
so on. Often we find intermediary units (5 in between 1 and 10, 50 in
between 10 and 100, and so on). Most numeral notation systems were
a compromise between the linguistic system and that of the abacus.’
Hans Freudenthal, ‘Notation mathématique’, Encyclopædia Universalis,
1972.
3. Consciousness in the Age of
Industrial Temporal Objects
ÉD: In this vertiginous journey that led us from the myth of Epimetheus, as told by
Protagoras and Plato, to the Neanderthal, without forgetting the Australopithecus,
we witness the birth of mnemotechnics. It is a real anthropogenesis: the making of the
human through the technics of memory.
BS: One needs to carefully distinguish between technics as a milieu of

the epiphylogenetic memory in general, and mnemotechnics. By being
a technical being, the human is also a cultural being: this third technical
memory that surrounds him has allowed him to accumulate an intergen-
erational experience that we often call ‘culture’. This is why it is absurd
to oppose technics and culture: technics is the condition of culture that
permits its transmission. However, our time is the era of technics, we can
call it technology: it is defined by the crisis of culture, due to its industriali-
sation and its submission to the imperatives of market efficiency. We will
come back to this point later on.
While technics in general constitutes for the human an originary
milieu of epiphylogenetic memory, any given technics is not however
made to retain memory. A sharpened flint is not meant to retain memory.
It is made to slice the meat and work on matter. It happens to also be,
spontaneously, a vector of memory. This is why archaeologists can,
through a sharpened flint, or through the shards of pottery, through
any given manufactured objects, reconstitute a civilisation. Gestures are
preserved in objects that are all, some more evidently than others, the
media of recordings. They record the human motor function but are
also recordings of human behaviour, and particularly the human spirit.
It is from this general epiphylogenetics that, around thirty or forty
thousand years ago but perhaps ever since the Neanderthal and the
first funeral practices, mnemotechnic usages arrived. With no hesita-
tion I include the mnemotechnics found in cave art. By then, human
Consciousness in the Age of Industrial Temporal Objects 59
groupings start developing technics and behaviours made to transmit

memory; amongst them, we can include the Churinga (or Tjurunga) and all
other forms of mythograms and inscriptions [engrammages], for instance,
the Amerindian cords made of knots and tattoos inscribed on sorcerers’
bodies, which are also instruments used to calculate.
But it is after the Neolithic age, a little over ten thousand years ago
and around the time of sedentary settlement, that entire systems of
numeration develop. These will give birth to what are now known as
systems of writing. The sedentariness that led to urban civilisation hap-
pened in a region that is today in Iraq, and where the Mesopotamian
empire would soon appear. It is the passage from the hunter-gatherer to
the farmer and the cultivator, who already produces a primitive form of
capital accumulation, that is, an excess in comparison to his immediate
needs. This will allow ‘investments’, accomplishments in technical, artis-
tic, religious and sumptuary domains but also in utilities, for instance,
the networks of irrigation and pyramids that correspond to what we
often more commonly refer to as signs of civilisation.
Agriculture thus allows the accumulation of stock listed in accounting
books – hence we encounter around that time the first accounting systems,
which consist in inscriptions on diverse media together with calculations
from these inscriptions. Rapidly, these systems of numeration would
allow the production of calendar systems (they appear in Mesopotamia
around the fourth millennium bc, and in Egypt this system already
denotes 365 days in the third millennium). These bring to collective
life a capacity to anticipate weather variations associated with seasons
and, particularly, rises in the water level (the Tigris, the Euphrates and
the Nile). In this way, in the era of great empires, the combination of
two facts produces new potentialities: the alluvial wealth of the great
lakes together with the technics of written notation makes it possible
to anticipate rises in water levels and therefore to produce the optimal
exploitation of the soils’ alluvial fertility. The systems of notation would
progressively improve from this period onwards. During the space of
two thousand years, mnemotechnics would transform from hieroglyphs
to modern alphabets.
The alphabetic writing that we continue to use (even on computer
keyboards) appears with the Greeks, and this alphabetisation constitutes,
strictly speaking, the Greek city-state: it is its condition of possibility. The
Greek city-state is a community that lives in the critical knowledge of its
rules of life. Due to their public nature, they are known, described and
criticisable; these rules of life are the law. The city-state can only have
such a critical knowledge of these rules of life because these are external-
ised and objectivised in the form of a written text and can be discerned
in a flow of speech. This flow is in turn discretised by writing and the
entire community can have critical access to this text since the technics
used is alphabetical: a system of diacritical signs that is economical and
made of fewer than thirty characters that each person can learn to use
both as a reader and as a scribe. This way, the Greek city-state is the first
community where schools emerge.
But, on the other hand, the alphabet brings the possibility to access
once again in a literal way – in other words, in a quasi-exact manner –
what happens in thought, the passage and the past of what a thought is.
If one were to read Meno, for instance, one has direct access to Plato’s
thought, regardless of what Plato himself can say about hypomnesis. You
can interpret this text in a variety of ways, in the same way that you
would interpret Plato’s speech in his presence. You could make the same
objection that Plato himself makes in Phaedrus: that Plato could defend
his own interpretation of his own speech [parole]. But who can claim that
Plato is the best interpreter of his own speech? Besides, he can himself
change the interpretation of his own speech in time. I believe that this
is exactly what happened in the case of Plato. I do not think that Plato
interprets the myth of Persephone at the time of Meno in the same way
that he would interpret it at the time of Phaedrus or Republic. All of us
interpret differently throughout our life; fortunately, we change our
point of view on the world and on ourselves. This means that we do
not understand our own speech and words in the same way as times
change; this also means that our words [paroles] are essentially open to an
indefinite number of possible interpretations that are all testifying to the
openness of the future, as many chances as time brings us. But this does
not mean, of course, that all interpretations are equal. Everybody knows
that while Richter and Gould give very different interpretations of Bach,
and are very remarkable, all interpretations of Bach are not equal.
When you read the sentences from Plato’s Meno, you do not feel that
you only have an approximate image of what Plato thought: you are in
an immediate relation to Plato’s thought, and you know it intimately. You
are in the very element of Plato’s thought.
Yet the situation is rather different when dealing with cuneiform
statements. The reading of the cuneiform statements of Mesopotamians
continues to be irreducibly associated with a relative uncertainty con-
cerning the meanings [sens] of those statements. There can be no doubt

as to the sense of the written statements by Plato and the sense of the
discussion. Meaning is not the same thing as signification – ‘meaning
is use’, as Wittgenstein puts it.1 The tone and the prosody are not pre-
served in the orthographic literal recording, hence the invention of the
phonograph.
The alphabet is the appearance of the first mnemotechnics that uses
a strictly ‘orthothetic’ character.2 I had to create this neologism from the
Greek orthotēs and thesis. Orthotēs means ‘exactitude’, and thesis ‘position’.
What I call an ‘orthothetic statement’ (for instance, alphabetic state-
ments) posits exactly the past. This way, it allows for an intensification
of the cumulation, which I was referring to earlier in relation to technics
in general and to mnemotechnics in particular. It constitutes in itself a
sudden accumulation of innumerable traces (that would be gathered in
the library of Alexandria before it burned down). Here a cumulation
reaches an obvious qualitative threshold since Plato not only writes,
which is essential to his own manner of philosophising (regardless of the
vices of hypomnesis), but what he writes becomes readable to the letter; it
becomes possible to continue the dialogue with him in his absence. This
is precisely what Aristotle ends up doing, but also the neoplatonists, and
what eventually all philosophy would do – this is what I do at this very
moment when talking with you about Plato and dia-loguing with you
through Plato, citing some of his works, from which I could – if we had
time – cite to the letter to comment word by word.
Yet this possibility of commentary is also that of anamnesis: contrary
to what Plato believes, anamnesis is far from being the contrary of hypom-
nesis; rather, the latter conditions the former. But this is an ambiguous
condition, as we will see; hypomnesis can always prevent anamnesis, as Plato
had feared. My dispute with Plato is not when he affirms that hypomnesis
constitutes a danger – and I will soon show to what extent we live today
in a dangerously hypomnesic era. My disagreement lies in the Platonic
argument that anamnesis is the opposite of hypomnesis. I believe, contrary
to Plato, that in fact anamnesis is the good way of practising hypomnesis. But
this also means – and I will come back to this in Symbols and Diabols –
that we need to overcome dialectics as such when it calls for a principle
of contradiction, since hypomnesic textuality is structurally open to a
multiplicity of interpretations: such is the dia-chronicity of thought.
What allows me to dialogue with Plato today (and what made it
possible for Plato to engage in a dialogue with himself, throughout the
lifetime of his thought) is the written form Plato has given to his thought.
And by having this written form, I can re-actualise this thought, or, as
Husserl put it, I can reactivate it with a new intuition. It is this possibility
of reactivation, locked in the literality of Greek texts, that always includes
an analytical and a critical moment. Thus it always constitutes a polemi-
cal moment conferred in the original point as a kind of ray of light that
gives us a clear and distinct vision of Greece that continues to impose
itself on us even today. We feel that light started shining all of a sudden
in Greece, what we call the Greek miracle. There is also, of course,
the erection of the Parthenon, but this is closely linked to writing itself.
This ‘light’ is in fact the effect of an era of epiphylogenesis. Far from
being a pure and simple enlightenment [illuminisme], its support is really
material.
On the back of the human’s epiphylogenetic situation, mnemotech-
nics also appeared tens of thousands of years ago, and became scripts
from the Neolithic period, in which the alphabet plays a fundamental
role around the seventh century bc; it coincides with the emergence of
the West [Occident], and far from Greece, the first books of the Bible are
being written, from the eleventh century bc onwards, in a form conso-
nant with the alphabet.
Mnemotechnics allows the material retention of time, the preserva-
tion of the past in a reactivable form, using the characteristics intrinsic
to each mnemotechnics. I argue that the study of the conditions of func-
tioning of the individual and collective consciousness is fundamentally
conditioned by the study of technics, which in turn gives consciousness
access into its own past. This is obviously a particularly significant ques-
tion today, when mnemotechnics has become mnemotechnologies: the
very heart of industrial development.
What I called consciousness’s ‘own past’ is not only the past that was
lived by this consciousness. I, Bernard Stiegler, am not only what I have
lived since my birth fifty-one years ago: I am also, in a way, all this past
that I have been referring to from the beginning of these interviews,
that lives in me, haunts me, possesses me as a spirit and what these
spirits give to a place, and make it their place by opening a time where
something happens. Everything that I have been talking about since
the beginning of these interviews, Plato, the Egyptians, Mesopotamia,
the Neanderthals and the Australopithecus, one way or another, I am
all of this, or at least I inherit all of this, which in turn constitutes me
in an essential manner. All this past, I have re-actualised it through the
a ccumulated traces that I have inherited in the form of ‘culture’ (com-

bined with my genetic inheritance, which obviously also has its own
role to play). My past is only mine, but it is also the past that I was trans-
mitted in the form of knowledge. This is the epiphylogenetic stratum,
and in particular the mnemotechnic stratum, what I called earlier the
three forms of memory of living humans, that makes the transmission of
knowledge possible.
In this sense, I believe, contrary to Plato, that technics is constitu-
tive of human knowledge. This does not mean that human knowledge
should be reduced to what is retained by the material retentions: human
knowledge is also, and in an essential way, human desire. These mate-
rial retentions give rise to an inheritance because they are fetishised,
and charged with phantasms and affects. What makes the human a
knowledgeable being is that he is desiring, with phantasms and imagi-
nations: he is only a knowledgeable being on the condition of being
passionate about knowledge, and properly hallucinated by the apparitions
of the geometrical figures, for instance. This is what Diotima argues in
Plato’s Symposium. Knowledge is what does not leave indifferent, and in
this sense it affects: it is what is not insipid, but on the contrary it is the
sapid par excellence. It is what manifests itself as salience – what becomes
evident: significance as such, which literally means that which signals [ce
qui fait signe(s)]. More generally, knowledge manifests itself first and pri-
mordially as beauty: knowledge is first what is beautiful (for the person
who knows). This is why, in the beautiful Symposium, knowledge takes
place in the figure of Eros: there, desire is the condition of knowledge.
However, we know since Freud that the condition of desire is the fetish
as prosthesis – although I think Freud has never really seriously thought
about the technicity or the prostheticity of desire, or of humanity as a
whole, in spite of everything that he wrote about the ‘prosthetic God’
that the human has ‘become’ in Civilization and its Discontents.3
Yet knowledge as sapidity seems to be threatened by liquidation. This
is what also anticipates Hegel (without knowing it as it were) when he
argues that it is high time for philosophy to ‘lay aside the title of “love of
knowing” and be actual knowing’.4 How have this ‘laying aside’ of the
name of love for philosophy and the resulting liquidation of the sapidity
of knowledge become possible?
This concerns a hypomnesic mutation, that knowledge has not yet
managed to give it a sapidity, and this illustrates the justness of the
Platonic prevention against anamnesis, resulting from a metaphysical
position. This opposition between anamnesis and hypomnesis should be

overcome.
The alphabetical script is a literal synthesis of memory. From the
nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, new technics of pres-
ervation of memory would appear, new orthothetic mnemotechnics,
comparable to the literal synthesis but in a new sense. There were tech-
nologies of analogic synthesis of visual and auditory perception: pho-
tography and phonography, much like the alphabet, can preserve and
transmit in an exact way by fixing an element of the past or a perception
on to a material medium. But this no longer concerns the meaning of an
oral statement, whose orthographic symbols reconstruct the diacriticity
of the phonemes of language and, through them, the meaning of, let’s
say, the luminous and sonorous frequencies produced by an object of
perception – the voice of an opera singer or a tragic actor, the sound of
an orchestra, the luminous frequencies emitted by a landscape or a face.
In this moment, we are recording a radio show ahead of its broadcast
[en temps différé]. I speak to you in this microphone and through it an
analogic and orthothetic sonorous image of my voice comes to rest on
the magnetic film of the tape recorder, in the form of a slight modifica-
tion of the electromagnetic state of this medium, which will keep it in the
form of a trace [empreinte] whose variations correspond analogically to
the variations of the frequencies of the streaming of my voice. If we look
at this signal on the oscilloscope, we can see a graphic representation of
time/frequency that is an analogue to the variations of the sound of my
voice. The radio listeners will hear my voice in a few days through their
radio receivers and they will not think that they are hearing an image
of my voice. Since this radio programme is not a live broadcast [un faux
direct], they might even believe that I am speaking at the exact moment
that they are listening to me. The radio listeners will be sure, and rightly
so, that they are hearing my voice itself and not the image of my voice.
This is the effect produced by the orthothetic character of a record-
ing, whether it is literal or analogic: in the same way that I am certain
of having direct access to Plato’s own thought when I read a book of
his, if I were to listen to a recording of the voice of Sarah Bernhardt,
the emotion comes from my certitude at hearing not an image of what
Sarah Bernhardt’s voice could have been, but her voice itself, and there-
fore Sarah Bernhardt herself – even though she is dead and buried.
From the nineteenth century, new orthotheses are therefore capable
of reconstituting strata of the past that are larger than the stock [fonds]
of the book-based civilisation – in which sculpture, painting and other

artistic forms representing the past co-existed, but were not exactly
orthothetic recordings. To sum up what we have discussed so far, we
can say that the human is a epiphylogenetic being and that in the
history of epiphylogenesis, which began two million years ago as a
process of externalisation, probably around tens of thousands of years
ago appeared mnemotechnics, and then with the Neolithic, systems
of written notation that gave rise to the first orthothetic synthesis (the
alphabet). We need to add to this brief history the analogic orthothetic
synthesis that happened in the nineteenth century first with photogra-
phy, then phonography, and then in the twentieth century with cinema-
tography, radio broadcasting and television.
The significance of the printing press as a technique of reproduc-
tion [duplication] needs to be explained. This mechanical technics of
reproduction only amplified the effect of the literal synthesis and did not
constitute in itself a new form of synthesis. It should be considered as a
development of the alphabetic orthothesis that expands its effects much
further, but it does not constitute a new orthothetic synthesis in itself.
However, this opened a new era of epiphylogenesis.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the digital orthothetic
synthesis appeared, first with computers [l’informatique], and now, at the
beginning of this twenty-first century, in the form of electronic appli-
ances of all sorts, such as video cameras, cameras, mobile phones, but
also voice recorders that are no longer analogic.
This is a new revolution of recording that is about to transform once
again, and with considerable consequences, what I call with philosophy
the ‘ecstasy of temporality’ – in other words, the relations between the past,
the future and the present.5 The main consequences of the evolution
of the epiphylogenetic stock (that constitutes humanity) are always the
modifications of the relations between the three terms of the ecstasy of
time. To put it differently, ever since the Industrial Revolution, and the
development of new mnemotechnologies that contributed in large part
to this revolution, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
we have kept on living disruptions in the conditions of temporisation,
and therefore individuation. Individuation should be understood as a
process by which we, as individuals or collectives, become who we are. We
are in fact by essence temporal beings, and the epiphylogenetic media of
our temporality condition in a primordial manner our relation to time.
In other words, we are always to come, inasmuch as we continue to have
a future and we are by essence in the future tense; we devote the totality
of our energy and our care [souci] to anticipating (or at least in trying to
do so, most of the time in vain, but not without any consequences) what
we will become, and even what the world will become after our lives.
Yet I need to emphasise another point: since the epiphylogenetic
becoming is now under the control of industries – the last two centuries
were characterised by a process of industrialisation of memory – we are
now in what I call an ecology of spirit, that is, a political and industrial
economy that rests on the industrial exploitation of the specific times
belonging to consciousness. Through this exploitation, masses of ego
are formed as bodies of consumers; large global markets are constituted
to absorb the ever larger investments made by large industries. In this
situation, consciousnesses are degraded, since they are exploited at the
limits of their temporal possibilities, in the same way that some territo-
ries or animal species are degraded or damaged.
To discern what is happening, the Husserlian theory of the temporal
object is useful: cinematographic or phonographic recordings, which
are now mostly broadcast by broadcasting industries, radio stations and
TV channels, make audiovisual temporal objects. Unlike an ordinary
physical object, a temporal object is constituted by its flow [écoulement]:
the condition of its appearance and disappearance to my conscious-
ness; it disappears as soon as it appears. For instance, the radio listeners
who are listening to this show on France Culture can only hear me by
letting my voice disappear. They cannot stop at what I just said, con-
trary to when they read a book. My radiographically transmitted words
are structurally temporal: they are flowing. A melody is also a flow:
a melody is a musical object precisely because this object is flowing.6
Music is a composition of time and time is by essence what happens.
Husserl has studied temporal objects since they present the specificity
of being constituted by this structure of flow that is perfectly homogene-
ous to the flowing of my own consciousness: to know their fundamental
structures is to learn something about the temporal structure of con-
sciousness itself. Our consciousnesses are flowing, in this sense, they
have a duration: this is the immediate data that Bergson refers to.7 My
consciousness is essentially duration and, therefore, a flow. At this very
moment when I am speaking to you in this microphone, I am listening
to myself, and together with me, my words testify that I am also flowing,
these words are a radiographic realisation, but those who are listening
are also flowing.
Yet, interestingly, there are objects that have themselves a flowing

structure. The flowing of these objects, when I am conscious of the
process, coincides entirely, or as Husserl puts it ‘point by point’, with
the flowing of my own consciousness. This led Husserl to argue that, if
I were to study these temporal objects and could therefore understand
their internal structure, I would learn something of the internal structure
of consciousness itself.
In his study of the temporal object, Husserl discovers the concept of
primary retention. Suppose that you are listening to a melody. A melody
is a succession of notes that have tonality levels and durations. This suc-
cession of notes is not only a succession of notes and sounds, since notes
are only constituted by their succession and therefore by creating rela-
tions between these notes. To put it differently, these notes do not only
succeed one another, they constitute preservations [maintenances] in the
flow, but also recurrences and so on, using relations between tonality
levels (intervals) and relations of durations (rhythms). A given note A, if
you consider it independently and outside a musical context, is no longer
the note A: it is a sonorous frequency today placed by the tuning fork at
440 hertz (this value was established by convention, at the international
congress that met in London in 1939). It is the relation (or relations) that
a given note A has with other sonorous frequencies that makes it the note
A. It is with these other frequencies that it produces a stability that we
call an interval, but that we also call, at the time of Pythagoras, a logos,
a relation.
Husserl thinks the melody and the temporal object in general (a film
is for instance such an object), which is present to my ear at the moment,
now, when I listen to it. He argues that the specificity of this temporal
object comes from the presence of the immediately preceding element.
The temporal object starts from this presence. For instance, the note
A retains a B flat that precedes it, which in turn retained another note
that preceded it, let’s say a C sharp, the whole constituting an arpeg-
gio. But this unity of relations between these elements will constitute
the melodicity as such – by forming a flow in continuity, a flowing that
is the time of music. These relations certainly become more and more
complex and rich as they contain ‘preservations’ that are also harmonic
and polyphonic . . .
The note can only be constituted as a note by retaining in itself the
previous note, thus the present of the temporal object is inhabited by
an originary past, which Husserl names the ‘just-having-been’, in the
very perception of the temporal object: it is the retaining of the present

note that Husserl calls a primary retention. We can even show – as I did at
length in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise – that the same thing
happens in cinema; this is what Xavier Lemarchand called the Kuleshov
Effect.8 One day, the Russian stage director would have experimented9
by editing [monter] a shot with the actor Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin, who
was performing an undetermined and undecidable expression, maybe
comparable to that of Da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa. Yet this same
shot was edited with three different shots (a table of victuals, a corpse, a
child), and what the spectators saw in each montage created three differ-
ent expressions of Mozzhukhin, even though it was each time the same
shot. This experience demonstrates once again that, much like the case
of the music note in the melody, the symbolic and temporal power of the
shot is realised by its capacity to retain primarily in itself the immediate
recollection of the preceding shot. But this power is also extended in its
capacity to ‘protain’ a scene to come, if I can put it this way, adapting
Husserl’s own concept of protention. In other words, the editing and
the relations that are woven create an expectation of the following shot.
This is what will make the unity of the sequence, sometimes in the form
of a surprise, as a diversion or reversal of this expectation.10
Husserl teaches us that we need to distinguish between primary reten-
tion, which he discovered in the present of perception, and secondary reten-
tion, which constitutes the past and belongs to imagination. Secondary
retention, which we usually call ‘memory’ [souvenir], belongs to the past
while primary retention belongs to the present. Yet Husserl argued that
there is no relation between primary and secondary retentions. This posi-
tion, which seemed to me paradoxical (and which he does not maintain
later on), is taken in the context of a debate that he had with Franz
Brentano (in his lectures ‘On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness
of Internal Time’). Brentano taught and initiated Husserl to the study of
the sound perception, leading Husserl to work on the question of tempo-
ral objects. Husserl argued that Brentano confused primary and second-
ary retentions, and therefore criticised his teacher for not understanding
primary retention. For Brentano, primary retention is produced by the
attribution of an indication of the past in the music note that precedes
the current music note that I hear at this moment, and to him this indi-
cation is conferred by imagination. Husserl disagreed and argued that if
this indication were produced by imagination, time would therefore be a
product of imagination, and not the object of perception, and ultimately
this argument would posit that time would not exist: it would only be
an illusion of imagination, a fiction. Yet Husserl’s starting point is, on the
contrary, that the temporality of consciousness is what is most indubi-
table and most immediately subject to experimental research, similar to
Bergson, for whom duration is an immediate data of consciousness. The
point of view of Brentano is therefore unacceptable, and the indication
of a past-being in primary retention is a product of perception. Hence
we need to refer to primary retention, and to meticulously distinguish it
from secondary retention, which derives from imagination.
Unfortunately, even though Husserl is entirely right against Brentano,
his reasoning nonetheless led him to radically oppose primary and sec-
ondary retentions. He went so far as to claim that they have no rela-
tion, and in particular that primary retention does not owe anything
to secondary retention. However, these two modes of retention are not
opposed; on the contrary, they continuously compose. When I listen
to the same melody twice in a row on two different days, and a fortiori
when I listen to it ten times in a row (as has become common practice
after phonographic recording), what happens differs since the more I
listen to the melody, the more I would find differences in every listening
of the melody: different phenomena are each time produced by the same
object. The object is the melody and each time it is the same object. But
each time a different phenomenon is produced, and if the music is good,
I would hear new things each time, even though I have the impression
of listening to the same object. Where does this difference between these
repetitions of the same come from?
First, such a difference can only mean that primary retentions produced
by my consciousness throughout the flowing of the temporal flux, which
is also the flowing of my own time of consciousness, will change with each
listening. My consciousness is therefore active in the listening of a melody:
it selects among all possible primary retentions, and does not retain every-
thing. This also explains why if we were to ask ten individuals – which I
often do when I give my classes – to sum up the meaning of my speech
from the last twenty minutes, these ten individuals would give ten differ-
ent meanings. They would not be wrong, nor would I be right to suggest
only one meaning to my own speech. This would simply demonstrate
that each of us has selected primarily a type of retention, but above all
that the difference between our primary retentions is closely linked to
our secondary retentions, which are knowledge that we already had
before listening to the statement. Here, what I call ‘knowledge’ is those
secondary retentions accumulated by our past experiences and which

constitute as many horizons of expectations, also called protentions.
Yet the role of secondary retentions as selection criteria in the primary
retentions, and therefore as a horizon of expectation overdetermining
the construction of a musical phenomenon during the listening of a
musical temporal object, only becomes obvious with the arrival of the
phonograph. This is what led me to introduce a third concept, formal-
ised as a way to continue and critique Husserl’s analyses: the concept of
tertiary retention.
Something new and previously unconceivable happens with the pho-
nograph: with this apparatus, the same temporal object, that is, the same
interpretation of the same music piece, can be produced in the exact
same way twice in a row. This makes possible the analogic and ortho-
thetic synthesis of the audible. Before this invention, this synthesis was
strictly impossible: an orchestra could play the same piece twice, but the
two performances necessarily differ. The phonograph allowed one for
the first time to repeat a temporal object – and obliged one to consider
that when the same object is produced many times, different phenom-
ena are produced every time.
I demonstrated in Disorientation that the literal and orthothetic syn-
thesis of the voice has also made comparisons possible for the first time,
but on a different plane. Hence the spatialisation of speech sound in
the alphabetically written form has also permitted repetitions leading
to an entirely original difference: the varied interpretation of written
statements made by the same reader in different circumstances. This is
what Foucault comments on with Seneca in ‘Writing of the Self’.11 The
textual identification of a linguistic statement is what gives the hermeneutic
difference, strictly speaking. What I call ‘literal différant identification’ is this
literal tertiary retention that gives different and new readings in each
repetition of the same text. The literal différant identification is the first
case of an orthothetic tertiary retention.12
The phonogram is also a tertiary retention. Some tertiary retentions
are orthothetic by nature but others are not. Examples of orthothetic
tertiary retentions are phonogramic, photographic, cinematographic,
alphabetic and diasthematic (as the notations on musical scores are
called), and there are many other kinds. In fact, all the epiphylogenetic
instances are tertiary retentions, that is, all objects in general, since all
objects are technical objects. But all technical objects, as tertiary reten-
tions, do not have the same characteristics.
The properly mnemotechnic tertiary retentions, which Plato would call

hypomnesic, have controllable effects, and when these mnemotechnics
are orthothetic, they open the era of history, law, philosophy, science
and, finally, what we call the West [Occident], but the monotheism of the
Islamic East [Orient] is also a historical concretisation very close to the
West. Monotheism makes the era of culture a reality, and comes from
the orthothetic literal retention.13 And, in this respect, I often think of
Islam, as with North America, as a non-European dimension of the
West.
Moreover, my thesis is that the analogic and digital orthotheses open
another era, and my hypothesis is that this era is probably the end of the
West. It is at the same time a process of industrialisation and, therefore,
of commodification of memory in all its forms (including biological,
since genetic manipulations are ‘tertiarisations’ of the living); it is the
theatre of a major crisis and perhaps catastrophic in the history of the
spirit, as the general process deploying human, individual and collective
temporality. This temporality is constituted by ‘revenances’ and rep-
etitions that make the human epiphylogenetic situation possible. This
situation leads to all sorts of global ill-beings, coinciding with the liquida-
tion of the millennial processes of psychic and collective individuation,
including the West and its different elements in particular. A multitude
of extremely reactionary temptations are emerging, such as xenophobia,
diverse fanaticisms (laïcité is one of them) and all possible forms of ressenti-
ment. This is why our present is so worrying.
The epiphylogenetic recordings of the past, and in particular when
they are orthothetic, overdetermine the relations that I make between
primary and secondary retentions. This explains why, in the twentieth
century, industries seized tertiary retentions to make what we call after
Adorno cultural industries. With cinema, music, radio and television,
and the broadcasting of audiovisual temporal objects, industries can
perhaps not control but at least condition these times of conscious-
ness and, for instance, make people adopt new behaviours. When these
audiovisual temporal objects are flowing, they coincide with the time of
the consciousnesses they are targeting, and these consciousnesses now
form masses of consciousnesses, also called audience figures. These new
behaviours encourage the consumption of products that large industries
place in global markets. For instance, today, everyone might associ-
ate a given melody with a certain brand of tights or chewing gum, but
certain images are also associated with this melody and this product
– for example, the brand of coffee for the family breakfast that Odile,
played by Sabine Azéma, recalls when talking to Nicolas, played by
Jean-Pierre Bacri, in Alain Resnais’s Same Old Song [On connaît la chanson].
Nicolas shows Odile a family picture:
Odile – What does this picture remind me of? Ah yes! The advertisement for
chicory, of course! You know what I mean?
Nicolas – The advertisement for chicory? No . . . I don’t know it . . .
Odile – This family, you know, who’s having breakfast in a corn field?
Nicolas – Ah yes, it rings a bell, yes . . .
The society of industrial temporal objects transforms our existence

in prefabricated serials full of clichés, which we accumulate without
paying much attention. The coincidence of the flowing time of indus-
trial temporal objects together with the time of consciousnesses has
the consequence that we adopt this time by making our own objects
of consciousness (or attention). We adhere to them with such privacy
that they become substitutes for the temporalities belonging to our own
consciousnesses. This is the catastrophic use, by the cultural industries,
of the virtues of temporal objects: this also leads to an ecological catas-
trophe in the epiphylogenesis as a mind/spirit milieu.
The ruin of this milieu is created when industries impose their criteria
in an exclusive or hegemonic manner on the retentional phenomenon
that characterises consciousness. We see the multiplication everywhere
of delirious behaviours. These are the acting out of the worst phantasms
found in all levels of society, everywhere on earth.
ÉD: Once we understand the role played by each of these retentions – primary, sec-
ondary, tertiary – and the way in which they intervene concretely in the constitution
and the reception of the temporal objects, we are left wondering how this schema
can make us think of a global phenomenon that seems at first sight to exceed the
limits of the operating of consciousness. More specifically, I think of the industry
of cultural objects that is increasingly an industry of temporal objects. Your last
volume of Technics and Time is called Cinematic Time: it is not entirely a
work on cinema, even though it also refers to cinema. You use the concept of cinema,
or rather the cinematic apparatus, as a paradigm to think of the functioning of
consciousness as a production and editing of time. This paradigm supports a strong
thesis: the hyperindustrial production – which goes beyond industrial production
– of temporal objects that we witness comes with a general synchronisation of
consciousnesses.
BS: Yes, I believe that such a process is taking place: a process of

generalisation of industrial production of temporal objects leads to the
tendency of generalised synchronisation. There are obviously some
counter-tendencies, but unfortunately they seem to be weaker than the
dominant tendency. I have to admit that this perspective described
in Cinematic Time is infernal, and I envisaged the end of the title, ‘The
Question of Malaise’, as a warning. I try to show that today’s society
is suffering, leading to a situation in which the tendency towards gen-
eralised synchronisation is concretising – even though it is not the only
reason.
To understand this phenomenon, I need to go back to what we were
discussing earlier: mnemotechnics and mnemotechnologies. Previously,
I described alphabetical writing as an orthothetic system that allows not
only the literal recording of a discourse but also a return to the letter (and
this is the theme of repetition that we have already introduced), and, by
this possibility of return, to find from the same identified statement in
the form of a text possible interpretations that are always more varied
and diverse. This occurs according to the reading context: this one de facto
overdetermines the interpretation since secondary retentions overdeter-
mine the selection of primary retentions of a given temporal object. The
reading context can vary according to two conditions: space and time.
The reading of the same text at the same time in two different places
gives two different interpretations. The reading of the same text in the
same place but in two different epochs also varies. Again we find the
production of differences in the repetition of the same.
Such is the literal orthotheticity. In Symbols and Diabols, I will show
that the first goal of Plato’s metaphysics is to eliminate this variability
that he considers – wrongly, in my opinion – to be a threat to the city’s
unity. Plato denounces at a stroke poetry, arts and hypomnesis (that is,
technics) in his fight against the plural interpretability of texts, the diver-
sity of readings and the singularity that each citizen brings. I argue on
the contrary that anamnesis is essentially interpretation, a text is by essence
indefinitely interpretable: there can be no ultimate interpretation of
a text. Nietzsche affirms, against Plato’s horror for interpretation: the
endless dimension of interpretation, and the irreducibility of multiple
interpretations. This horror is also present amongst some contemporary
Platonists.
The variability of interpretations is the manifestation of a great dia-
chronicity in the reception of a text, since this reception is itself a process
of interpretation. This diachronicity is itself the singularisation of the

reader in the reading community that opens the text. This singularisa-
tion translates the realisation [accomplissement] of a process of individu-
ation of this reader (a process in which the reader becomes who he is).
At the same time, the unicity of the text, the identical establishing of its
letter, is what supports a synchrony of singularities.
More specifically, the reader is first composed by the text of law: the
citizen as a figure in ancient Greek is profoundly linked to the process
of individuation that alphabetical writing made possible as an apparatus
of ‘différant identity’. I therefore tried to produce concepts to formally
account for the historical reality that was described at length by Jean-
Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Marcel Detienne.
We have seen that in the nineteenth century the arrival of analogic
orthothetic technologies like the phonograph, and in the twentieth
century the tape recorder [magnétophone], allows the recording of voices –
like my own voice right now. These technics created the possibility
of a real industry of temporal objects, since they consist, at first, in
producing recording machines. With the literal synthesis, the scribe
and the reader encoded and decoded the orthothetic recording, and any
reader was potentially a scribe, while with the photographic apparatus,
the phonograph, the cinematograph, the tape recorder and so on, it is
the machines that are encoding and decoding. This made possible an
industrialisation, since an industry is established from the separation
of producers and consumers; this condition is fulfilled by the advent of
analogic machines. While for the literal synthesis it is impossible to be
a reader without knowing how to write (though not necessarily being
a writer), it is possible for someone to receive an audiovisual image
without having the skills to produce one.
The reversibility of the reader-scribe positions is the pledge [gage] of
‘communitisation’ that, for Husserl, opens the possibility of the transcen-
dental We as a support, but it also opens the possibility of science as a
dialogue between consciousnesses by means of ‘reactivation’ (as he calls
it), or even the question of return, Rückfrage, which is a form of anamnesis.
The sudden dissymmetry that arrives with the analogic mnemotech-
nologies breaks away from this horizon of literal tertiary retentions that
support the promise of a communitisation, by substituting the ‘isonomy’
of citizens (their equality before the law, which is the juridical and politi-
cal word for the so-called communitisation) with the inequality of produc-
ers and consumers created from a new division of labour and social roles by
the deployment of machinism. This symbolic inequality is as serious as eco-

nomic inequality, and both forms of inequality often come together. The
former relinquishes individuals from their time, and thus from themselves.
Simondon has shown that the arrival of the tool-machine produced a
loss of individuation of the worker, as he called it – the worker is deprived
of his knowledge and reduced to the condition of being a servant to the
machine that externalised his knowledge. The tool-machine becomes
the ‘technical individual’, taking the worker’s place; Simondon de facto
reinterpreted analyses from Marx’s manuscripts. With analogic tech-
nologies of temporal objects, a new loss of individuation is produced: it
deprives the consciousnesses of their diachronicity, which is also their
singularity.
I have demonstrated elsewhere that, to understand the necessity
of this synchronisation of the industrial temporal objects, we need to
understand the Industrial Revolution that happened in the nineteenth
century and that led to a sudden proliferation of new objects connected
in series, with the development of machinism. This industrial machin-
ism presupposes huge investments from companies that therefore need
to get a return on this ever greater immobilisation of capital. This neces-
sity to invest is to increase surplus value and to guarantee amortisation of
those investments made by companies that enter into increasingly fierce
competition between themselves: to have access to innovation, to attract
more capital, but also, and above all, to gain access to other markets to
make the company profitable.
At the end of the twentieth century, and at the beginning of this
twenty-first century, this competition has become a true global eco-
nomic war that could – and we fear it with good reason – become a
fully fledged war. From the nineteenth century, in order to amortise
great machines of production, constituting the development of machin-
ism, industries had to make mass products and produce ever newer
products, bringing about slowly what became known as the consumer
society. But they faced a problem: society does not spontaneously want
to adopt these new industrial productions. The velocipedes, made by
the Paris-based Compagnie parisienne des vélocipèdes, established in
1867, could only be socially adopted when several newspapers were
launched (five specialised publications were created between 1880 and
1900, while Le Petit Journal, a high-circulation newspaper, had its own
policy to promote bicycles), but were also advertised with competitions,
and finally with the Tour de France, which continues to be highly
ediatised. Even before showing achievements, the goal of these events

m
was to convince future cyclists that it was possible to travel on two
wheels without falling.
This imperative organised towards public opinion works at convert-
ing that opinion into a market of consumers by using all possible means
to make it fantasise about the fetish-form of commodities. This is what
the historian of technics Bertrand Gille calls the permeabilisation of social
resistance to technological change. Almost all new industrial products
are promoted by advertisement industries, and those industries are also
engaged by cultural industries. Their role is to ease the adoption of
innovative products by society – not only by socialising new behav-
iours, by inculcating new usages with these new products, but also by
socialising the collective and social organisational models, which are
also adapted to results from the industrial innovation (this is what Gille
calls the problem of adjustment).14 The modification of the behaviour of
individuals who compose society is the first problem of industrial society,
that they should no longer be called citizens but consumers: the object of
consumption – the commodity – has become the main operator of the
socialisation of individuals. In this way the media is essential to indus-
trial democracies: as promoting innovation and vectors of the process of
generalised adoption, central to capitalist modernity.
There have always been retentional apparatuses: we can call those
who attempt to be in charge of the production of referential criteria
for the selection of retention – for instance, by defining the educational
models, the religious dogmas, the rules of law, and so on – ‘the powers’
[les pouvoirs].15 But as long as the retentional authority is in the control
of the cultural industries (amongst which I include information and tel-
ecommunication technologies), the process of selection is submitted to
a supreme criterion that cannot be calculable; it is properly incommensurable.
It is particularly true for the divine criterion but also for scientific truth,
or the value of justice. While we know that justice on earth is a promise
that will never be kept, and that in practice injustice rules, by right justice
remains the criterion of all social behaviour, and we need to admit that
justice is an incommensurable criterion. It cannot be the object of an evalu-
ation according to a measurable and calculable reality, since reality is
always de facto unjust. Yet it needs to be the absolute criterion. Similarly,
in science, we cannot evaluate or calculate the truth value of a scientific
statement by evaluating – I mean, by measuring – its value against other
exchange values. We cannot claim that Thales’ theorem is worth more
than Pythagoras’, and we cannot imagine a theorem gaining or losing

value with time: we cannot speculate on (and calculate) such values,
since they are absolute. And this is the case since the constitutive ele-
ments of the theorematic are idealities, as we discussed regarding lines
and surfaces: these entities do not exist in the time and space of experi-
ence, but they constitute the very possibilities of experience. Equally for
justice, realised justice does not exist and will never exist in experience:
attempts to absolutely realise justice lead to hell, simply because justice
is not a calculable object. However, it constitutes, as an ideality, the very
possibility of a liveable experience. For this reason, justice is incommen-
surable: it is not measured in light of experience, and this is why ‘market
democracy’ is an illusion. Justice cannot simply be the equilibrium of
calculable behaviours of economic actors, and we cannot build a politics
on the market. A politics, or, more generally, a psychic and collective
individuation, can only entail a becoming-singular. And the market only
produces the becoming-particular.
Incommensurability conditions all singularity, whether it is religious,
political or other, whether it presents itself as the absolute authority of
the ‘father of all fathers’ or as the ideality of a concept, and it is also the
sign of artworks, but also of philosophy and eventually of all works of the
‘spirit’, as we call them. Yet this incommensurable difference between
norms and facts, which needs to be made, is not given spontaneously and
is strictly im-probable. It is in itself the responsibility of all consciousness,
which is both in principle irreducible and de facto always threatened. By
submitting retentional dispositifs to the market criteria, which always
need to be subject to complex amortisement calculations, the very spirit
is being purely and simply liquidated.
You understand now why I argued that, while I do not agree with
Plato regarding his opposition between anamnesis and hypomnesis – since
I believe that a certain practice of hypomnesis can make anamnesis possible
(that is, the production of differences in repetitions) – I do however sub-
scribe to this argument about the danger of hypomnesis, and that a hegem-
onic appropriation of hypomnesis (the retentional dispositifs) by economic
forces governed by a purely financial logic is catastrophic, and it is this
catastrophe that we are currently living.
Today, consciousnesses tend to synchronise, to adopt the same tem-
poralities, and therefore lose their singularity. Yet consciousness is essen-
tially a singularity in the sense that freedom is the act of consciousness
par excellence. Consciousness par excellence – that is, the acting out of
consciousness – is the freedom to think. To put it differently, what is

threatened and systematically fought by this process of synchronisa-
tion is the philosophical potentiality of all consciousness. Philosophy is
essentially the affirmation of the freedom of thinking that belongs to any
consciousness, since it is intrinsically diachronic and therefore singular:
it is thus potentially philosophising [philosophante en puissance]. What syn-
chronisation tends to muffle is the potential to philosophise that belongs
to all of us, and above all the possibility to act out this common potential
that we all share, in particular as a collective thought and political action. This
is possible since there is a profound stupidity in all consciousness that
demands this synchronisation. Thinking is a struggle against stupidity,
since when it prevails, laziness triumphs. Thinking is to fight one’s own
laziness. And this fight becomes harder and harder since the media is
systematically exploiting and encouraging this laziness.
I am one of those who believe that it is possible to carry out a political
action to increase the acuity of individual and collective consciousness,
and to never renounce this vision and goal. I belong to those philoso-
phers who proclaim this kind of acting out. This does not mean that I
want to restore consciousness as the ground of thought and action. From
the end of the nineteenth century, we have learned with Nietzsche,
with Freud, with all Enlightenment’s critiques of metaphysics, with the
discovery of the role of systems and structures as well as the question
of praxis, that consciousness is not its own master, that it hosts in itself
forces that escape it. It is, as the host of spirit, inhabited by spirits that
haunt it and ventriloquise it. It is precisely what I demonstrate with
the concept of tertiary retention. But to take into account these points
of view acquired in the twentieth century – and I believe them to be
irreversible – cannot constitute an alibi to renounce a politics of con-
sciousness as well as a political action – and, in particular, a politics that
is conscious of the weakness of consciousness,16 and what I have called
elsewhere the constitutive default of consciousness. This default is a default of
qualities, which is also a default of community constituting a community
of default, as Bataille writes it. This is also what the myth of Prometheus
and Epimetheus gives us to think.
Notes
1. [Trans.] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London:
Blackwell, 2001).
2. [Trans.] On the historical role of orthothetics and orthographics, see

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen
Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 57–64.
3. [Trans.] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James
Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), p. 35.
4. [Trans.] G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 3, emphasis in the original.
5. [Trans.] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and
Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), H. 329, p. 378.
6. [Trans.] On melody and the temporal object in Husserl, see Stiegler,
Technics and Time, Vol. 2, chapter 3 (pp. 188–243).
7. [Trans.] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover, 2001).
8. [Trans.] See Xavier Lemarchand, ‘Différance et audiovisuel numé-
rique’, PhD dissertation, Université de technologie de Compiègne,
1998; Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the
Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 15.
9. I use the conditional tense here since this story was later contested by
François Albera.
10. I demonstrated in Symbolic Misery, Vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, trans.
Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), that expectations are in
general the expectation of the unexpected, and that the art of cinema
consists in this reversal. This also applies to music.
11. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell
(London: Penguin, 1969); Michel Foucault, ‘Self Writing’, in Essential
Works, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans.
Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 2002), pp.
207–22.
12. [Trans.] See Technics and Time, Vol. 2, chapter 1, especially pp. 57–63.
13. [Trans.] Stephen Barker, the translator of Disorientation, translates lit-
térale as ‘literal’ and ‘literate’ given the various meanings of ‘literal’
in English. Barker wants to note the opposition between the oral and
the written, which is there in the French language but not in Stiegler
since his work comes after Derrida’s deconstruction of this opposition.
However, ‘literal’ here should be understood in English in the material
sense rather than in the metaphorical sense. See Technics and Time, Vol.
2, p. 248 n. 15.
14. On all these points, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The
Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), especially pp. 34–7.

Bertrand Gille, The History of Techniques, Vol. 1: Techniques and Civilization,
trans. P. Southgate and T. Williamson (Montreux: Gordon and Breach
Science Publishers, 1986), and The History of Techniques, Vol. 2: Techniques
and Sciences, trans. J. Brainch and others (Montreux: Gordon and Breach
Science Publishers, 1986).
15. I analysed this most in Technics and Time, Vol. 3.
16. This has nothing to do with what Gianni Vattimo called ‘weak thought’.
See Gianni Vattimo, Weak Thought, ed. Pier Aldo Rovatti, trans. Peter
Carravetta (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013).
4. Consciousness, the Unconscious
and the Unscience
ÉD: In referring to a political ecology of consciousness or spirit, amongst others, you

distinguish the fundamental concepts of the synchronic/diachronic, or, to be more
precise, synchronisation/diachronisation, as an opposed couple. It seems that the
synchronisation of consciousnesses is closely tied to another general process that we can
observe in all societies at the global scale: a process of uniformisation of behaviours
and, more precisely, behaviours of consumption. But we are immediately tempted to
object to the following: if we presuppose that indeed consciousnesses are synchronised
by the hyperindustrial dispositif of production and broadcasting of temporal objects –
which lead to a denial of agency to these consciousnesses [marge de manœuvre],
or any possibility of diachronic subjectivation in the use of these objects (distracted
listening, zapping and so on) – is it therefore legitimate to posit an a priori relation
between synchronisation of consciousnesses and uniformisation of behaviours, without
taking the time to question beforehand the sociological reality of this synchronisation?
Do we really witness, especially in the case of temporal objects, a uniformisation of the
modes of consumption? On the contrary, others would argue that markets are more and
more segmented, and that consumption is increasingly moving towards an à la carte
functioning, individualised, custom-made for ever more profiled users, according to
criteria that allow combinations and diversified uses. We can take the examples made
available by the internet, MP3 downloading, mobile phones with their own individu-
alised ringtones, and so on. Earlier you noted that we do not listen in the same way,
with the same attention and the same expectations, to a TV or radio show.
BS: We need to distinguish between two examples. If we listen to a

quartet by Beethoven, each of us, in principle, not only listens singularly,
but each of us, each time we listen to it, will listen to it again in a singular
way. This diversity is not at all the same thing as the diversity of mobile
phone ringtones that we are offered as an ‘option’, or all these options
offered to us by the market segmentalisation: options for cars, options
proposed by the travel industry to the tourist masses who believe to be
going all over what they believe or no longer believe to be the world, or
by the user profiling that also selects information that supposedly cor-
responds to your ‘own personality’. The organisation of the market aims
precisely at a systematic investment in all domains of life, absolutely
all domains: leisure, education, old age and so on, far beyond the so-
called ‘material’ consumer goods, and what we designate traditionally
as services. The new form of capitalism takes into account all moments
of individual existence – and consequently it defines all modes of social
organisation, hence the imperative to liquidate states – to calculate and
produce the life-time value* as described by Jeremy Rifkin. This is done
to standardise all behaviours, precisely by optimising them, and leading
to the notorious industrial economies of scale. These options allow an
artificial diversification since the programmes on generalist television all
converge to the same model when they are subjected to the same market
of audience figures.
The internet is perceived by large industry as an ideal system to read
the hypersegmentation of markets. This means that there is an ever finer
efficiency of marketing, with ever better defined and reached targets.
The question is also that of speed and ‘reactivity’. From the point of
view of marketing, all these behaviours, even the most singular, need to
be anticipatable, and therefore they are no longer singular behaviours, but
particular behaviours.
Libido, which is absolutely indissociable from singularity,1 can none-
theless be temporally diverted towards particularity, and advertising
campaigns can favour those phantasmatic investments, but I think that
libido wears out very quickly. Particularity refers here to the part of the
partial object; this object is only the representative of the singular foun-
dation needed for a particularity to exist. Hypersegmentation consists
in substituting the singularity of my unique lifestyle [mode de vie], which
resembles no other, with a particular behaviour belonging to a profil-
able list, a check-list * corresponding to an industrial supply, and that is
inscribed in what we call a profile, a user profiling*.
Generally, consumption, in using and wearing out the libido, func-
tions on the basis of an essential frustration – and produces a society
of frustrated beings. The object consumed, precisely since it does
not support singularity but folds it into particularity, is a deceptive
object, and its consumption does not bring any satisfaction, does not
support any pleasure; on the contrary, it intensifies the feeling of emp-
tiness, vanity, that the consuming reaction strings together almost
Consciousness, the Unconscious and the Unscience 83
a utomatically to attempt, in vain, like Sisyphus, to fill in. In reality, he

only intensifies this emptiness dully. He accumulates the conditions of
generalised disgust.
One could believe that the internet network allows other modes
of broadcasting, that it constitutes a new retentional dispositif, more
open and alternative, as it were, to programming industries. In reality,
this could be true if we managed to impose an entirely new organisa-
tional model to access information that this network of digital networks
makes imaginable and realisable. As for me, I worked at the National
Audiovisual Institute (INA), but also at the University of Compiègne, to
define these alternative models. Unfortunately the models of access to
information that dominate and structure the internet today are perfectly
homogeneous with those of segmentation – in other words, responding
to the logic of markets. If one wants to exist on the internet, if one wants
to make a website, the important thing is obviously for this website to be
visited. Yet it needs to be referenced and to adopt indexes and systems
of content description that meet industrial standards: once again the
imperative is to process huge masses and realise economies of scale. To
be correctly referenced, the conditions of selection need to be antici-
pated in the individual production by the industrial retentional system.
There are, however, alternative solutions, and in this respect I devel-
oped two concepts: first, that of authors’ societies, supported by what I
called situated semantics, where communities of readers conceive, with
electronic annotation systems, thesaurii, that is, lists of authorities that allow
a very fine indexing by preserving the singular localities of indexing.2
Second is the notion of the discretisable audiovisual temporal object,3 which
allowed the implementation of new audiovisual broadcasting dispositifs.4
Besides, one should not confuse the contemporary question of syn-
chronisation with that of uniformisation, even though they have an
immediate and evident relationship. Uniformisation is a fact, but it is
far from being new. The uniform is a classical means to signal a belong-
ing. It is also an incontestable fact that modernity is a new uniformisa-
tion. And it is also a fact that, for instance, Mao Zedong has made the
Chinese people adopt a kind of uniform, and that this uniform denotes
a kind of social alienation by a more or less coercive imposition of a
behaviour, leading to stupidity and suffering – including the military
uniform. Uniformisation is not only this. What I called earlier the dif-
férant identity presupposes a uniformisation: it is from this moment that
the alphabet makes it possible to describe in a uniform manner a very
large variety of idioms; these idioms were in turn made possible by

the alphabet. Between these idioms, exchanges intensify their idiomatic
content and their repetition leads to a difference through different inter-
pretative experience, as I have previously described. But it should also
be emphasised that alphabetic uniformisation – that Sylvain Auroux
called ‘grammatisation’ – also produces true linguicides, liquidations of
idioms. There is an entire political economy of uniformisation, as both
entropic and negentropic. In Symbols and Diabols, I will try to show that
these questions made up the history of an endless war of spirits, where
grammatisation and more generally mnemotechnics constitute, with the
retentional dispositifs, the very weapons of this war.
While the development of the alphabet has led to a perceptible liq-
uidation of idiomatic diversities – for instance, Greek dialects – this
uniformisation at the linguistic level by the alphabetisation has allowed a
very strong diversification of individuals, an intensification of the singu-
larity of individuating processes. Even though tribal idioms have without
doubt disappeared with the development of the great lingua francas
[langues véhiculaires], such as the Attic language of the Athenians that was
strengthened by the adoption of a unique alphabet in 403 bc, speaking
individuals could also assert in new ways their singularity when practis-
ing this novel way of speaking, constituted by the literate relation to
language.
The uniformisation is therefore not in itself a bad thing. In other
words, my answer is a way to show that I am not opposed to industry,
on the contrary, nor am I an adversary of technology or modernity. I
believe in the possibility of an industry that would not be fatally entropic.
However, with today’s mode of industrial development, with industrial
policies [politique industrielle], or rather industrial non-policies, that dev-
astate the contemporary world, we have come to the very limits of a
process of lethal homogenisation.
Moreover, the synchronisation is of course not in itself a bad thing.
Not only is it not a bad thing, but it is absolutely indispensable. For a
society to be a society, dispositifs, structures and moments of synchrony
need to exist. We need a synchronic horizon of the language if we want
to speak to one another, as Ferdinand de Saussure explained. A language
is a process of collective individuation that is carried on by all its speakers
[locuteurs] at the same time, that is, it is carried to the limit of its equilib-
rium, or synchrony. Diachrony is a disequilibrium and synchrony is an
equilibrium. Yet the fact of language – interlocution – is situated in between
equilibrium and disequilibrium: it tends towards equilibrium as much as

towards disequilibrium. Provided that they do not simply engage in chattering, any
two persons will speak differently, that is, diachronically – o therwise, they
would have nothing to say to one another. Speech is here an exchange
of singularities and desires, as diachronies carrying significance, in their
meeting, which is also non-insignificance.5 This exchange produces novelty
and also the crossing of a stage in psychic and collective individuation –
the individuation of each speaker as well as the individuation of language
itself. Language structures itself and synchronises itself in new ways.
In fact, for two speakers to converse, and exchange diachronies, as it
were, a synchronic terrain of exchange needs to exist. But this terrain is
always provisional and is never given as such. These two speakers begin
in a given and already-there terrain, but when there is significance, a
new terrain of synchrony is conquered. This new terrain can possibly
only exist between these two speakers, in what forms a small idiolect, but
it can also become an idiom, a way of speaking a language, shared by a
group of speakers.
The problem is not synchrony in itself but the tendency to synchrony
that governs all human exchange and, in particular, all interlocution.
The problem raised by the current tendency to synchronisation is that it
consists in a decomposition of the synchronic and the diachronic. A lan-
guage is what articulates two tendencies, diachronic and synchronic, so
they create a strong sense of belonging through strong synchronic links,
but these would not find their power if it were not for the diachronic
intensity that they make possible, that is, for the potential singularities
and playing field these links open.
There is an ‘ecological crisis of spirit’ when the industrial control of
synchrony leads to an opposition between the diachronic and the syn-
chronic; when they de-compose, it is the process of psychic and collec-
tive individuation itself that decomposes. The I and the We get affixed
into a They of idle talk, where there is nothing else to say, in the insig-
nificance of the world: either you are synchronisable, but in renouncing
your diachrony – that is, your singularity – you belong to the sphere of
consumption and so-called ‘modernity’, or you are not synchronisable
and you are marginal, deviant or even a terrorist; you are accused of
asociality, even when this exclusive act is precisely the destruction of the
social and relational.
We can object that in reality it does not happen this way. Indeed,
we see behaviours that appropriate new technological processes and
that, at the same time, develop a huge amount of singularity. I would

be tempted to think of myself in this way. I would however invite soci-
ologists who draw these kinds of conclusions to verify the magnitude
of this observation: what sort of people are concerned, in what cat-
egory of the population can these facts be proved, and to what extent
do they not develop in the same way as the marginality that society
lives and represses as asociability? As for me, I believe that we are in a
deeply rifted society, to use a term that continues to be fashionable these
days – for good reasons, unfortunately.6 We live in a society in which,
more and more, two worlds cohabit with more and more difficulty and
improbability; they ignore one another in increasingly polarising and
threatening ways. There is the world to which, by chance or by accident, I
belong, along with many of those who listen to France Culture, many of
them by chance as well. If they listen to France Culture, which has not
yet become an organ of definite cretinisation, it is because they resist this
tendency, at least partly. But let’s not delude ourselves: no one can escape
this tendency. Directly or indirectly, we are subjected to it, if only the
tendency to escape instinctually from the vile [immonde], and therefore
the ignorance – or what I called earlier ‘the unscience’ – that we hold so
dear in front of facts.
If, by chance, some people continue to be in a culture of s ingularities
– and I hope I belong to this culture as well – there are still countless
people who live in entirely different, and often extremely alienating,
working conditions; when they have work, it is in entirely destructured
urban environments, which are the result of a functional urbanism that
separated residential from commercial neighbourhoods, shops from
business centres, and so on, leading to literally unliveable zones. I know
these zones very well: I spent my childhood in them, at Sarcelles, and
already at that time we called it ‘sarcellite’ – inhabitants of the uninhab-
itable are the privileged targets of supermarkets, publicists, PR entities
that sell commodities with ‘options’, banks that sell loans and interest
rates, and so on.
These people live in another world, close to the vile [immonde], a kind
of non-world, or somewhere that tends towards a non-world – something
like hell. I am not saying that nothing can come out of it: I left a passage
very close to the vile. I am trying to say that nothing good can come out
of ignoring this fact, or minimising it, from the side of those who leave it
or by those who think that their unscience allows them to leave this fact
behind. I think that when we make sociological analyses, we need to take
into account these two worlds. Let’s not delude ourselves into making
the hypothesis of a common world; this is an entirely abstract fiction of
an academic or media-based discourse that only works to legitimise the
established disorder.
Of course, there are – and fortunately so – some bridges between
these two worlds, their opposition comes with different gradations, some
of us belong to both worlds, depending on where we are, the activities
that we have, the moments of the day we live. I try to cultivate in my
own existence, whenever I can, some of these passages, and therefore I
try to belong to both worlds. Our society is more and more split, and
a part of it has sunk into hypersynchronisation, and it has lost a major
part of its self-esteem and is close to eruption since the situation is in all
respects unbearable, but more importantly – and this is far worse – it is
symbolically unbearable. It leads to the danger of reversing symbols into
what I call diabols, and a risk taken by an era obsessed with the diabolical.
It is this symbolic dispositif that has made the unity of a society. Until
the nineteenth century, the symbolic dispositif was the fruit of clerics.
Clerics make up a category, whether they are religious, secular or simply
‘intellectuals’, which is not involved in economic activity and produc-
tion. They are in charge of producing symbols of collective belonging,
constitutive of the We. They produce the synchronic horizons, that is,
the common spaces of experimentation of individual singularities, as
artists, as intellectuals, as religious persons, as jurists and so on. These
common spaces of experimentation that I am referring to are the dis-
positifs of repetition that give difference.
While until the end of the nineteenth century the world of clerics had
continued to be distinct from the world of production, by the early twen-
tieth century these two worlds began to merge. The clerics are absorbed
by the world of production: they disappear. This is what leads to the
systematic exploitation of symbolic production, entirely subjected to the
market criteria. These are purely immanent, utilitarian and calculable
criteria – but at the same time they are deprived of the strength and
symbolic efficiency that inhabit the works of spirit. This is what Hannah
Arendt discusses when she raises the question of ‘durability’.7
When the production of symbols becomes reduced to an effect from
calculation, and consequently the symbol is amortisable in the short
term, the production of symbols should now be understood as selection
criteria subjected to the archi-criterion of profitability in the short term:
then symbols are reversed into diabols. I define symbols as secondary and
tertiary retentions of the We that make the selection of primary reten-

tions possible in the everyday flow.
The difficulty is to avoid diabolising the diabol. The diabol is also what
produces individual singularity. The diabol sides with the diachronic. In
a way, it is Plato who diabolises the diabol. The diabol is the dynamic
and paradoxical principle of a healthy synchronic: this is what Simondon
calls the dephasing of the individuating process that ensures the movement
of this individuation, as the tendency to disequilibrium present in meta-
stability. It comes at a moment when the criteria become immanent and
are hegemonically subjected to calculations, where diabols and symbols
are entirely separated. We enter this vileness and, in this sense, into the
possibility of the diabolical. When the decomposition of the symbolic
leads to a de-composition of the synchronic and the diachronic, a rever-
sal of the symbols and diabols takes place, bringing about a strictly dia-
bolical situation: far from constituting the process of projecting the unity
of a We, in a welcoming and desired synchrony, the symbol produces a
loss of self-esteem and social atomisation that can lead to war – either
civil or military war.
ÉD: Do you think that a politics of culture can play a role in this ‘diabolic’ landscape?
Since what is at stake is symbolic, is it not a politics of symbols that we would need?
Perhaps we do not need a politics that only plays out in the symbolic domain – which
unfortunately makes our everyday – but a form of symbolic ecology that would redefine
the domain of the political?
BS: All politics is also a politics of symbols, sometimes the worst and
sometimes the best symbols. Regarding the fleshing out of a politics
worthy of the situation, I believe that a new critique of consciousness is
necessary. As I have already explained, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, we denounced with reason the illusions of ‘awareness’ [prise de
conscience] and mastery as conceived by the philosophies of conscious-
ness. My work on technics, and the relation between anamnesis and
hypomnesis, raises the irreducible character of what we call the passive
synthesis – a synthesis that is made outside the subject, in contrast with
his or her judgement and decision that are called ‘active synthesis’. But
it does not mean that this approach renounces consciousness, since this
would simply be renouncing philosophy and thought as such, and, with
that, renouncing freedom and the very possibility of decision. We cannot
deny that contemporary melancholia can help us perceive the contem-
porary situation, even though we can be tempted to take pleasure in

this very melancholia; we cannot escape it. But we should not concede
to this. The right to thinking should be affirmed, the duty of acting out.
At this stage, I find it necessary to rethink in depth what conscious-
ness is. Until the end of the nineteenth century, up until Nietzsche,
consciousness is thought of as the spiritual sphere, as the non-material,
as the immaterial. (Marx is a special case: when he refers to ‘class con-
sciousness’, he does not argue very much about consciousness even
while denouncing its metaphysical conception; in Engels, consciousness
is reduced to the question of dialectics.) Consciousness, from the funda-
mental opposition introduced by Plato between material-mortal body
and immaterial-immortal soul, is always conceived as philosophy in its
opposition between matter and form, what Simondon has definitively
critiqued by thinking technics.
I try to think with concepts such as epiphylogenesis, where conscious-
ness is a form of life and a series of decisions, or tertiary retention,
where memory is always already hypomnesically constituted and with
it records not only consciousness but also the unconscious. Therefore I
try to think consciousness as being essentially constituted by the time of
consciousness itself, constituted by tertiary retentions, forming each time
a world that is also a historical-technical milieu of spirit.
To come back to the beginning of our interview, what makes who I
am is the manner in which I have inherited a past that I have not lived.
I have inherited a spirit that haunts me, which was received from the
experience of my ancestors, which we call culture, and that led to ways
of living that constitute my own past, my lived past. This legacy and
my lived past are made accessible via tertiary retentions, and this takes
place ever since the Australopithecus, although in different ways: ter-
tiary retentions transform themselves and transform humans’ relations
to time, and they transform the human itself, which is only a relation to
time. The first condition is narcissism and the ‘mirror stage’ that Lacan
refers to, and I argue that this first condition is understood precisely in
tertiary relations.
The layer of tertiary retentions is constitutive of the human and it has
become the field of systematic industrial exploitation, ruining the pro-
cesses of consciousness (as nodes of singularities capable of taking deci-
sions), but also ruining desire, as processes of unconsciousness – if I can
put it this way. To fight this state of affairs, one needs to rethink in depth
the material condition of consciousness as well as the unconscious. I am
a materialist since I posit that consciousness is constituted by matter; but

I am also a spiritualist, since I posit that matter supports spirits that are
not reducible to matter, and that haunt consciousness from the uncon-
scious. Consequently, I practise a spiritual materialism or a materialist
spiritualism. From this position, I call for a new critique of conscious-
ness as well as the unconscious that would ground once again a political
project, or that would allow us to face a passage beyond politics, beyond
Western individuation. One needs to ask whether the very word ‘poli-
tics’ is adequate: polis is indeed very far from us. This is why when we
argue for the necessity to think action, in order to maintain the possibil-
ity of a We, including in its articulation with an It (in other words, the
It denotes what makes the criterion improbable in its symbolic power and
irreducible to calculation), the word ‘politics’ would only be appropriate
at the cost of a critique, and especially a critique of law, which remains
to be done.
After all, Kant or Condorcet, but before them Rousseau and Diderot,
opened ‘Enlightenment’, that is, the discourse on consciousness as the
condition of a political revolution. ‘Political revolution’ does not neces-
sarily mean terror and beheading, and it does not simply mean aware-
ness [prise de conscience] either: it should also be an unawareness [prise
d’inconscient]. To start a revolution does not necessarily mean fire and
blood: to start a revolution essentially consists in positing that an era is over
[révolue] and that something else should come instead. The words ‘era’,
‘positing’ and how ‘something else should come’ need to be questioned.
I can ‘posit’ that this revolution lies in the uttering of this sentence; in this
case it does not translate into anything in reality, except in a new tertiary
retention! But if this is the case, I produce a revolutionary writing, which
will perhaps one day be translated into revolutionary acts and decisions.
Something else should come, that is, new modes of thinking that no
longer oppose, for instance, the material and the spiritual, and to me
this is a revolutionary position. This means that we need to think the
symbolic (and the I, and the We, and the narcissisms that support them)
without opposing the diachronic and the synchronic, while continuing
to re-evaluate in depth the great concepts inherited from philosophy,
and not abandoning them, but critiquing them, especially in light of all the ques-
tions linked to the development of technoscience in the twentieth century and the new
problems associated with this development, as a working hypothesis.
The Industrial Revolution established a new relation between science
and technics that is relatively poorly analysed by the great thinker of
technical revolution, Marx. At the very beginning of our interview, I

argued that philosophy, as an epistēmē that could be clearly distinguished
from science, was opposed to technics. It is a general truth that ever
since Plato until around the eighteenth century, science and technics
were not only separated but strictly opposed. Yet this situation started
to change with the Industrial Revolution that began in England. All of
a sudden, science was associated with technics for the needs of industry
and it changed meaning entirely. From a science which had the ambi-
tion to tell the state of things – that is, identity, essence and stability – we
move towards a science that seeks to explore the possible becomings of
things. It is much less interested in the real than in the possible, much
less in being than in becoming.
Today, instead of being opposed, by associating itself with technics,
science becomes a kind of science fiction: a science capable of producing
chimeras. This situation is a total upheaval in the conceptual apparatus
that philosophy used to think science, politics, aesthetics and religion,
roughly between Plato and Kant. To this day we have not yet evaluated
what this becoming-technoscience of science means. We have not yet
measured the degree of engagement of science in the world, and it is
far from being a simple neutral objectivation [objectivation] of processes,
becoming an actor of these processes. Yet this position of actor is a
central epistemic change.
In particular, we do not understand the debate around genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) and the associated reactions; especially in
France, when farmers are condemned for their actions, the gestures of
the farmers’ association (Confédération paysanne) are reminiscent of peasant
revolts [jacqueries] and manifest a certain lucidity regarding the changing
status of science. We bury our heads in the sand when we call these dem-
onstrators vandals, as Dominique Lecourt declared.8 These ‘vandals’
denounced the processes that resulted from the changes of direction of
science but that have not been evaluated. These farmers demand with
reason that we discuss the transformation of science and the exclusively
industrial finalities that drive it. Here again, it is a question of control of
memory, but this time biological memory is concerned, be it vegetal, animal
or human, as the object of a tertiarisation and the industrial control of a
new retentional dispositif that Foucault analysed as biopower.
What is happening to the production of transgenic plants like GMOs,
for instance, or with human cloning? We cannot ignore the fact that the
techno-industrial development constitutes a unilateral decision of selection
among all possibles of the technicised living. Such a development is hegem-

onically subjected, once again, to the criterion of short-term profitabil-
ity: nothing can be more entropic and hostile to life, which is by essence
negentropic. We cannot ignore the fact that the selection criteria of possibles
have nothing scientific: they are purely economic and capitalist.
It is deeply unjust to simply call José Bové a vandal, to get rid of the
serious problem he presents us, and to give him a fourteen-month prison
sentence. We cannot call him a vandal because he is opposed to the
situation towards which we are blindly directing ourselves. He is right
to denounce it. He is, however, wrong to do it by targeting laboratories.
Like Dominique Lecourt, I condemn this by principle. Yet at the same
time, I cannot ignore the fact that José Bové and the Confédération paysanne
know that a media presence is necessary and, unfortunately, the very
working of the media apparatus requires sensational behaviour and the
creation of a commotion that will be heard.
Instead of denying all legitimacy to the discourse of José Bové and
his friends, we need to critique it: their arguments are meagre, they
denounce the ‘technical system’ with Jacques Ellul’s concepts, which
seem insufficient to me. But on the other hand, not to take into account
what Ellul has pointed out, that technics is the ‘challenge of the century’,
is as worrying as the crude denunciation that too often stands for cri-
tique, while in truth it really empties out any possibility of critique.
Concerning the question of GMOs, I do not really know what to
think except that, first, it is the biopolitical dimension of the question
of selection and the industrial retentional dispositifs. Second, I cannot
imagine how earth will face the huge demographic problems to come
without adopting new food production techniques. However, I do not
trust the current state of the industry to hand over the future of reten-
tions and their selection, and determine the living.
A profound epistemological, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, eco-
nomic and political revolution should take place in our minds as well
as in our acts. In this respect, there is a kind of blindness among certain
scientists, and in a way it is not only the unscientific state of science but,
above all, the disavowal [dénégation] of this unscience and, with it, the
denial of the unconsciousness that this worrying situation creates. This
situation encourages rejections, reactivity and ressentiment that proliferate
in different forms throughout the world. By becoming technoscience,
science explores and realises possibles as fictions, in the sense that all arte-
facts are partly linked to fiction: it becomes science fiction, and is no longer
guided by a truth criterion derived from the sky of ideas – the models
that essences made in Platonism. This means that the depth of the ques-
tion of fiction needs to be reconsidered, along with its relation to truth.
I tried, in my own work, to draw out consequences from the passage
of a science conceived as a description of being to a science conceived
as the inscription of new possibles (and thus constituted as technosci-
ence, strictly speaking). The question is not to refuse this becoming.
Eventually, this becoming only deploys what is contained in the origi-
nary hypomnesic character of all knowledge. The question, however, is
that of knowing how to distinguish between good and bad fictions, to
learn to think a truth that would not be opposed to fiction, but a truth composed with
fictions. This is perhaps related to the theological question, since it often
designates God as a necessary fiction. I’m not calling for a return of the
theological; I feel far away from this idea – even though I believe that we
need to rethink entirely the religious question since we have not come to
terms with it. I raise the question of God in terms of diabelein.
I ask the scientific community to take into account as much as possible
the absolutely novel character of these questions, as well as the prudence
that they call for. I understand this word (‘prudence’) as a translation
of Aristotle’s concept of phronēsis.9 The Aristotelian prudence raises a
problem, however, precisely due to his conception of technē that does not
allow taking contemporary technology into consideration. This problem
is even greater in Kant, for whom technics is simply applied science.10
I therefore demonstrated that it is no longer possible to think tech-
nics in this perspective. Unfortunately, in spite of the questions opened
by Bachelard concerning, for instance, the role of the technological in
scientific experience, philosophers and many scientists often think or
do not think technics with this archaic Kantian concept (and Alexis
Philonenko understood this very well).
The disavowal of these problems by scientists is, in truth, for me a
form of ressentiment, and the reactivity that grows in the world. An axi-
omatic revolution of our minds and acts is the first step towards the
accomplishment of an ‘ecology of spirit’ that knows as much as possible
the extent (and the excessiveness) of (1) the constitutive place of technics,
that arrives in all domains – from the exploitation of the raw material
of our conscious time [temps de conscience] by cultural industries or by
exploitation of the biological molecules transformed into mnemotech-
nic materials; and (2) the way in which financial power seized technics
hegemonically, by understanding it empirically de facto although missing
out on its de jure direction [sens]; it has therefore ignored the limits of its
actions that will be made self-evident at some point, but perhaps too late.
I understand the practice of critiquing after Kant as the task of limit-
ing or delimiting. This critique, this political economy of symbols, spirits
and living bodies that inhabit these spirits, needs to show the suiciding
dimension, as it were, for capital, as well as the drive for an unlimited
and uncritiqued exploitation of consciousnesses and bodies. All of this
leads to disarray and to the liquidation of narcissism and desire, but
more problematically it will end up annihilating the market itself.
Moderation [mesure] and immoderation [démesure] are indissociable.
It therefore requires us to return to the tragic sense: something that
Nietzsche had already invited us to do. It does not mean that we need
to return to a pre-Platonic Greek thought, but that we should read the
Greeks who came before Plato without interiorising everything that is
Pauline in his way of thinking (it has been noted that Paul was the transla-
tion of Plato into Judaism and as such the invention of Christianity). The
tragic philosophers thought without opposition, this is what Nietzsche
taught us: they thought the tragic situation as composition, or, to put it
differently, the irreducibility of fiction. We come after Christianity, we
need to revisit the withering Christian history of the West [Occident] from
the point of view of the tragic: this history began as a departure from
the tragic and as the forgetting of its sense. We are in charge of this remi-
niscence. This is the immense strength of Bertrand Bonello’s film Tiresia
that brings a sensibility to these questions that appear at first abstract.11
To put it differently, in passing through the question of the tragic, the
critique that I am referring to consists in thinking the accident first, and the
accidental origin of human fate; thinking and philosophising the accident
and with the accident, if I can put it this way, and therefore by accident,
otherwise it would contribute to reactive discourses.
Notes
1. On this point, see Bernard Stiegler, ‘To Love, To Love Me, To Love
Us: From September 11 to April 21’, in Acting Out, trans. David Barison,
Daniel Ross and Patrick Crogan (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2008), pp. 37–8, and Symbolic Misery, Vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch,
trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).
2. These concepts are derived from the work I did for the National Library
in France (BNF) in 1990.
3. I presented this concept on different occasions, particularly in the

article ‘La numérisation des objets temporels’, in Franck Beau, Philippe
Dubois and Gérard Leblanc (eds), Cinéma et dernières technologies (Paris:
INA/De Boeck, 1998).
4. This is what the studio of hypermedia production that I created in 1997
at the INA continues to use today; it is directed by Jean-Pierre Mabille
and his assistant Xavier Lemarchand.
5. [Trans.] Cornelius Castoriadis also wrote on insignificance in two
books: the untranslated The Rising Tide of Insignificance in 1996 and
Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis, ed. Gabriel
Rockhill, trans. Gabriel Rockhill and John V. Garner (London:
Continuum, 2011).
6. [Trans.] The expression ‘rifted society’ echoes Jacques Chirac’s famous
slogan for the 1995 presidential elections, the ‘social rift’ (la fracture
sociale). A recent controversial sociological study on the French working
classes continued this argument; see Christophe Guilly, Fractures fran-
çaises (Paris: Flammarion, 2013).
7. [Trans.] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 136–7, 167–8.
8. [Trans.] Dominique Lecourt (1944–) is a French historian and philoso-
pher of science at the University Paris 7 Saint-Denis, and the director
of the Centre Georges Canguilhem. He first worked with Althusser and
Canguilhem in the tradition of French historical epistemology, and
later wrote on contemporary topics such as cloning, bioethics, posthu-
manism, mythology and the politics of fear. See François Ewald and
Dominique Lecourt, ‘Les OGM et les nouveaux vandales’, Le Monde, 3
September 2001.
9. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd edn, trans. Terence Irwin
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), book 6, chapter 5, pp.
89–90, and Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1963).
10. All these questions are analysed in detail in ‘The Malaise of Our
Educational Institutions’, in Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 3:
Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 131–56.
11. [Trans.] For a commentary of this film, see ‘Tiresias and the War of
Time: On a Film by Bertrand Bonello’, in Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Vol.
1, pp. 81–93.
Appendix 1. The Technologisation
of Memory: Interview with Élie
During
Élie During (ÉD): In your view, the culture industry’s mass production of temporal
objects is inseparable from a ‘mass-produced temporalisation of consciousness’. How
does this remark represent a new take on the question of mass Kulturindustrie as
formulated by the Frankfurt school? In other words, what is the difference between
what you say about Hollywood as ‘the world capital of schematism’, and Adorno and
Horkheimer’s denunciation of an alienation mechanism in which ‘cars, bombs and
films ensure the system’s cohesion’?
Bernard Stiegler (BS): What limits Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis

is that in denouncing the process of the technical exteriorisation of the
imagination, they fail to explain why consciousness can be so highly
penetrated and controlled by the unfolding of a movie or a temporal
object in general. In order to grasp the problem, we have to start with
an exact definition of the concept of temporal object. What I call a
temporal object is one whose flow coincides with the flux of the con-
sciousness of which it is the object, and which therefore is basically a
flux itself, since it exists only with the passage of time, as a flow. The
paradigm for such a thing is a melody, as Husserl demonstrated. A tem-
poral object is woven of retentions and protentions. These protentional
and retentional processes also weave the temporality of consciousness
in general – and by the same token temporal objects make it possible
to modify these processes of consciousness, and, to some extent, to
influence or even control them. These processes are most highly for-
malised in music, which explains, for example, its military and religious
functions.
ÉD: How exactly do you see the relationship between temporal objects and reten-
tional processes? And how do you go from there to the question of the alienation of
consciousness?
The Technologisation of Memory 97
BS: In the ‘now’ of a melody, in the present moment of a musical

object in its unfolding, the note played can only be a note (i.e. not just a
sound) insofar as it retains within itself the preceding note, and the still-
present preceding note retains the one before that, which in turn retains
the previous note, etc. This primary retention, which pertains to the
present of perception, shouldn’t be confused with secondary retention,
which is, for example, a melody I may have heard last night, which I
can play back in my imagination through the workings of memory, and
which constitutes the past of my consciousness. Husserl tells us that
we shouldn’t confuse perception (primary retention) with imagination
(secondary retention). Before the invention of the phonograph it was
absolutely impossible to hear exactly the same melody twice in a row.
The advent of sound recording, which is itself what I have called a
‘tertiary retention’ (a prosthesis, exteriorised memory), made possible
the identical repetition of the same temporal object, and that allows us
to better understand the importance of retentional processes. On the
one hand, when the same temporal object is repeated twice in a row, it
gives rise to two different temporal phenomena, which means that the
primary retentions are different in each of them: the retentions of the
first hearing become secondary and play a selective role in the primary
retentions during the second hearing. But on the other hand, tertiarised
temporal objects, that is, recordings (phonograms, films, radio and tel-
evision broadcasts), are materialised time overdetermining the relation-
ship between primary and secondary retentions, and making it possible
to control them in some respects. Today, the flux of consciousness of
which we are constituted increasingly follows the rhythm and warp
of precisely these kinds of mass-produced temporal objects. With the
technological changes now under way, we are going from an industrial
stage to what could be called a hyperindustrial stage, which integrates
the world of culture and the mind in its entirety into an enormous
technological-industrial system where the same machinery produces
material goods and disseminates symbols and other forms of ‘spiritual
nourishment’. Moreover, TV receivers are now being transformed into
remote control terminals, allowing us not only to watch programmes
but to perform actions at a distance, such as purchases, now, and many
other things in the future. This is leading to a general synchronisation
of the temporal flow of consciousness, something which will develop
more and more.
ÉD: The idea that we are experiencing a process of uniformisation linked to the glo-
balisation of the systems of cultural production and dissemination (a process accelerated
by the establishment of standards of interoperability between digital infrastructures)
usually arouses either admiration or condemnation, moralisation or thrilled futurology.
How does your thinking relate to the standard critical discourse on globalisation?
BS: To respond adequately to that question, we’d have to go back to the

thinkers who have been considering it for the last two hundred years.
An amazing amnesia surrounds it today, as if Braudel, for example,
had never written on the subject, or as if the Marxian analysis of capital
was not primarily concerned with globalisation. In my view, the ques-
tion of globalisation is directly linked to the development of the techni-
cal system. Globalisation means, above all, that the technical system
of production of symbols as well as material goods is now starting to
operate on a world level. From the West to the Far East there’s been
an enormous shift – the power of symbolic production, formerly in
religious, artistic, political and intellectual hands, is now subordinated
to and integrated into the industrial and sales apparatus and its cri-
teria; the technical system has entirely absorbed the mnemotechnical
system. From the Neolithic period through to the nineteenth century,
the rhythm and conditions of development of the latter were structurally
distinct from the technological system for the production of material
goods: the writing of the alphabet remained the same even though the
technological systems of production changed constantly. For the last
thirty years an integration of the two systems has been under way, and
now, in 2001, it is complete.
ÉD: In your book, you warn of the danger of a ‘loss of individuation’, and the subtitle
refers directly to the question of ill-being, an existential malaise. It’s hard to take this
as mere medical diagnosis and not see it as a moral evaluation . . .
BS: The point is not to condemn a process or construct an edifying phi-

losophy, but to analyse the existing facts and from that consider the pos-
sibility of right (in the sense that Kant distinguishes the question of fact
and the question of right, or de facto and de jure). The integration of the
technical system and mnemotechnics is a fact, a very long-term process
to which any ‘resistance’ would be an illusion. Leroi-Gourhan summa-
rises this trend by a concept that I have adopted: exteriorisation. But
this process opens up various alternative possibilities; it’s not a matter
of blind determinism. A number of questions of political economy arise

within this framework, and they are still rather ill-defined because we
don’t distinguish between becoming, the process overall, and time,
what we do with the process. This process actually requires us to make
choices, to make a distinction, even though at first, taken simply as a
becoming, it might seem to consist of a general elimination of difference,
what I’ve called synchronisation. The production of difference can only
arise from a critique of that which within the process goes against the
process itself. The conclusion of this process (its end and liquidation)
must be diverted in time, time which generates difference. That’s what I
call invention. I think any resistance to the future is irrelevant. The point
is not so much to resist it as to invent it, or in other words to transform it
into time: the invention of differences which bring out the new within a
process that in and of itself tends, on the contrary, to eliminate them. In
Technics and Time, Vol. 2: Disorientation, my general intention was to show
how the process we are seeing has resulted in disorientation, in the sense
that we have completely lost our sense of North, East and West and are
experiencing a global confusion leading to suicidal and other extreme
behaviours. What’s needed in the face of the process of the integration
of technics and mnemotechnics is a critical reformulation making it pos-
sible to make distinctions which aren’t given in advance, so that we can
get our bearings. That’s why I wrote a commentary of Kant’s ‘What
Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’.1 Today we’re in a situ-
ation where we have to decide between possibles which are all fictions,
to differentiate between good and bad fictions. In the end, philosophy is
always based on the idea that you have to differentiate. But until now, it
considered fiction a bad difference, and tended to contrast it to the true,
taken as the non-fictional. But if, as we see with tertiary phonographic
retentions, secondary retention always plays a role in the selection of
primary retentions, this means that perception always works with the
imagination, that reality is therefore always projected by the imagina-
tion: fiction is a component of consciousness. So, the point is to be able
to differentiate between good and bad fictions. Systematic industrial
exploitation of our consciousness leads to a very bad fiction, one that
kills our powers of imagination, desire and fictionalising.
ÉD: How does this disorientation pose a political question? I have the impression that
the way you get to the root of the problem through a reconsideration of the question of
retention inherently leads to politics. What you call ‘the cinema of consciousness’ (the
hypothesis that consciousness, in general, is cinematographic in and of itself) would

necessarily be a political cinema . . .
BS: Absolutely. Consciousness does work like a movie projector; not

only a projector but also a machine for capturing, recording, splic-
ing, editing, post-production, mixing and special effects. The movies
are an exteriorisation of the structure of consciousness. Consciousness
is a cutting room, a central control room, because it edits the flow of
primary, secondary and tertiary retentions. I say this on the basis of
Husserl and a close reading of the triple synthesis of the imagination
presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. The concept of retention is essen-
tial in order to understand the political problem posed by the process
of the integration of technics and mnemotechnics. Retention is what
allows us to retain the past in the present for the future. The memory
in the nerves of my cerebral cortex performs this retention. But there is
also the retention of the present within the present (Husserl’s primary
retention) and the artificial, exteriorised memory held by a trace or an
object (tertiary retention). A carved flint is a form of recording, a manual
activity, as are writing, photography, phonographs, signs scribbled into
a diary, words spoken into a tape recorder, and a knot in my handker-
chief. In each of these examples, we put symbolic elements into mate-
rial form so that they can be preserved through time. The process of
hominisation is essentially linked to this possibility of tertiary retention,
because these materialised symbolic memorisations are what makes it
possible to transmit an individual’s memory to the collective. The future
of societies and the very possibility of the existence of a We are overde-
termined by these retentional mechanisms. But every retentional tech-
nology also applies criteria for retention or selection. Clearly everything
can’t be retained; memory can only function if it is selective (the paradox
described by Borges in ‘Funes, His Memory’).2 So the political question
is always this: what are society’s criteria for retention? Totalitarianism is
characterised by hegemonic selection criteria. Law itself is the choice of
a form to make case-by-case decisions on the basis of variable elements.
That is what gives law its general applicability. The judgement of ideas,
what’s called universality, rests on the possibility of an infinity of judge-
ments through time; there is a particular economy of selection where the
criterion is the possibility of universalisation and thus infinitisation. Until
the twentieth century, all this was produced, de jure and de facto, by the
circle of clerics, which was relatively independent of the constraints of
the sphere of material production and business. Today this is no longer

the case, because the process of retention has itself become material.
When the British Paramount archives, including their newsreels, are
bought up by VisNews and most of them are destroyed because the film
stock they are recorded on is highly inflammable, the imperative guiding
the company, which comes from the stockholders, is to obtain the fastest
possible return on their investment. The sphere of the marketplace
applies a criterion that is no longer that of the universal infinitisation of
a judgement but the most rapid amortisation possible. In contrast, the
imperative of universalisation implies the slowest amortisation possible.
There is a radical conflict between these criteria, because the mind is not
amortisation. The mind does not pay off.
ÉD: What is the exact nature of the link you indicate between the mass production of
programmes and the homogenisation of the criteria of retention? How is it that second-
ary retentions, which are filters, tend to become homogenised (as do consciousnesses as
well, by the same token)?
BS: When ten million people watch the same broadcast, the same audio-
visual temporal object, they synchronise their fluxes. Of course, the
criteria they apply for retention are different, and so they don’t all per-
ceive the same phenomenon or think the same thing about what they’re
seeing. When I listen to a melody for a second time, I don’t hear exactly
the same thing, in the sense that my listening is not the same – which
shows, by the way, how technics makes possible differentiation and not
just homogenisation. The original protentions are no longer present;
I’ve already ‘refilled’ them and now I have a secondary retention (a
memory) of the object which in fact serves to filter primary retentions.
The secondary retention is what explains the difference between the
two hearings. But while the secondary retentions shape the selection
criteria at work in primary retentions, the fact that every day the same
people watch the same shows necessarily leads them, in the end, to share
the same secondary retentions, and thus to select the same primary
retentions. They end up being so much in synch that they lose their
diachrony, i.e. their singularity, and in the last analysis their freedom to
think.
ÉD: But we are often told that the new digital technologies and the increasing segmen-
tation of the markets of cultural goods will bring about more diversification, with à la
carte programming making it possible for people to choose what they see, personalised
viewing, artworks on command, etc.
BS: In 1987, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, I curated the exhibition

Memories of the Future, which was an attempt to create a space to play out
possible alternatives created by contemporary memorisation technolo-
gies. The ecology of networks and archives always occasions amazingly
naive discourses. As Rifkin demonstrated in The Age of Access, the ques-
tion with networks is access.3 The filters are what counts. Today, search
engines that make it possible to hierarchise information charge people
for being referenced. It’s always a question of selection. User profiling
consists in identifying your search behaviours so that you can be offered
things before it even occurs to you to ask for them. If this doesn’t amount
to consciousness programming, it’s at least Pavlovian conditioning and
reinforcement. You are locked into your synchronicity, prevented from
changing, in an effort to achieve hypersegmentation, a marketing strat-
egy that consists in identifying marketing micro-niches. Thus behaviours
are standardised by reducing them to socio-professional categories or
‘tribes’ identified by ‘markers’ that are far more useful for marketing
than political society. The media use mass-production consciousness-
exploiting technologies by imposing their criteria for retention. The
effect of this control of retentional mechanisms where consciousnesses
represent a market (the value of an hour of consciousness is equal to the
total cost of the ad time divided by the number of viewers, which comes
to a few cents) is the homogenisation of secondary retentions. This is one
essential cause (but not the only one) of our existential malaise. Control
over our retentions implies a loss of identity, which means of difference.
Nietzsche clearly saw this loss of the ability to produce difference and the
tendency for societies to negate the exception. Our supposedly individu-
alistic societies are in reality completely herd-like.
ÉD: Does this bring back the romantic figure of the individual genius who creates
himself and new values?
BS: No, my discourse on singularity has nothing to do with autonomy.

I posit technics, society and exteriority in general as among its constitu-
ent elements. My starting point is not consciousness but technics, which
is not a ground but an initial ‘groundlessness’ [effondement] which I have
also called the default of origin. I am not saying that what we have to get
back to is the singularity of the romantic self – rather, it’s the process of
individuation, in Simondon’s sense of the term. Individuation is always
simultaneously psychic and collective. The I exists only insofar as it is
part of the individuation of the We through that which links the former
to the latter, namely mnemotechnologies, tertiary retentions. Today this
We is in trouble; we don’t know who’s saying We. The We is fraying at
the edges, becoming unbounded. The abrupt change in our retention
technologies means that we have no understanding of our retention
criteria.
ÉD: How do you see the role of art in this context?
BS: Art establishes a slice of time. It is an event, a suspension and an

invention. It makes the synchronic diachronic. It is a reverse entropic
factor, and its effect should be reconsidered in the framework of an
overall energetic and symbolic evaluation. The problem facing con-
temporary art is that it has renounced the concept of beautiful as Kant
defined it, as a judgement not determined by any concept and therefore
universalisable. This art also confronts the crisis of criteria previously
mentioned, which is an aesthetic question linked to perception, or in
other words the materialisation and actual occurrence of an object that
is not me, since we can only perceive the material. Today we have to
think about and define the elements of the ecology of the material milieu
of the mind artists are making use of in the current context, i.e. the
hyperindustrial sphere. If the art world doesn’t advance in developing
an intelligent understanding of the questions, we’ll pay a heavy price.
The question of criteria will not resolve itself spontaneously; it’s up to
us to differentiate. We have to invent differences. And art cannot avoid
critical work in the Kantian sense, a questioning of the relationship
between technics, art, industry and the We.
In this sense, I feel that the Institut de recherche et coordination
acoustique/musique (IRCAM) is a good place for working to reverse the
terrible cultural entropy all around us. Music is the starting point for the
concepts I’ve sketched out here. The concept of the musical instrument
is the best starting point for thinking about technology. Music was and is
the first manifestation of the culture industry: we hear music absolutely
everywhere, not just on the radio and in discotheques and on home
sound systems, and sometimes in concert, but also in airports, lifts, at the
hairdresser’s and in cars. Today, when temporal objects occupy such an
enormous place in our lives, it is an extraordinary opportunity to be at

the IRCAM, which is a space for the culture of invention, independent
of industry, a simultaneously artistic and technological centre for the
formalisation of temporal objects and organs of temporalisation.
Notes
This interview was previously published in Artpress, 276 (2001), pp. 15–19
(translation by L.-S. Torgoff).
1. Immanuel Kant, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?
(1786)’, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood
and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), pp. 1–18.
2. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes, His Memory’, in Fictions, trans. Maria
Kodama (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 91–9.
3. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access is
Transforming Modern Life (London: Penguin, 2001).
Appendix 2. Becoming the Quasi-
Cause of the Accident: Interview
with Benoît Dillet
23 December 2014, Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris
Benoît Dillet (BD): In your Philosophising by Accident, you present your rela-
tion to technics and technology as well as the extent to which your philosophical
approach is influenced by your reading of Plato. These interviews provide an overall
assessment of your trajectory over the course of the first three volumes of the Technics
and Time series as well as opening up new inquiries that you developed in other
works after 2004. I would like to test the hypothetical periodisation that I formu-
lated as a reader of your work. I found three periods in your work: first the three
volumes of Technics and Time (1994–2001); then three more series between
2004 and 2006, Disbelief and Discredit (three volumes), Symbolic Misery
(two volumes) and Constituting Europe (two volumes), which pose questions
on political economy, aesthetics and European cultural politics respectively. A third
period began in 2008, after the great recession, with books that turned to a positive
pharmacology, such as Taking Care (2008), For a New Critique of Political
Economy (2009), What Makes Life Worth Living (2010), States of
Shock (2012) and Pharmacology of the National Front (2013). Ten years
after the publication of these interviews with Élie During, could you explain what
motivated these different projects and series? How do you understand retrospectively the
logic that articulated these three phases that I briefly outlined?
Bernard Stiegler (BS): The first two volumes of Technics and Time were
taken from my doctoral dissertation, that I defended in 1992. The third
volume was not at all part of my dissertation. I wrote it after working in
the domain of archives and images at the Institut national de l’audiovisuel
(INA) for three years. My introduction to the field of images functioned
as a kind of necessary disinhibition before confronting Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason and the question of schematism. At the heart of this third
volume was a rethinking of technics in light of the question of schema-

tism. As an aside, Pietro Montani argues the same thing today, and this
is crucial since he is a specialist of Kant.1 I have been announcing three
more volumes for a very long time now; they have yet to be published
and people often ask me why I do not write these next three volumes
rather than doing all of this – and it is a real question. The incident that
suspended the writing process of Technics and Time was the maturing of
the question of political economy. It created a state of emergency in my
work and I realised that it was no longer possible to do what I believe in
many respects to be indispensable: to go into the works of Husserl, Plato,
Heidegger or even Derrida. It is something that continues to be relevant,
and I feel a sense of incompleteness about this foundational work.
At the same time, there are emergencies. The first was ‘To Love,
To Love Me, To Love Us’, which was published before Philosophising by
Accident.2 Following the initiative of Élie During and his interest in the
third volume of Technics and Time, the interviews included in Philosophising
by Accident were organised to develop the arguments from this third
volume. Then came a series of invitations, especially two at Cerisy-
la-Salle, including one on the constitutive condition of the We.3 But
this conference presentation arrived after two fundamental events that
opened the twenty-first century: the September 11 attacks and the elec-
tion of Jean-Marie Le Pen for the second round of the French presiden-
tial elections. It was in this context that I reconsidered other priorities
and developed a critical agenda.
BD: However, when we read Symbolic Misery, we find in-depth readings of

authors working in the aesthetic field, such as Paul Klee, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol
and Marcel Duchamp. It is therefore a new field of inquiry for your work that we
already encounter in an emerging state in Philosophising by Accident. I’m think-
ing for instance of your discussion of synchronisation and diachronisation introduced
in Disbelief and Discredit, although the two volumes of Constituting Europe
are perhaps more direct interventions with practical responses to panic-stricken politics
[panique politique]. These are not simply political manifestos or polemics, rather
they require a real engagement with the subject. They are long readings of precise
moments in the history of philosophy but also an encounter with new fields of inquiry
for you, such as aesthetics, for instance – they are not pamphlets.
BS: Ah no, they are not pamphlets, far from it, and I hate pamphlets!
When I write a book, I try to treat questions philosophically, at least for
Becoming the Quasi-Cause of the Accident 107
now; it might change one day. Such is the dignity of thinking, even after
my priorities changed. For a very long time now, I have wanted to write
a fundamental work on Husserl’s first philosophy, which is a very impor-
tant text and not discussed enough, but given what is happening in the
world, I have better things to do. This does not mean that I will not do
this work, but if I end up writing it, it will be in reference to what is hap-
pening. In the last ten years, I have tried to maintain [assurer] philosophi-
cally the state of emergency. We are in a state of emergency on different
levels: in relation to children – they are in a situation of desymbolisation
that is extremely serious and irreversible; a state of emergency at the
political level, with the far right dominating everywhere – maybe there
are exceptions but I do not see them . . .
BD: . . . maybe in Spain . . .
BS: . . . Yes, Spain is currently left relatively untouched by the far right,
but this comes after thirty-five years of Francoism! And there are other
emergencies like the question of the Anthropocene that I introduced in
my lecture at the General Organology conference at the University of
Kent in Canterbury (UK). Today I write in this context. I have to share
something: one day I was having dinner with Jacques Derrida at his
place, at the end of the 1990s or perhaps in 2000. He had come back
from South Africa, where he went regularly since he wrote on apart-
heid and Mandela. He tells me: ‘It’s incredible that people there study
Heidegger and Husserl while their country is doing so badly. How can
they do this?’ I replied to him that in our country as well, things are also
going very badly. What I am trying to get at is that, from the beginning,
philosophy was born in a state of emergency. Socrates explains this very
clearly: when he starts philosophising, it is in front of the Thirty Tyrants
(who ruled Athens after the defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404
bce), in face of civil war. Philosophy does not happen in peace [quiétude];
this is what Hegel theorised.
Now, to answer the question: how do we keep philosophical rigour
when we want to confront these things? Symbolic Misery is a very theoreti-
cal text – there are analyses of Freud, Darwin, Beuys and so on – but
it starts with a text that was displayed in all the theatres in France,
when those workers known as the intermittents du spectacle were on strike
and prohibited the organisation of the Avignon festival.4 As the direc-
tor of the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique
(IRCAM), I was invited by France Culture and Laure Adler (who was
France Culture’s director at that time) to Cabaret Sauvage for a dis-
cussion with the intermittents du spectacle. This discussion was the origin
of Symbolic Misery. All these texts were always anchored in the events
of the twenty-first century – these are texts from the early twenty-first
century. Moving on to what I am trying to do in these texts: others have
reproached me for analysing short news items [faits divers], especially in
the case of Richard Durn.5 But for me these are not at all ‘trivial news’
but tragedies. It becomes trivial news with the media, and I tried to
deconstruct this in order to turn this news story into philosophical ques-
tions. It is true that these events dominated my work in this period, up
until Constituting Europe.6 There is a second period in my work that begins
with the fall of the Twin Towers and that ends with the two volumes
Constituting Europe, which had a political objective: to participate in the
debate on the European constitution.7
BD: This also coincided with the creation of your association Ars Industrialis . . .
BS: Exactly, Ars Industrialis was born in all this. My working methods
changed with Ars Industrialis; they became much more collaborative.
For instance, The Re-Enchantment of the World is a collective text, and, more
generally, all my books at that time drew from a collective work.8 Ars
Industrialis really functioned as a group, and it continues to work this
way, even though the registers have evolved over time. Ars Industrialis
works differently now compared to earlier. One aspect of this trans-
formation is the funding; it receives much less public funding than it
used to, but it continues to enjoy a lot of support. New concepts were
produced there: circuits of transindividuation, contributive economy,
techniques of the self, and many other things.9 Fundamental concepts,
such as general organology which came before Ars Industrialis, were
linked not only to the news related to the intermittents du spectacle, but also
to my work in IRCAM.
In fact, my work at INA (between 1996 and 1999) led me to the ques-
tion of schematism in Kant when I observed the work of the image in the
industry of images at the end of the twentieth century. Then, I observed
the question of time and artificial supports at IRCAM in organology,
but at that time only in relation to music, as an organologist who studies
music instruments. With the creation of Ars Industrialis, things changed
at the level of the working environment and methods, and André Gorz’s
work had increasingly entered my thought, particularly influencing my

conception of a contributive economy. This became a collective work,
with around a dozen core members – this can be witnessed in the refer-
ences in my texts during this period. There is also the co-written book
with Christian Fauré and Alain Giffard,10 but all these works drew
upon the contributions of the members of the governing board of Ars
Industrialis, like Frank Cormerais and Arnaud de Lepine and others.
There are now so many people involved, particularly in the philosophi-
cal school and the website <pharmakon.fr>.
BD: There are two main themes that I want to address with you: first, your under-
standing of accidentality that forms the central, and underdeveloped, theme in the
interviews included in Philosophising by Accident, and the second theme is your
philosophical work before 1994 and the publication of Technics and Time 1. The
theme of accidentality is present throughout the interviews with Élie During, but can
you explain how you approach the difference between accidentality and the event? I am
thinking in particular of a passage from Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense contrasting
these two concepts:
Events are ideal. Novalis says that there are two courses of events, one of them ideal, the other
real and imperfect – for example, ideal Protestantism and real Lutheranism. The distinction
however is not between two sorts of events; rather, it is between the event, which is ideal in
nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs. The distinction is between
event and accident.11
In The Logic of Sense, quasi-causality transforms what happens, the accident,

into an event. To put it differently, accident is what happens to existence while the
event is a composition of singularities which is in ‘the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive
in which they subsist and insist’.
BS: This book by Deleuze is the first of his books that I read, I think, a
long time ago, around 1979. Like many books by Deleuze, I have left
it in a dormant state for a long time, since it was extremely difficult to
work on phenomenology, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida together with
Deleuze. This was a choice. The relations between the Derridians and the
Deleuzians were extremely tense at that time, but not between Derrida
and Deleuze. One should not confuse Deleuze with the Deleuzians. For
instance, for Deleuzians, to work on Husserl did not make any sense,
even though this is nonsense since Husserl and much of phenomenol-
ogy were very important to Deleuze. Heidegger was one of his first
interlocutors, contrary to what many young, naive Deleuzians believe.

At some point, one needs to make some choices and it is very difficult to
navigate in both Bergson and Husserl, and at the same time in Deleuze
and Derrida – it is almost impossible, actually. I read Deleuze’s texts at
that time, and I also relied on Joël Bosquet, particularly for very personal
reasons. I used Bosquet’s words to survive but without really theorising
them. Now I theorise them, and quasi-causality has almost become my
weapon, Deleuze’s weapon that he took elsewhere; Nietzsche would
have said the spear. I tried to document this question with Simondon,
with a part of Simondon’s work that was not known to Deleuze.
Coming to your question about the event: for Deleuze, the event is
what happens [ce qui arrive] in general, and what produces what happens
to me. And ‘to become what happens to me’ is closely related to the
transindividual and transindividuation.12 This point is not really central
to Deleuze, since he never uses Simondon’s notion of the transindividual
but borrows the concept of pre-individual instead. The neo-Deleuzians
rush and make big mistakes, particularly when they see in the transin-
dividual the unification of singularities, which cannot be further from
Simondon’s conception of the transindividual. This question of the
event – which refers back to the accident for me, and thus to the origi-
nary default of origin, that is, the Accident – is what structures abso-
lutely my entire thinking on technics. When I develop the question of
the ‘double epokhal redoubling’, in truth what is at stake is the event that
goes through a fundamental facticity (and on this point Deleuze would
no longer agree with me), since any given accident is artificial [factice],
it is in the very nature of the accident – outside of causal series, there is
no essence. The event is accidental but not essential, except when quasi-
causality will make this accidentality a necessity, not an essence but a
necessity, and it will be inscribed in a quasi-causal series where there are
no series. But as for me, I always bring this back to what Canguilhem
called ‘technical life’. It is this technical life in its entirety that matters.
And today, we live an absolutely stunning acceleration of technological
shocks, in need of being transformed into a necessity. This is what I call
therapeutics of the pharmakon, which is completely homogeneous with
Deleuze, even though I do not think Deleuze would have put it this way
– but perhaps Félix Guattari would have.
BD: For Deleuze, the event-Idea comes after the accident, in contrast to Plato in
Meno, who argues that we only recognise what we already knew; this is anamnesis
or reminiscence. This is the text that you discuss in Philosophising by Accident,

but it is also a core moment of the first volume of Technics and Time. However,
for you, anamnesis is always already conditioned by hypomnesis, as the artificial
medium. Therefore, the event-Idea is for you technics, the arrival of technics and the
invention to compose with accidentality. I would like to come back to the very heart
of Philosophising by Accident: what is the relation between accidentality and
technics, or hypomnesis? My second question follows from the first one: what is
the relation between accidentality and intermittence in your work more broadly? It
seems important to me to link these questions, since the theme of intermittence takes an
increasingly central place in your work after 2003, after those radio interviews.
BS: All forms of life, and not only noetic life, confront accidents. Technical
life is not simply confronted by accidents, but it is constituted by acciden-
tality. It is natively accidental and this is why the myth of Prometheus
and Epimetheus shows a birth by accident. It is by accident (Epimetheus’
forgetfulness) that life arrives if we revisit this myth. It is by accident that
new living species – noetic species – need to be created. If we refer to a
more scientific or anthropological register – and my theories are only
theories – we do not know for sure, and to my mind we will never know,
since this is precisely the originary default of origin. We will never be
able to find this origin since by nature this origin lacks [fait défaut]; we
will always need to theorise it. Today, it is perhaps a somewhat dated
theory, but the notorious question of the Rift Valley in Kenya, which
explains the conquest of mobility, is an accident. It is close to Rousseau’s
ecliptic – in his case it is a divine accident, but nonetheless it is an acci-
dent. In general, when we try to theorise on the origin of the human, we
stumble across an accident every time. The original sin is an accident. In
Taoism, there is also a myth very close to the myth of Prometheus and
Epimetheus, and so on. All this always produces artifice, that is, what will
fill in [combler] artificially the accident of the lack, what I call the default.
BD: But is it not more a matter of composing rather than making up or filling in
[combler]?
BS: Indeed, it is never fully filled in since, as Freud shows, as soon as it is

filled in, an even greater gap [comble] is created, according to the logic of
the pharmakon. This is done through the process of externalisation. The
more the accident is compensated, the more it grows, and the greater the
compensation needs to be, and this is endless. It is the myth of Sisyphus.
Now, concerning intermittence, we need to come back to the ques-

tion of quasi-causality and the event from earlier, but also that of the
double epokhal redoubling – which, to put it very plainly, posits that
the technical accident starts a system-making process with other acci-
dents, eventually developing an entire technical system. The system
has its own internal logic, what I call technical individuation. This is
what makes this system seem autonomous at times, but in reality it
is not autonomous. It is true that it secretes its own developing logic,
and that it constantly misadjusts itself. This is lived as an accident or
what I called a ‘technological shock’.13 Disorientating and stupefying
epochs are produced, where circuits of transindividuation as a whole
are disturbed. Then comes a second period, where circuits recompose
themselves, and there existences reappear since in the first period we are
in subsistence – a situation when one is only concerned with survival and
self-preservation.14 Existences reappear when characters [personnages] are
produced, they invent something new. At the end of this process, some-
thing comes together: consistence. A new age of consistence is constituted
but it immediately starts to disappear. This is crucial, and in a way it cor-
responds to the theory of phases of being in Simondon – nothing is given
once and for all. These are the event-Ideas that you mentioned earlier:
at some point, something that is more than existing is produced. This is
what consists and creates what Deleuze calls the ‘plane of consistency’,
even though it is not so clearly expressed in Deleuze (and Guattari) and
there are other ways to interpret it. I do not think the way I interpret it
is in complete contradiction with Deleuze.
BD: But is intermittence essential? We know that it takes place among subsistence,
existence and consistence, but in your work, the question of intermittence comes at times
on extremely practical registers such as the question of work, when you dialogue with
André Gorz and Maurizio Lazzarato, but at others, when you read Aristotle’s On
the Soul, it becomes – and I know you don’t like this word – ontology.15
BS: No, it is not an ontology . . .
BD: . . . What about an ontogenesis?
BS: It proceeds from an Aristotelian ontology. In fact, I think this from

Freud; it is linked to desire and therefore to Spinoza and Hegel, who
are both great thinkers of desire. I have an economy of subsistence,
existence and consistence that is quite clear and invariable. I am really

at peace with this. I argue – in a classical way – that existence is what
no longer needs subsistence. Someone who exists is someone who does
not ask himself where he is going to sleep tonight or what he is going to
eat tonight; he has time ahead of himself. Thus he has time to devote
to his narcissism – I do not use the word ‘narcissism’ in a pejorative
sense but rather in the sense of ‘auto-affection’. We do not exist without
auto-affection, which is narcissistic (according to Freud), and this is what
Hegel calls ‘self-consciousness’, if we refer to the history of philosophy.
But I argue that an existence exists when it is capable of moving to con-
sistence. I can only conquer a dimension other than subsistence when I
am capable of going into the sphere of consistence: such is intermittency
according to Aristotle. Sometimes I am capable of reaching this sphere
and I know it, but most of the time I know it but I cannot arrive there,
and other times I cannot reach it at all, but I know that others do – such
is noetic life. You referred to ontology, and in fact the thought of inter-
mittence starts from Platonic ontology interpreted by Aristotle, but for
me it is a return to the tragic. The great thinkers of intermittency were
tragic thinkers. The tragic condition can be expressed this way: I cannot
reach truth qua truth. Truth is always fugitive or transient, accidental,
quasi-causal, and it always needs to be reconstructed, in contrast to
Zeus’ self-presence.
BD: Intermittency in France is almost synonymous with precarity, and yet it is a

positive concept for you. Intermittent work is defined by periods of intense work in
employment with periods of unemployment, which are considered ‘work time outside
unemployment’, as you put it with Gorz.16 It is also a work scheme for those working
in the cultural sector: they are called intermittents du spectacle. How do you
reconcile questions of intermittency in Aristotle, Spinoza and Hegel, and these practi-
cal questions linked to the status of the intermittent du spectacle, whose dossier
is currently sitting on the Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin’s desk, waiting for a new
reform? Should this working condition be understood more broadly and encompass
creative and freelance employments in the contributive or sharing economy?
BS: This is one of the themes of my last book, The Automatic Society, which
ends on these questions, but with Ars Industrialis, we have been thinking
about these questions for a long time.17 For me this regime of exception
(the intermittents du spectacle) should become the rule since employment will
disappear. I do not think employment should be replaced by precarity,
but by a contributive income that does away with precarity. Precarity

is a condition that leaves oneself in subsistence. At the time of writing
the Disbelief and Discredit series, I planned a fourth volume entitled The
Aristocracy to Come, and my goal is to constitute this aristocracy, so that
everyone can become an aristocrat, and therefore live outside subsist-
ence. Aristocrats do not need to think about subsisting. They are ready
to die, but in Ancient Greece this meant to be ready to fight against
Sparta and to remain in the field of honour. To be ready to die today
means to be ready to change, to accept the accident and to become its
quasi-cause. Today, this is not a utopia but the only rational way to face
the fast economic development of robots that, as many studies show,
will destroy employment and will lead to problems in terms of solvency,
purchasing power and so on. We should therefore introduce redistribu-
tion on other criteria. A rational perspective on the economic context
today works at making sure that in fifty years, the temperature of the
Earth has not risen, that we are not resorting to cannibalism or mass
killings to support nine billion people. We need negentropy produced
by intermittency.
BD: I would like to come back to the important steps towards the writing of Technics
and Time. Your readings and borrowings of Leroi-Gourhan’s theories were particu-
larly important to your arguments in the first volume of Technics and Time. Those
theories counted even more than Simondon, whom you read much later. Can you
explain how you encountered Leroi-Gourhan’s work?
BS: I encountered Leroi-Gourhan in Derrida’s Of Grammatology. I was a

student at that time, and I bought all the books that Derrida referred to in
Of Grammatology: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Leibniz, Heidegger, Rousseau
and others. I wanted to appropriate this book as much as possible. It is
an important book to me: it was a dazzling sight, a vision, something
happened and I tried to cultivate all of this more than Derrida himself,
since Derrida gave up at some point. This is why I am very proud that
Sylvain Auroux will soon be translated into English.18 After reading
Leroi-Gourhan, I tried archaeology and prehistory. When I got out of
prison, I went to his laboratory; he was no longer there but his team
remained at Meudon, directed by François Audouze. I met and worked
with a lot of prehistorians. I wrote articles for Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie.19
I gave a seminar at the Collège international de philosophie for a few
years, and one of the researchers from Leroi-Gourhan’s team, Jean-
Paul Demoule, participated in my seminar. I worked a lot with archae-

ologists, and when I refer to tertiary retentions, I do not only refer to
computers but also flints – I had the chance to dig. My encounter with
Simondon took place later, around 1986, on François Laruelle’s advice,
but as for Leroi-Gourhan, I read him from 1979.
BD: Can you explain how crucial is Leroi-Gourhan’s thought to the question of origin,
discussed in the first volume of Technics and Time, and particularly how material
traces require a more material approach? Plato remains at the level of ideas in Meno,
while with Leroi-Gourhan, you seek materials . . .
BS: I am a spiritualist materialist, since I do not at all oppose spirit and

matter. I think that there is a hypermatter that is more than matter, and
on this point I refer to quantum physics, but in different terms.20 What
interested me so deeply in archaeology were the traces, and here I am
extremely critical of Derrida and his concept of ‘arche-trace’. It is an
empty concept: there are traces but ‘arche-trace’ cannot exist, and traces
are always accidental. To him, arche-trace is the essence of the trace, but
there can be no essence to the trace. What makes a trace is precisely the
absence of essence. There is nothing but traces: they are hard, like relics,
they are what has vanished [de l’évanouit], and they are also promises, like
protentions, and thus inexistence and consistence. It is extremely moving
to find a flint. Once I found one by chance, by accident, while planting
a tree. I have a really practical, empirical and experiential relation to the
concept of tertiary retention. I try to create concepts that are at times
very abstract and formalised, but at the same time I try not to lose sight
of their relation to the material and empirical trace. This is why my rela-
tion to Leroi-Gourhan is essential. On the other hand, I have a problem
with Simondon, and this is part of a larger debate I have with Yuk Hui
and Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, who are more Simondonian than I am.21
I have never agreed with Simondon’s concept of information: he argues
that we can dissociate information from matter. I do not believe this is
possible. A unit of information always carries with it its medium and its
conditions. We cannot see this but that does not mean it does not exist.
This is what organology is all about, to claim that traces are always
conditioned by their organs of production.
BD: To continue with your intellectual and practical journey in the 1980s up until
1994 with the publication of Technics and Time: how did this period affect your
understanding of the difficult relations between theory and practice? I am thinking, for
instance, of the propositions you made to the government in the 1980s. They seem to
prepare for the arguments of Technics and Time, before your involvement at INA
and its influence on your redefinition of schematism, after Kant.
BS: In 1984, I was a member of the Collège international de philoso-

phie. The engineer Thierry Gaudin participated in my seminar and
brought in his entire team. At the end of these seminars, he suggested
investing in a project on digital technologies if I could find other sources
of funding. I let Derrida know that I wanted to make some proposi-
tions to the Ministry of Culture to work on digital technologies. I was
working on this since my topic at that time was Plato’s conception of
hypomnesis. This was when floppy disks, Minitels and telematics were
around. I found myself chargé de mission for the French government, and
with a salary. The title of the study was ‘The Philosophical Challenges
of New Information Technologies’. I worked on this study for one year,
and I delivered the report at the Château de Vincennes to a jury com-
posed of Derrida, Michel Deguy, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc
Godard and Pierre-Jean Labarrière. Based on this report, the Centre
Georges Pompidou decided to organise an exhibition. During two years,
between 1985 and 1987, I worked on this exhibition called Memories of
the Future, and I developed relationships with INA personnel. One year
before Memories of the Future, Lyotard also proposed his exhibition The
Immaterials. I participated in the creation of the electronic system épreuves
d’écriture (writing tests) since I was very close to Lyotard at that time.22
After Memories of the Future, I learned that Jacques Attali (President
Mitterrand’s advisor at that time) commissioned Michel Melot, who was
the conservator of the Georges Pompidou Centre’s library and thus my
line manager, as an external curator – I was working with a conservator
as my line manager. Melot was commissioned by Attali to conceive a
library based on my ideas from the exhibition: the famous ‘Très Grande
Bibliothèque’ (TGB). Melot asked me to contribute to the Melot-Cahart
report on electronic texts, and I wrote a section on ‘reading stations’
[postes de lecture].23 At that time, I got a position at the Technological
University of Compiègne, and in 1988 I submitted to the Ministry of
Research a report on computer-aided reading and writing. It called for
the development of a literary software on CD-ROM, but the Ministry
replied that this project would only be supported if the TGB project
integrated the project of reading stations. This is how I started my
employment at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which was then

called Établissement public pour la bibliothèque de France.
For almost three years I was directing a research group (‘Département
nouvelles technologies’), composed of fifteen people including someone
from INA, to develop machines called ‘Postes de Lectures Assistées
par Ordinateurs’ (PLAO) (computer-aided reading stations).24 While
the internet did not exist, we had the idea to develop GML language –
which is a hypertext language – to create exchange formats for the first
modems and systems of communication by phone to exchange files, but
also to think of annotating languages to share corpuses and to read col-
lectively the corpuses and so on. In 1993 came a new government and
the new Prime Minister Édouard Balladur ended these projects, both
for our team and for my own job. In 1993, I am laid off and everything
is stopped. One should not forget that for the Bibliothèque nationale de
France this was first and foremost a project of a server-centre to digitise
seven million books.25 If this had been done, it would have been the
world’s first data centre! It is partly Mitterrand’s fault, since he wanted
an imposing building, and all the money went into the architecture. This
was a catastrophe, since France was at the forefront of digital innovation
at that time.
BD: In the interviews contained in Philosophising by Accident, you introduce

some elements that would make up the next volumes of Technics and Time.
Discussions and analyses of Plato, Freud, the notion of idiotext and the ‘necessary
default’ [le défaut qu’il faut], the atranscendental as default of origin, and so on.
As a reader, I wonder: what place did these future projects occupy in your work?
BS: I’ve always thought that the last part of my doctoral dissertation,
called ‘The Idiot’, and in which the concept of idiotext is central, is not
publishable. I have not published it yet since I do not think it is ready.
The first presentation was there in my dissertation, but a dissertation is
not a book. Jean-Luc Marion thought that it was the most interesting
part of it all, and he wanted to publish it with Presses Universitaires de
France.26 I did not want to publish it so soon. If I did not continue the
Technics and Time series, it is not only due to the fall of the Twin Towers
in September 2001, but also to the insufficient maturation of this work.
The last part of my dissertation on idiotext, on spirals and other things,
is not far from Leibniz and Whitehead; it is very speculative. Behind
these speculations are great ambitions. It is not about ontology or the
transcendental; indeed, I try precisely to leave those realms, referring

to the atranscendental. I tried in this last part to establish what long ago
we would have called ‘Principles for an Atranscendental Philosophy’.
To me, this is what philosophy is about. In other words, I have not
yet started the labour of philosophy, and perhaps I will never devote
myself to this – maybe I will not have time. It is true that, at times in
my recent books, I have introduced briefly some of these ideas. I try,
on the other hand, to gather the conditions to make all this express-
ible, but for the moment it is not possible. If it comes to light, it will
be a long dialogue with Bergson, Jacques Lacan and questions raised
by Heidegger in Being and Time, among other things. Two volumes of
Technics and Time remain to be written: Symbols and Diabols, on Plato and
philosophy in Ancient Greece, and The War of Spirits, which discusses
at length Sylvain Auroux’s work that I only discovered in 1993. These
two volumes were not part of my dissertation, but there are traces of
these materials in it and in my lectures on ancient philosophy at the
University of Compiègne.
Notes
1. Pietro Montani, Bioestetica: Senso comune, tecnica e arte nell’età della globaliz-
zazione (Rome: Carocci, 2007), and Tecnologie della sensibilità: Estetica e
immaginazione interattiva (Milan: Cortina Raffaello, 2014).
2. Bernard Stiegler, ‘To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us: From September
11 to April 21’, in Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross and
Patrick Crogan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 37–82.
3. The lecture was originally entitled ‘Of the I and the We: Working
Together in the City’ and published as ‘To Love, To Love Me, To
Love Us, Part I’, in Acting Out, pp. 37–59.
4. Intermittents du spectacle are artists and technicians working in the cultural
economy (theatre and cinema, mostly); their special status grants them
benefits when they are out of work or in between two projects. These
benefits are different from unemployment benefits, both financially
and morally. See Pierre-Michel Menger, Les intermittents du spectacle:
Sociologie d’une exception (Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2005), and Antonella
Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato, Intermittents et Précaires (Paris: Éditions
Amsterdam, 2008).
5. Richard Durn murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council on
26 March 2002, and committed suicide two days later. For an analysis
of Durn’s diaries and killings, see Stiegler, ‘To Love, To Love Me, To
Love Us, Part I’.
6. Bernard Stiegler, Constituer l’Europe, 1: Dans un monde sans vergogne (Paris:
Galilée, 2005), and Constituer l’Europe, 2: Le motif européen (Paris: Galilée,
2005).
7. A referendum on the project of a European constitution was organ-
ised in France on 29 May 2005, in which a majority of voters rejected
the project (54.68% of the voters). The European constitution was,
however, passed a few years later by the Parliament.
8. Bernard Stiegler and Ars Industrialis, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The
Value of Spirit against Industrial Populism, trans. Trevor Arthur (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014).
9. Definitions and contextualisations of these concepts can be found
in Victor Petit, ‘Vocabulaire d’Ars Industrialis’, in Bernard Stiegler,
Pharmacologie du Front national (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), pp. 369–441.
10. Bernard Stiegler, Alain Giffard and Christian Fauré, Pour en finir avec la
mécroissance: Quelques réflexions d’Ars Industrialis (Paris: Flammarion, 2009).
11. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale
(London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 53.
12. ‘To become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for
the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event.’ Deleuze, The
Logic of Sense, p. 150. See also Stiegler, Pharmacologie du Front national, pp.
288–91.
13. See Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-
First Century, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).
14. For distinctions between existence, consistence and subsistence, to
which political insistence needs to be added, see Bernard Stiegler,
Disbelief and Discredit, Vol. 1: The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans.
Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
15. Aristotle, De Anima: On the Soul, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London:
Penguin, 1986); Stiegler, Disbelief and Discredit, Vol. 1, pp. 131–62.
16. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel
Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 22.
17. Bernard Stiegler, La Société automatique, Vol. 1: L’Avenir du travail (Paris:
Fayard, 2015).
18. Sylvain Auroux, La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Liège:
Mardaga, 1994).
19. Bernard Stiegler, ‘Leroi-Gourhan, part maudite de l’anthropologie’,
Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie, 48–9 (1992), pp. 23–30, and ‘La
Programmatologie de Leroi-Gourhan’, Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie, 48–9

(1992), pp. 31–6.
20. Bernard Stiegler, Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir: Entretiens avec
Philippe Petit et Vincent Bontems (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008).
21. Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2016); Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, ‘De Simondon à
Stiegler via Leroi-Gourhan: La Refondation artefactuelle du “transin-
dividuel” ’, in Benoît Dillet and Alain Jugnon (eds), Technologiques: La
Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2013), pp. 247–64.
22. Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann (eds), 30 Years after Les Immatériaux:
Art, Science, and Theory (Berlin: Meson Press, 2015).
23. Patrice Cahart and Michel Melot, Propositions pour une grande bibliothèque.
Rapport au Premier ministre (Paris: La Documentation française, 1989).
24. Daniel Renoult and Jacqueline Melet-Sanson (eds), La Bibliothèque
nationale de France: Collections, services, publics (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de
la Librairie, 2001); Jean-Marc Mandosio, L’Effrondrement de la très grande
bibliothèque nationale de France, ses causes, ses conséquences (Paris: Éditions de
l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 1999).
25. For a comparison of three different models of digitisation at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library and the
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, see Gaëlle Béquet, Trois bibliothèques
européennes face à Google: Aux origines de la bibliothèque numérique (1990–2010)
(Paris: Publications de l’École des Chartres, 2015).
26. Jean-Luc Marion is the current editor of the famous and important
philosophy book series Épiméthée at Presses Universitaires de France.
Index
accidentality, 2–4, 6, 8–10, 14, 16–17, Barthes, Roland, 31, 43n9

19, 31, 34–5, 42, 94, 109–15 Bataille, George, 78
Adorno, Theodor, 2, 71, 96 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81
Aeschylus, 38, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 2
aesthetics, 1, 15–16, 91–2, 103, 105–6 Bennington, Geoffrey, 15
Alcibiades, 17 Bergson, Henri, 1, 66, 69, 110, 118
aletheia, 42 Bernard, Claude, 50
alphabet, 38, 59–65, 70, 73–4, 83–4, 98 Bernhardt, Sarah, 64
already-there, 11, 55 biblion, 8
Althusser, Louis, 4, 22, 95 Bibliothèque nationale de France
anamnesis, 7–13, 31, 40–2, 46, 52, 61, (BNF), 36, 116–17
63–4, 73–4, 77, 88, 110–11 biology, 50–1, 71
Anthropocene, 107 Blanchot, Maurice, 37
anthropocentrism, 15 Bonello, Bertrand, 94
aporia, 18, 41 Borges, Jorge Luis, 100
Apostrophes, 3 Bosquet, Joël, 17, 110
arche-trace, 14, 115 Bové, José, 92
Arendt, Hannah, 87 Braudel, Ferdinand, 98
Aristotle, 9, 11, 33–4, 40, 61, 93, Brecht, Bertolt, 2
112–13 Brentano, Franz, 68–9
Aron, Raymond, 4
Ars Industrialis, 20, 108–9, 113 calculation, 55, 59, 76, 82, 87–8, 90
associated milieu, 5, 8, 49, 72, 89 Canguilhem, Jean, 95n8, 110
atranscendental, 15, 117–18 capitalism, 18, 46, 59, 75–6, 82, 92, 94,
Attali, Jacques, 116 96, 98
Auroux, Sylvain, 14, 84, 114, 118–19 Centre Georges Pompidou, 14, 36,
Australopithecus, 49, 50, 58, 62, 89 43n2, 102, 105, 116
auto-affection, 113 Chaplin, Tamara, 3
Avignon festival, 107 Chomsky, Noam, 65
cinema, 2, 16, 65, 70–4, 79n10,
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 60 99–100, 118
Bachelard, Gaston, 4, 93 city-state, 37–9, 53, 59–60
Balladur, Edouard, 117 Clavel, Maurice, 3
Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues, 115 cognitivism, 55–6
Collège international de philosophie, Ellul, Jacques, 92

14, 22, 29, 114, 116 emergency, 16, 106–7
consciousness, 2, 9, 15–16, 62, 66–72, employment, 113–14, 118
75, 77–8, 81, 88–90, 94, 96–7, Enlightenment, 62, 78, 90
99–102, 113 entropy, 15, 84, 92, 103
consistence, 8, 10, 13, 112–13, 115, Epimetheus, 8, 42, 47–8, 58, 78, 111
119n14 epiphylogenesis, 12, 51, 54–5, 58, 62–3,
contributive economy, 108–9, 113–14 66, 70–2, 89
Cormerais, Frank, 109 epistēmē, 11, 91
cretinisation, 86 Eros, 63
critique, 1, 11–13, 30, 34, 43, 78, 88, essence, 14–15, 19, 23, 33, 38, 40–1,
90, 92, 94, 99 55, 91, 93, 110, 115
cybernetics, 46 Euclid, 52
event, 103, 106–12
de Lepine, Arnaud, 109 existence, 13, 42, 49, 53, 72, 82, 87, 98,
de Saussure, Ferdinand, 11, 84, 114 102, 109, 112–13
deconstruction, 1, 5, 8, 11, 14, 79, 108 experimental technology, 35
default, 9, 35, 38, 42, 48–9, 78, 102, externalisation, 31, 46, 50–5, 65, 75,
110–11, 117 96–100, 102, 111
deferred action, 9, 12, 16, 47, 54
Deguy, Michel, 116 Fabiani, Jean-Louis, 6
Delcourt, Xavier, 3 facticity, 17, 19, 46, 48, 110
Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 19, 109–10, 112 Fauré, Christian, 109
Demeter, 43n12 fetish, 34, 76
Derrida, Jacques, 8–10, 14–15, 43n6, flint, 35, 115
43n7, 46–7, 56–7, 79, 106–10, Fodor, Jerry, 55
114–15 Foucault, Michel, 70, 91
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 4 France Culture, 1–7, 10, 18, 68, 86,
desire, 6, 10, 17–18, 33–4, 63, 85, 89, 108
94, 99, 112 French Communist Party (PCF), 30–1
Detienne, Marcel, 74 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 30, 32, 47, 64, 78,
diabol, 87–8 107, 111–13, 117
diachrony, 11, 13, 74–5, 78, 81, 84, 88, Freudenthal, Hans, 57
90, 101, 103, 106
dialectics, 9, 11, 17, 35, 40–1, 45, 61, Gabriel, Marcel, 4
89 general organology, 13, 107–8, 115
différance, 15, 46 genetically modified organisms
Diotima, 38, 63 (GMOs), 91–2
discretisation, 13, 18, 60, 83 geometry, 37–8, 45–6, 52–4, 63
double epokhal redoubling, 110, 112 Giffard, Alain, 109
dunameis, 47–8 gift, 38
Durn, Richard, 108 globalisation, 98
Glucksmann, André, 3
electronics, 22n22, 30, 32, 64–5, 83, Godard, Jean-Luc, 116
116 Google, 18, 120
Index 123
Gorz, André, 108, 112–13 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 19, 31, 35–6, 40,
grammatisation, 13–14, 84, 119 45, 53, 55, 57, 90–1, 93–4, 98–9,
Granel, Gérard, 8 103–6, 116
Guattari, Félix, 110, 112 Koyré, Alexandre, 4
Kuleshov effect, 68
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32,
43, 63, 107, 112–13 Labarrière, Pierre-Jean, 116
Heidegger, Martin, 2, 10, 12–14, 34–6, Lacan, Jacques, 30, 89, 118
42, 44n13, 48–9, 106–7, 109, Laruelle, François, 115
114–15 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 112
Henri-Lévy, Bernard, 3 Leakey, Mary and Louis, 49
hermeneutics, 19, 49, 54, 70 Lecourt, Dominique, 91–2, 95
Hesiod, 38, 47 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 54, 114,
historicity, 19, 46 117
homonisation, 50, 100 Lemarchard, Xavier, 68, 95n4
hubris, 30, 39, 93 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 11, 35, 49–50,
Hui, Yuk, 115 54, 56, 98, 114–15
humanism, 15, 50 Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie, 114
Husserl, Edmund, 10–11, 34–5, 52–4, Levinas, Emmanuel, 4
62, 66–70, 74, 96–7, 100, 106–7, libido, 82
109–10 literality, 60–5, 70–1, 73–4, 79n13,
hypermatter, 115 86
hyperphilosophy, 35 logos, 14, 38, 49, 67
hypomnesis, 7–8, 11–14, 40–2, 45–7, love, 38, 63
60–1, 63–4, 71, 73, 77, 88–9, 93, Lukács, Georg, 2
111, 116 Lyotard, Jean-François, 4, 13–14, 17,
116
identity, 41, 53, 74, 83, 91, 102
idiotext, 12–13, 117 machinism, 75
idle talk, 38–9, 85 magic, 29
imagination, 36, 68–9, 83, 96–100 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10
Immaterials, The, 116 Mandela, Nelson, 107
Industrial Revolution, 32, 64–5, 75, Marion, Jean-Luc, 117, 120n26
90–1 Marx, Karl, 12, 15, 24n54, 31, 75, 89,
industrial temporal object see temporal 91, 98
object materialism, 30–1, 46, 90, 115
Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), mathematics, 18, 37–8, 53
14, 29, 36, 83, 105, 108, Mauss, Marcel, 22
116–17 Melot, Michel, 116
intermittence, 8, 111–14 Memories of the Future, 36, 102, 116
intermittents du spectacle, 107–8, 118n4 memory, 1–3, 7–9, 11–13, 31,
35–6, 40–2, 45–7, 50–3, 58–9,
James, Ian, 10 63–4, 66, 68, 71, 89, 91, 97,
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 4 100–1
justice, 48, 76–7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4
Mesopotamia, 59–60, 62 prosthesis, 8–9, 41, 49, 53, 97

metaphysics, 5, 11, 17, 32, 34, 37–8, prostheticity, 10–14, 34, 38, 41, 46,
56, 63, 73, 78, 89 48–9, 63
mimesis, 39, 49 protention, 6, 12, 68, 70, 96, 101, 115
Mitterrand, François, 116–17
mnemotechnics, 46, 58–9, 61–5, 71, quasi-causality, 13, 109, 112–14
73–4, 84, 93, 98–100, 103
Mowitt, John, 2 radio, 1–9, 30, 42, 64–6, 71, 81, 97,
103, 111
narcissism, 89–90, 94, 113 Rancière, Jacques, 15–16
Neanderthal, 36, 50, 58, 62 reactivity, 37, 46, 62, 74, 82, 92–3
negentropy, 15, 84, 92, 114 Resnais, Alain, 72
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 48, 73, 78, 89, ressentiment, 71, 92–3
94, 102 revolution, 19, 90–3
noesis, 15–16, 111, 113 Rifkin, Jeremy, 82, 102, 104
nonhuman, 15
Nouvelle Critique, 30 Saint Paul, 94
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2, 4, 20n8
onto-theology, 34 scepticisim, 39, 41
ontology, 15, 40, 112–13, 117 schematism, 12, 36, 43, 55, 57, 96,
origin, 8–9, 11, 21–2, 31, 33–6, 40, 42, 105–6, 108, 116
48–9, 53, 94, 102, 110–11, 115, Seneca, 70
117 shame, 37, 48
orthotēs, 4, 64–5, 70–1, 73–4, 79 Simondon, Gilbert, 5, 11, 30, 35, 75,
88–9, 103, 110, 112, 114–15
Parmenides, 38 singularity, 11, 35, 73–5, 77, 82, 84–9,
Persephone, 41, 43, 60 101–3, 109–10
pharmacology, 9, 13, 105 Sisyphus, 83, 111
pharmakon, 8, 56n2, 110–11 situated semantics, 83
Philonenko, Alexis, 93 Socrates, 16–18, 37–41, 45–7, 55,
philosophy of technics, 29, 35 107
phonography, 61, 64–6, 69–70, 74, 97, sophism, 37–40, 42, 47
99–100 Sophocles, 38–9
Piaget, Jean, 51 soul, 41, 48, 55, 89, 112
Picasso, Pablo, 31 spirit, 7–8, 10, 19, 39, 46, 51–2, 55, 58,
Pivot, Bernard, 3 62, 66, 71–2, 77–8, 81, 84–5, 87,
Plato, 8–9, 11–12, 17, 31–2, 35–42, 89–90, 93–4, 97, 115
45–8, 55, 56n2, 58, 60–4, 71, 73, structuralism, 11–12, 31
77, 88–9, 91, 93–4, 105–6, 110, stupidity, 47, 78, 83
113, 115–18 subsistence, 13, 109, 112–14, 119
praxis, 31, 46, 78 supplement, 6, 14, 38
pre-Socratics, 11, 17, 37–9 synchronisation, 2, 9, 11, 15, 72–3, 75,
printing press, 65 77–8, 81, 84–5, 87, 97, 99, 101,
proletarianisation, 6, 9, 13 106
Prometheus, 8, 47–8, 78, 111 synchrony, 11, 13, 74, 84–5, 88
Index 125
tape recorder, 6, 64, 74, 100 transindividuation, 13, 108, 110, 112
teaching, 17–18, 29 traumatype, 19
technē, 11, 30, 36, 39, 93 Trottein, Serge, 13
technical individuation, 112
techniques of the self, 108 unconscious, 9, 18, 89–90
technoscience, 9, 29, 36, 90–2 unscience, 86
television, 2–3, 6, 16, 36, 65, 71, 82
temporal object, 66–70, 73, 79n6, 104 Van Reeth, Adèle, 7
tendencies, 9, 11, 15, 73, 85–6, 88 velocipede, 75
tertiary retention, 1, 11–12, 56, 70–2, Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 38, 74
74, 78, 88–91, 97, 99–100, 103, Vidal-Nacquet, Pierre, 74
115 virtue, 40–1, 55, 72
Thales, 38, 53, 76
totalitarianism, 100 Weismann, August, 51
trace, 6, 9, 12–15, 19, 34, 45–6, 51–2, Whitehead, Alfred North, 117
57, 61, 63–4, 100, 115, 118 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61
tragedy, 38–9, 108
transcendental, 15, 34, 40, 45, 54, Zedong, Mao, 83
117–18 Zeus, 8, 43, 47–9, 113
transductive relations, 10–11, 16, 23 Zinjanthropus, 49

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What are some of the main concepts discussed in the book?

What are some of the main concepts discussed in the book?

Philosophising by Accident

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10.5/13pt Monotype Baskerville by

ISBN 978 1 4744 0822 6 (hardback)

Notes on the English Translation vi

Translator’s Introduction: Radiographing Philosophy 1

Philosophising by Accident: Interviews with Élie During

Appendix 1: The Technologisation of Memory: Interview with

I draw attention to this since for structuralists (influenced by a certain

This series of interviews between Bernard Stiegler and Élie During

twenty-first centuries, it is productive to follow the movements of

The very practice of ‘radiographing philosophy’ in these interviews

Stiegler envisages radio as a technical milieu with the capacity to

In the myth, it is precisely because Epimetheus forgets to give humans

an accidental production of prostheses and artifices. Following Derrida,

In these interviews, Stiegler participates in a certain project of France

The Birth of a Philosophy

pharmacology, general organology, transindividuation, grammatisa-

Stiegler sometimes calls this ‘différant identification’, to reflect this process

The originary trace to all traces, or arche-trace, prevents the

occurrences. This also leads to fundamental disagreements on the status

writes in an extremely provocative sentence that these resentful critical

Stiegler’s political thought is related to accidents and the potential for

first written work, he reads it as the first philosophy book. Commenting

of a post-revolutionary generation that knows that their future will be

certainly agreed that this statement can be extended to philosophy itself,

talks and debates. See <http://arsindustrialis.org/​podcast.xml> (last

30. A transductive relation is a relation that constitutes the terms.

and Alain Jugnon (eds), Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler

Vol. 1: L’Avenir du travail (Paris: Fayard, 2015), p. 260. Further on,

Bernard Stiegler (BS): I indeed began being interested in technics for

Industrial Revolution, and so the question of technics is raised anew, as

sance], if not a great impertinence, that sometimes takes a hysterical and

BS: I am interested in grounding again and entirely the question of tech-

in a laboratory the gestures of carving a flint and, with these gestures,

BS: In a certain way, the process of repressing the question of technics

Philosophy began as metaphysics – and for me, metaphysics is an origi-

as a device of domination to control the spirits of the city-state, to seize

BS: Once the sophists seized language, such an excessiveness turned

Aristotle would later raise as the philosophical posture par excellence,

At this point, aletheia (truth) and anamnesis (reminiscence) become

relation to philosophy and my practice as a philosopher, but all this is

BS: It was indeed by reflecting on this second important moment in

technical, even when it is living memory. Anamnesis (reminiscence) is

government,3 or, in today’s vocabulary, management and logistics. He

they end up becoming ‘savants’ – as the adjective epimethes means in

Aidos would be a knowledge of the limits. I call this ‘reserve’ [vergogne].6

Yet this process of externalisation is also the process of constitution

stream of thought. The geometer thus needs both to draw and to

The drawn figure and writing are two indispensable conditions of

but by being a structure, it bears its own dynamic, making it a system. I

argued in short that there is a ‘language of thought’ that is pre-inscribed

Fleuriel (see <pharmakon.fr>), in reading Charles Darwin’s The Descent

BS: One needs to carefully distinguish between technics as a milieu of

groupings start developing technics and behaviours made to transmit

talks and debates. See <http://arsindustrialis.org/podcast.xml> (last

a ccumulated traces that I have inherited in the form of ‘culture’ (com-

secondary retentions accumulated by our past experiences and which

ediatised. Even before showing achievements, the goal of these events

a utomatically to attempt, in vain, like Sisyphus, to fill in. In reality, he

interlocutors, contrary to what many young, naive Deleuzians believe.