Stiegler and Technics

by Christina Howells (Editor), Gerald Moore (Editor)

Overview

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748677023
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2013
Series:	Critical Connections
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Christina Howells is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She works on twentieth-century French literature and thought, Continental Philosophy and Literary Theory. Her publications include Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988), and The Cambridge Companion to Sartre (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992); Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Polity Press, 1998); French Women Philosophers (Routledge, 2004); and Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought (Polity, 2011).

Gerald Moore is Lecturer in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University. He is the author of Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (Edinburgh, 2011), as well as articles on recent French thought (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler), psychoanalysis and literature (Michel Houellebecq). He is currently preparing a monograph, Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy in the Age of Technology, for Polity.

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

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

Brown University David Wills

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

Editorial Reviews

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

Brown University David Wills

This book is one of the most important collections published in Continental philosophy this year, bringing together many important thinkers to produce excellent forays into aesthetics, the nature of the self after deconstruction, political economy, and post-Freudian notions of desire ... Christina Howells and Gerald Moore are two of the best and most careful interpreters of contemporary Continental philosophy ... Each contributor here makes substantive and important claims about technology, political economy, aesthetics, and so on, with and beyond [Stiegler's] writings, so that this collection operates as a front seat to the most pertinent debates in recent Continental philosophy.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews - Peter Gratton