For a New Critique of Political Economy

The catastrophic economic, social and political crisis of our time calls for a new and original critique of political economy - a rethinking of Marx's project in the very different conditions of twenty-first century capitalism. 
Stiegler argues that today the proletarian must be reconceptualized as the economic agent whose knowledge and memory are confiscated by machines. This new sense of the term ‘proletarian' is best understood by reference to Plato's critique of exteriorized memory. By bringing together Plato and Marx, Stiegler can show how a generalized proletarianization now encompasses not only the muscular system, as Marx saw it, but also the nervous system of the so-called creative workers in the information industries. The proletarians of the former are deprived of their practical know-how, whereas the latter are shorn of their theoretical practice, and both suffer from a confiscation of the very possibility of a genuine art of living. But the mechanisms at work in this new and accentuated form of proletarianization are the very mechanisms that may spur a reversal of the process. Such a reversal would imply a crucial distinction between one's life work, originating in otium (leisure devoted to the techniques of the self), and the job, consisting in a negotium (the negotiation and calculation, increasingly restricted to short-term expectations), leading to the necessity of a new conception of economic value. This short text offers an excellent introduction to Stiegler's work while at the same time representing a political call to arms in the face of a deepening economic and social crisis.

Politics & Social Sciences

Bernard Stiegler

Social Sciences

Polity

Decadence of Industrial Democracies

Translated by DANIEL ROSS 
Bernard Stiegler is one of the most original philosophers writing today about new technologies and their implications for social, political and personal life. Drawing on sources ranging from Plato and Marx to Freud, Heidegger and Derrida, he develops a highly original account of technology as grammatology, as a technics of writing that constitutes our experience of time, memory and desire, even of life itself. Society and our place within it are shaped by technical reproduction which can both expand and restrict the horizons and possibilities of human agency and experience. In the three volumes of Disbelief and Discredit Stiegler argues that this process of technical reproduction has become dangerously divorced from its role in the constitution of human experience. Radically challenging the optimistic view of new technologies as facilitators of learning and progress, he argues new marketing techniques shortcircuit thought and disenfranchise consumers, programming them to seek short-term gratification. These practices of ‘libidinal economics’ have profound consequences for nature of human desire and they underpin the social and psychological malaise of contemporaty industrial society. In this opening volume Stiegler argues that the industrial model implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century has become obsolete, leading capitalist democracies to an impasse. A sign of this impasse and of the decadence to which it leads is the banalization of consumers who become ensnared in a perpetual cycle of consumption. This is the new proletarianization of the technologically infused, hyper-industrial capitalism of today. It produces a society cut off from its past and its future, stultifying human development and turning democracy into a farce in which disbelief and discredit inevitably arise.

Business & Money

Economics

Acting Out (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Acting Out is the first appearance in English of two short books published by Bernard Stiegler in 2003. In How I Became a Philosopher, he outlines his transformation during a five-year period of incarceration for armed robbery. Isolated from what had been his world, Stiegler began to conduct a kind of experiment in phenomenological research. Inspired by the Greek stoic Epictetus, Stiegler began to read, write, and discover his vocation, eventually studying philosophy in correspondence with Gérard Granel who was an important influence on a number of French philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, who was later Stiegler's teacher. The second book, To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us, is a powerful distillation of Stiegler's analysis of the contemporary world. He maintains that a growing loss of a sense of individual and collective existence leads to a decreased ability to love oneself, and, by extension, others. This predicament is viewed through a tragic event: in 2002, in Nanterre, France, Richard Durn, a local activist, stormed the city's town hall, shooting and killing eight people. Durn committed suicide the following day. The later publication of Durn's his journal revealed a man struggling with the feeling that he did not exist, for which he tried to compensate by committing an atrocity. For Stiegler, this exemplifies how love of self becomes pathological: a "me" assassinates an "us" with which it cannot identify.

History

Stanford University Press

Psychoanalysis loves technology. The truth of this statement is a reversal of the fundamental misunderstanding at the instant of the glance according to which psychoanalysis is ambivalent about -- if not implacably resistant to and expressly critical of -- the challenging claim (herausfordernden Anspruch) that, from cloud computing and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to additive manufacturing (AM) and the psychic apparatus, does not stop writing itself in modern technology. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis loves all technology, much less everything that makes the human animal a Prothesengott, a "Prosthetic God" or "God with prostheses"; technology is irreducible to the imaginary extension of the bodily ego and its capacities or the symbolic autonomy of its detached pieces or spare parts (pièces détachées). Nor is it to suggest that this love is synonymous with the object of narcissism or the subject supposed to know that supports transference. In Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the possibility of the invention of a "new weapon" in order to account for the murder of the father of the mythical primal horde in addition to the logic and temporality of ambivalence that, in the après-coup of the passage à l'acte, the sons -- qua the original partners in crime -- experience as hateloving (hainamoration). "They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires," "but they loved and admired him too," and this "fresh emotional attitude" is the subjective moment of a symptomatic partnership with technology that writes the logic of fantasy in the social body it retroactively constitutes. "One day," Freud explains, "the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength)." If psychoanalysis indeed loves technology it is insofar as it loves this undecidable but real invention, between being and having, to which the trace of such an equivocal new weapon bears witness in the moment of concluding the hateloving specific to the analytic experience.

Umbr(a): Technology

ALAIN BADIOU

Russell Grigg

Graham Harman

Levi R Bryant

Paul-Laurent Assoun

Oxana Timofeeva & Lorenzo Chiesa

Marc De Kesel

Samo Tomsic

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

Stiegler,Zum Akt

LA MISERIA SIMBOLICA 1

LA MISERIA SIMBOLICA

Meltemi

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Books by Bernard Stiegler