Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (No. 1)

313 Pages·1998·9.32 MB·English

by  Bernard Stiegler

Translated by Richard Beardsworth
and George Collins
Stanford
University
Press
Stanford
California
1998
TECHNICS
A ND TIME, 1
The Fault of Epimetheus
Bernard Stiegler
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
was originally published in French in 1994
under the title La technique et le temps, 1: La faute d'Epiméthée,
© 1994 Galilée / Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.
Assistance for the translation was provided
by the French Ministry of Culture
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
CIP data are at the end of the book
For Gilles, my deceased brother

Preface
The object of this work is technics, apprehended as the horizon of all
possibility to come and of all possibility of a future.
This question still seemed secondary when, ten years ago, I was setting
down its first delineations. Today, it informs all types of research, and the
enormousness of the question summons us all. This calls for a work
whose urgency is still hardly grasped despite the high stakes of the issue
and the disquiet it arouses—a long and exacting task, as exciting as it will
be difficult, stirring a necessary but deaf and dangerous impatience. Here
I would like to warn the reader of this difficulty and of its necessity: at
its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed technics as an
object of thought. Technics is the unthought.
The reactions, immediate or mediate and mediatized, "epidermic" or
calculated, that are provoked by the extraordinary changes characteristic
of our age, in which technics constitutes the most powerful dynamic fac
tor, must be imperatively overcome. The present time is caught up in a
whirlwind in which decision making (krisis) has become increasingly
numb, the mechanisms and tendencies of which remain obscure, and
which must be made intelligible at the cost of a considerable effort of
anamnesis as much as of meticulous attention to the complexity of what
is taking place. The work presented here is nothing but a tentative ap
proach to these questions, as subject to trial and error as it is resolute—
advancing by trial and error (with the hand permitting) is the very ob
ject of this reflection.
The frenzy of time is all the more paradoxical in that, although it
should open onto the evidence of a future, never before has the immi-
IX
Preface
X
nence of an impossibility to come been more acute. That a radical change
in outlook and attitude is demanded induces all the more reactivity be
cause it is unavoidable. Ressentiment and denegation are factors of ruin as
well as irreducible tendencies, which Nietzsche and Freud placed at the
heart of their reflections a century ago. They will never have been exem
plified so diversely as today. The reader will know, then, that these au
thors, if seldom quoted in these pages, form the vanishing point of the
perspectives I have attempted to open.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to acknowledge here everything I
owe to so many friends and allies encountered in the course of this un
dertaking. I would at least like to express my profound gratitude to
Gérard Granel, who, as professor at the University of Toulouse-LeMirail,
awakened me, with the warm exigency that all those who have had the
opportunity to study under his direction know, to the necessity of re
turns (to things themselves, to metaphysics) as well as to that of a ma
jor overturning.
I would also like to thank Madame Montet, Eliane Escoubas, Annick
Jaulin, Madame Levy Hébrard, and Elizabeth Rigal, whose excellent
teachings find an echo here.
Jacques Derrida has made this work possible through his own, and the
reader will find in these pages a reading that strives to remain faithful
while taking on ("starting from," "beside," and in the deviation (écart) of a
différance) the fascinating inheritance that the spectral authority of a mas
ter engenders—all the more fascinating when the master suspects any and
all figures of mastery. Jacques Derrida's immense devotion to the possibility
of the other not only is the object of his exemplary discourse and medita
tion but also governs a lifestyle, a thought of life and a life of thought
where, in his relationship to students, to those who are close to him, to
the private and public spheres, the author authorizes his text in the facts of
existence the more he is vigilant in observing the limits of his authority.
Without the welcome extended to me by Jean-François Lyotard at the
Collège International de Philosophic and without the dialogue he so
generously allowed me to enter into with him and with others (whom I
also thank without mentioning their names here), steps that were deci
sive to my project could no doubt not have been made.
Frequent conversations with Paul Virilio, Régis Debray, and Antoine
Dulaure have greatly enriched this work and have given me inestimable
encouragement.
Preface
xi
The most precious stimuli to work are often friends. I have shared with
Antoine Berman, Thierry Chaput, and Michel Servière, all of whom have
since died, the care and the enigma of the memory haunting this work.
Catherine Malabou has encouraged and accompanied me in the work
as well as in the banal difficulties of everyday life, while setting out on
her own investigations. Tenderness has been our bond in the aim of
philosophical exigency, which ties together as much as it opens out the
spaces of struggle—a fruitful and threatening emulation that Hesiod
sings about under the name of Eris, the daughter of Night. Never before
has the experience of the community of a de-fault of community, residing
magnificent and terrifying at the heart of what I attempt to explore, been
more radical than with Catherine, in the concept and the circle of love, if
only to conceptualize out of love for the concept—what she also names
the end of love (in these times when philosophy will have wished to "lay
down its name as love of wisdom in order to be effectively and actually
real knowledge").
My children Barbara and Julien Stiegler had to bear, when growing up,
the conception and the birth of this other progeny: a book. May this hec
tic period of my life have brought them some kind of joy, and may this
object, now behind me, which I hope is turned toward a future already
no longer my own, be for them in their own right fruitful.
I thank my students who attended my courses and often contributed
to the maturing of the theses set out here. I also thank the higher admin
istration of the University of Compiègne, which has not forgotten the ur
gency and necessity of an encounter between philosophy and technology.
A grateful beneficiary as much as a devoted actor, I wish to recognize
their unusual clairvoyance.
Lastly, I would like to express my thanks to Roger Lesgards, to Jacques
Tarnero, and to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie; without their help,
this book could not have been published.
B.S.

Contents
Translators' Note xv
General Introduction I
PART I: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN
Introduction 21
§1 Theories of Technical Evolution 29
§2 Technology and Anthropology 82
§3 Who? What? The Invention of the Human 134
PART II: THE FAULT OF EPIMETHEUS
Introduction 183
§1 Prometheus's Liver 185
§2 Already There 204
§3 The Disengagement of the What 239
Notes 279
Bibliography 291