See Andrés Vaccari, “Unweaving the Program: Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technics,” →.
Bernard Stiegler, “Within the limits of capitalism, economizing means taking care,” Ars Industrialis. See →.
Stiegler, “Within the limits of capitalism, economizing means taking care.”
Stiegler’s lecture series at Goldsmith’s 4th, 11th, 25th February & 4th March 2010 focused on “pharmacology.” His introduction to the series stated that he hoped to examine: - why the pharmacological situation in which we live, as technological beings, that is to say as non-beings, always becoming, needs an economy of this pharmacology: an economy which tend to optimise the curative effects of pharmaka and to reduce the toxicological ones; - why such a pharmacology can never purify the technical remedies of their poisoning side, whereas there is nothing human which is not technical Peven language, and then, thought. - I will try to show today why, if a pharmacology is a grammatology, it needs the development of a history of the supplement that gramma is, and not only a logic of this supplement. Of grammatology announced such a history, but in fact, this one never appeared. - We will see that this history of the supplement needs to develop the concept of a process of grammatisation, which is the process of production of all sorts of gramma which are pharmaka as well. A pharmacology is what prepare therapeutics, which is a historical form of adoption and of socialization of a pharmakon, or rather, and more precisely, of a system of pharmaka. This therapeutics, as an adoption of pharmaka forming on what was called in the classical age a political economy which is, then, an economy of the supplement studied with the concept of grammatisation: which is not simply a grammatology. Thus considered, the economy of the supplement is a kind of new critique of political economy as well as of libidinal economy.
Stiegler speaks of “technics” as essentially a form of memory constitutive of human temporality: “The technical object in its evolution is at once inorganic matter, inert, and organization of matter. The latter must operate according to the constraints to which organisms are submitted.” Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 150.