Bernard Stiegler's work on the intimate relations between the human and the technical have made him one of the most important voices to have emerged in French philosophy in the last decade. At the same time both an accessible summation of that work and a continuation of it, "The Re-Enchantment of the World" advances a critique of consumer capitalism that draws on Freud and Marx to construct an utterly contemporary analysis of our time. The book explores the cognitive, affective, social and economic effects of the 'proletarianization' of the consumer in late capitalism and the resulting destruction of the consumer's "savoir-vivre. "Reflecting the collective work of his activist organisation, "Ars Industrialis," Stiegler here sets forth an alternative path to that of 'industrial populism', one that appeals to the force of the human spirit."The Re-Enchantment of the World" also includes the manifesto of "Ars Industrialis" and an account of the organisation's 2005 summit in Tunis.

Bernard Stiegler works systematically through the current crisis in education and family relations resulting from the mesmerizing power of marketing technologies. He contends that the greatest threat to social and cultural development is the destruction of young people's ability to pay critical attention to the world around them. This phenomenon, prevalent throughout the first world, is the calculated result of technical industries and their need to capture the attention of the young, making them into a target audience and reversing the relationship between adults and children.
"Taking Care" exposes the carelessness of these industries and urges the reader to re-enter the "battle for intelligence" against the drive-oriented culture of short-term ("short-circuited") attention characteristic of the negative aspects of the new technologies. Long-term attention, Stiegler shows, produces retentions of cultural memory mandatory for social development--and for the counteracting of ADD and ADHD. Examining the history of education from Plato to the current quagmires in France and the United States, he tracks the notion of critical thinking from its Enlightenment apotheosis to its current eradication. Stiegler is unique in combining the most radical of theoretical constructs--such as "grammatization"--with quite traditional values, values he proposes we re-address in our not-so-brave new world.

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.
The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.
Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers--Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

"Disorientation" is the first publication in English of the second volume of "Technics and Time," in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology--including alphabetical writing--is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

In the first two volumes of "Technics and Time," Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the "exteriorization process" of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"-- as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer--that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.

"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 Gerard 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.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.
The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.
Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers--Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

In the first two volumes of "Technics and Time," Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the "exteriorization process" of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"-- as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer--that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.

Half a century ago Adorno and Horkheimer argued, with great prescience, that our increasingly rationalized world was witnessing the emergence of a new kind of barbarism, thanks in part to the stultifying effects of the culture industries. What they could not foresee was that, with the digital revolution and the pervasive automation associated with it, the developments they had discerned would be greatly accentuated, giving rise to the loss of reason and to the loss of the reason for living. Individuals are now overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of digital information and the speed of digital flows, resulting in a kind of technological Wild West in which they find themselves increasingly powerless, driven by their lack of agency to the point of madness. How can we find a way out of this situation? In this major new book, Bernard Stiegler argues that we must first acknowledge our era as one of fundamental disruption and detachment. We are living in an absence of epokhē in the philosophical sense, by which Stiegler means that we have lost our path of thinking and being. Weaving in powerful accounts from his own life story, including struggles with depression and time spent in prison, Stiegler calls for a new epokhē based on public power. We must forge new circuits of meaning outside of the established algorithmic routes. For only then will forms of thinking and life be able to arise that restore meaning and aspiration to the individual. Concluding with a dialogue between Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in social and cultural theory, media and cultural studies, philosophy and the humanities generally.

Bernard Stiegler works systematically through the current crisis in education and family relations resulting from the mesmerizing power of marketing technologies. He contends that the greatest threat to social and cultural development is the destruction of young people's ability to pay critical attention to the world around them. This phenomenon, prevalent throughout the first world, is the calculated result of technical industries and their need to capture the attention of the young, making them into a target audience and reversing the relationship between adults and children.
"Taking Care" exposes the carelessness of these industries and urges the reader to re-enter the "battle for intelligence" against the drive-oriented culture of short-term ("short-circuited") attention characteristic of the negative aspects of the new technologies. Long-term attention, Stiegler shows, produces retentions of cultural memory mandatory for social development--and for the counteracting of ADD and ADHD. Examining the history of education from Plato to the current quagmires in France and the United States, he tracks the notion of critical thinking from its Enlightenment apotheosis to its current eradication. Stiegler is unique in combining the most radical of theoretical constructs--such as "grammatization"--with quite traditional values, values he proposes we re-address in our not-so-brave new world.

"Disorientation" is the first publication in English of the second volume of "Technics and Time," in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology--including alphabetical writing--is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

"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 Gerard 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.

On the social consequences of machines Automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern in today's society of humans and machines. This volume describes the social consequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life and automation of technology. Bernard Stiegler's automatic society illustrates how digital media networks establish a new proletariat of knowledge workers. Gertrud Koch offers the animation of the technical to account for the pathological relations that arise between people and their devices. And Thomas Pringle synthesizes how automation and animation explain the history of intellectual exchanges that led to the hybrid concept of the ecosystem, a term that blends computer and natural science. All three contributions analyse how categories of life and technology become mixed in governmental policies, economic exploitation and pathologies of everyday life thereby both curiously and critically advancing the term that underlies those new developments: 'machine.'

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object.

In this book of interviews, conducted in 2002 by Elie During, Bernard Stiegler discusses the reasons that motivated him to develop his philosophy of technics. Divided into four parts, Philosophising by Accident introduces some of the key points in Stiegler's argument about the technical constitution of the human, and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. Stiegler presents his original analysis of Plato and the beginning of philosophy in relation to the tragic culture, the method of dialectics and metaphysics. He also reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his controversial thesis about the three types of memory, and refers to concepts central to his later works such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. While contemporary times call us to examine and analyse technical tools and new technologies, Stiegler argues that philosophy has, from its very origins, repressed technics, and examining rigorously the evolution of technics and its effects on the human, will provide us with greater insights into what it means to be human.

Bernard Stiegler's work on the intimate relations between the human and the technical have made him one of the most important voices to have emerged in French philosophy in the last decade. At the same time both an accessible summation of that work and a continuation of it, "The Re-Enchantment of the World" advances a critique of consumer capitalism that draws on Freud and Marx to construct an utterly contemporary analysis of our time. The book explores the cognitive, affective, social and economic effects of the 'proletarianization' of the consumer in late capitalism and the resulting destruction of the consumer's "savoir-vivre. "Reflecting the collective work of his activist organisation, "Ars Industrialis," Stiegler here sets forth an alternative path to that of 'industrial populism', one that appeals to the force of the human spirit."The Re-Enchantment of the World" also includes the manifesto of "Ars Industrialis" and an account of the organisation's 2005 summit in Tunis.