Stiegler’s philosophical project centers around the theme that philosophy must come to terms with the role of technology, particularly the technologies of memory. This project has had a profound impact on digital studies and media theory. Stiegler’s recent work suggests that the Anthropocene, considered widely as our current epoch, is characterized by widespread automatization and proletarianization. He views this society as revolving around highly closed, “entropic” systems that lack the openness necessary for genuine individuation and knowledge. In opposition to this tendency, Stiegler has identified and theorized a “negentropic” alternative that fosters the invention of new forms of individuation and knowledge-producion.
Bernard Stiegler is among the most important contemporary philosophers and critical theorists after Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Within the English-speaking world, he is best known for the 3-volumn Technics & Time (translated into English), a philosophical expose on a world increasing run on the assumptions of a software culture and how we live. Other widely read translated monographs include For a New Critique of Political Economy (2009/2010), Acting Out (2003/2009), Symbolic Misery I: the Hyperindustrial Epoch (2014), Symbolic Misery II: the Catastrophe of the Sensible (2015) and so on.
He is currently an associated professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy. He is the director of the Institute for Research and Innovation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, after his former positions as director of the department of cultural development at Pompidou as well as the director of Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique. He was also a Professorial Fellow at Goldsmiths College in London for 6 years.
He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit to bring forth a new “life of the mind.” In 2011, he established his own philosophy school in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel. Professor Stiegler has published numerous books and articles on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, consumer culture, etc. Among his writings, his three volumes of La technique et le temps (English Translation: Technics and Time), two volumes of De la misère symbolique, three volumes of Mécréance et Discrédit and two volumes Constituer l’Europe are particularly well known. His recent publications includes Pharmacologie du Front National (2013), Etats de choc – Bêtise et savoir au XXIè siècle (2012), and Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue: de la pharmacologie (2011).
Details of the lecture are as follows:
Date: 15th March 2016 (Tuesday)
