Bernard Stiegler Memorial Lecture 2024
Pieter Lemmens
Disillusioned Awakenings in Dark Times: Reading Bernard Stiegler after the Covid Event
Tuesday 6 August, 2024.
8 pm HKT ― 10 pm AEST ― 2 pm CEST
Online event, register to join: http://bit.ly/3LkUvZT
It has now been four years since Bernard Stiegler passed away, a few months into the so-called COVID-19 crisis, which in the meantime has changed the world – and a fortiori our view of the world – in an unprecedented manner. COVID-19, for those paying attention, has proven to be no less than a revelation of how things actually stand on this planet – indeed in the form of an immense disillusionment. It has unveiled nothing less than the systemically corrupt, tyrannical and malicious nature of the power structures behind our political, economic, cultural and medical institutions, including, above all, the media. Indeed, the scales have fallen from people’s eyes and a truth has manifested which can be characterized as that of a grand déconfiture (bankruptcy). The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation and the escalation of the war between Israel and Palestine have only aggravated this gigantic démasqué (unmasking) and accelerated the disbanding and downfall of the so-called “civilized West.” This lecture by Pieter Lemmens will explore the intellectual, ethical, political and cultural disaster that has been unfolding before our eyes in the last four years from the pharmako-organological, noetico-libidinal perspective on technology of Stiegler, who like no other thinker understood the gravity of our planetary anthropic crisis. Stiegler might not have been prepared though, or so it will be suggested, for the darkness that is manifesting since his passing, a darkness however that might prove to be highly illuminating for those willing to see.
Pieter Lemmens teaches philosophy and ethics at the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has published on themes in the philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology and (post)phenomenology, and on the work of Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler and post-autonomist Marxism. Recent book publications are Cosmotechnics. For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene (2021, co-edited with Y. Hui) and The Technical Condition. The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society (2022, co-edited with T. Swierstra, T. Sharon and P. Vermaas). Current interests are the planetarization of technology and the technosphere, the renewal of philosophy of technology in the age of the Anthropocene, conspiracy thinking and the philosophical aspects of psychedelics.
