Bernard Stiegler Memorial Lecture 2025
Hidetaka Ishida (いしだ ひでたか)
How can we go on … in the night?
For Bernard Stiegler
Moderator and Discussant: Yuk Hui
Tuesday, 5 August, 2025.
8 pm HKT ― 10 pm AEST ― 2 pm CEST
Online event, register to join: http://bit.ly/44MwRin
How can we go on … in the night?
For Bernard Stiegler
We are now witnessing the “barbaric implosion” that Bernard predicted—borrowing the phrase from Félix Guattari.
This crisis runs deep, and the night keeps thickening.
We feel his absence more than ever—he, who never ceased to warn us of this peril.
We must resume the questioning—together.
We must return to his interrogations and respond to them in turn: Rückfragen.
And we must do so idiotextually, in the singular manner he taught us.
Let us try, from our scattered horizons, to go and find him again—
by deepening the pharmacology of this crisis, a century after Freud.
The night before, it was a full moon.
Did you see it that night?
The Absolute shall exist outside—moon, beyond time:
and he shall lift the curtains, facing us.
— Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur
Speaker:
Hidetaka Ishida (いしだ ひでたか)
Born in 1953
French literature scholar, philosopher, and semiotician
Hidetaka Ishida studied French literature and the humanities at the University of Tokyo and the University of Paris. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from Paris Nanterre University (Paris 10). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Honorary President of the Asian Semiotics International Association. He also hosts “Hidetaka Ishida’s Classroom on Contemporary Thought” on the online platform Shirasu (https://shirasu.io/c/igitur).
After serving as Associate Professor at Doshisha University and the University of Tokyo, Ishida was Professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School from 1996 to 2019. During this period, he also served as Dean of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies and as Deputy Librarian of the University Library.
He was a Visiting Professor at Paris 8 University and Paris 7 University, and served as Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in France.
Major Publications
- Knowledge of Signs / Knowledge of Media (2003, University of Tokyo Press)
- Textbook of Contemporary Thought (2010, Chikuma Shobō)
- How to Create Yourself and Your Future: Living in an Information-Industrial Society (2010, Iwanami Shoten)
- Lectures on Media Theory for Adults (2016, Chikuma Shobō)
- New Semiotics: When Brain Meets Media (with Hiroki Azuma, 2019, Genron Publishing)
- Lectures on Semiotics (2020, Chikuma Shobō)
He directed the Japanese publication of Michel Foucault’s Dits et Écrits in ten volumes (Michel Foucault Shikō Shūsei, 1998–2002, Chikuma Shobō). He also co-translated with Kenji Nishi the three volumes of Bernard Stiegler’s La Technique et le Temps into Japanese (Gijutsu to Jikan, vols. 1–3, 2009–2013, Hosei University Press).
Moderator/Discussant:
Yuk HUI is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and serves as the founding director of the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. Hui studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong and philosophy at Goldsmiths College in London where he wrote his doctoral thesis under Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020). He obtained his Habilitation from Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. Hui is currently jury chair of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology. He is the author of several monographs, translated into more than a dozen languages, the most recent of which are Machine and Sovereignty (2024) and Post-Europe (2024).
