Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler's path is like no other in contemporary philosophy. Imprisoned for armed robbery, he discovered philosophy in jail, reading Husserl and Derrida, and drafted there the first outlines of what would become his monumental work, Technics and Time. Once released, he defended his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Jacques Derrida, directed IRCAM and then cultural development at the Centre Pompidou, and in 2005 founded the think tank Ars Industrialis. This trajectory is not an anecdote: it says something about his philosophy, born of an experience of deprivation — of world, of technics, of memory — transformed into a question.

The poison, the remedy — and the scapegoat

At the heart of his thought lies a concept inherited from Derrida: the pharmakon. In ancient Greek, the word means both poison and remedy. Every technique, Stiegler argues, has this double face: it deactivates and activates human capacities, it makes some forms of knowledge disappear and makes others possible. Writing weakens living memory — Plato was already alarmed by this — but it makes law, science and literature possible.

Stiegler also retains a third sense of the Greek word, inseparable from the first two: the pharmakos is the scapegoat — the expiatory victim charged with the city's ills. When a society does not know how to take care of its technologies, it ends up accusing them: "it's the screens' fault", "it's AI's fault". The pharmakon then becomes the outlet for a collective failure of care — and the critique of technology, a way of not examining oneself.

This frame rules out the two most comfortable postures towards the digital: technophobia, which sees only the poison, and technophilia, which sees only the remedy. It forces a harder question: under what conditions does a given technology heal rather than poison?

The human, originarily technical

Stiegler radicalises this intuition: technics is not a tool that humans invented after the fact — it is constitutive of humanity. To the memories carried by our consciousness (primary and secondary retentions, in Husserl's vocabulary), he adds "tertiary retentions": memory externalised in technical supports — writing, recording, the digital. Our ways of perceiving, remembering and desiring are shaped by these supports. To change memory supports is to change humanity.

Hence the stakes of what he calls "generalised proletarianisation": after the worker's know-how was captured by the industrial machine, it is the consumer's savoir-vivre, then the very capacities to think and to decide, that contemporary technologies tend to short-circuit. Not through conspiracy, but through economics: capturing attention pays better than cultivating it.

What he helps us think

Faced with artificial intelligence, Stiegler provides a strikingly current frame. Generative systems are tertiary retentions of unprecedented power: they externalise no longer just memory, but formulation itself. The pharmacological question arises about them with particular urgency: under what conditions do they augment our capacities to think, and under what conditions do they atrophy them?

His notion of "long circuits of individuation" — those slow processes through which a person or a collective singularises itself, learns, matures — names precisely what algorithmic short-termism threatens. Cultivating these long circuits, reappropriating technologies in the service of attention and desire rather than their capture: such is the programme of an "industrial politics of spirit" that Stiegler never ceased to defend, until his death in 2020.