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Technics And Time 4: Bernard Stiegler’s Unpublished Manuscript

Lecturer: Daniel Ross

Originally Taught: Evening Sem 1 2023

On 1 September 2017, Bernard Stiegler circulated a file to friends and colleagues entitled La technique et le temps, tome 4. Facultés et fonctions de la noèse dans l’age post-veridique. On 31 December 2017, he circulated a new introduction to that text, entitled ‘Ouverture et fermeture. De l’univers infini au monde clos’. These two files add up to over 100,000 words: the intention was to write a fourth volume of his magnum opus, Technics and Time, as a way of taking account of new questions that had arisen since the publication of the first three volumes (in 1994, 1996 and 2001, respectively), and as a way of preparing the stage for the long-awaited final three volumes. The main body of the text is divided into three parts: “On the ‘Notion of Information’”, “Pharmacology of Locality”, and “Organology of Intermittence”. Stiegler was unable to totally finish the manuscript in his lifetime, and so never published it, but the insights it contains on the questions he felt were unavoidable for the future of thought and for the future of human existence on this planet, are invaluable. In this course, the weekly readings will consist of excerpts from the translation of this remarkable manuscript, which has been completed by the lecturer.

Lecture 1 (March 10): General Introduction to the Work of Bernard Stiegler

Lecture 2 (March 17): Opening and Closing: From the Infinite Universe to the Closed World

Lecture 3 (March 24): Faculties and Functions in Exosomatization

Lecture 4 (March 31): Negentropy and Anti-Entropy: The Post-Truth of Information

Two-Week Easter Break

Lecture 5 (April 21): Information Tension and Totalization

Lecture 6 (April 28): The Exosomatization of Noesis

Lecture 7 (May 5): Seven Theses on the Conflict of the Faculties and Functions in Digital Exosomatization

Lecture 8 (May 12): Market of Information, Calculability, Knowledge

Lecture 9 (May 19): Neganthropic Locality

Lecture 10 (May 26): Idiomatic Différance

Lecture 11 (June 2): Intermittence in the National There

Lecture 12 (June 9): Detachment of the Id (and Conclusion)