Pub: BERNARD STIEGLER AND THE QUESTION OF TECHNICS. TRANSFORMATIONS 17 (2009).

Bernard Stiegler's concept of technics has emerged recently as an important contribution to studies of the relation between technology, time and the human. Technics, or the prosthetic supplementation of the human in "default" of the origin, is the condition of "life that knows." In Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, drawing from and critiquing various sources, including the work on evolutionary biology by Gilbert Simondon, on palaoanthropology by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, on Martin Heidegger's existential analysis of Dasein and Jacques Derrida's différance as the logic of the supplement, Stiegler has proposed arguments about technology and its relation to the human that suggest a formulation of human life as "epiphylogenetic," that is, evolving according to the logic of prosthetic supplementation. In later works, such as the subsequent volumes of Technics and Time, and works such as Taking Care, he explores the role of hyper-capitalism and cinematographic technologies in contemporary consciousness and becoming. This issue of Transformations features articles that address these themes and others in the work of Bernard Stiegler. Download the entire issue here: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/editorial.shtml.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. Review of Bernard Stiegler's ACTING OUT. NDPR (April 2009).

Stiegler, Bernard. Acting Out. Trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Acting Out consists of a very fine translation of two brief 2003 books by French philosopher and social critic Bernard Stiegler: Passer à l'acte, which is translated under the title "How I Became a Philosopher"; and Aimer, s'aimer, nous aimer: Du 11 septembre au 21 avril, which is rendered here as "To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21." "How I Became a Philosopher" is an account of just that, a memoir of Stiegler's "passage to the act" of philosophy, with special emphasis on his five years of imprisonment for armed robbery (1978-83), where he first began this difficult passage. This text is a lyrical, elliptical, and philosophically rich recounting of Stiegler's own transformation, under the most dire conditions, in and through the practices of thinking. "To Love" is a very different kind of text, a piece of social criticism that takes the form of an extended meditation on what Stiegler calls the "loss of individuation" (39) under contemporary consumption capitalism, pointing out the toxic, violent effects of de-individuation for both the individual and the community (or, in Stiegler's preferred Hegelian vocabulary, the "I" and the "we"). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15885.