‘We Have to Become the Quasi-cause of Nothing – of Nihil’: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler

Abstract

This interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler was conducted in Paris on 28 January 2015, and first appeared in Dutch translation in the journal De uil van Minerva. The conversation begins by discussing the fundamental place occupied by the concept of 'technics' in Stiegler's work, and how the 'constitutivity' of technics does and does not relate to Kant and Husserl. Stiegler is then asked about his relationship with Deleuze, and he responds by focusing on the concept of quasi-causality, but also by arguing that there is a certain trajectory in Deleuze's thought, situating his own philosophy in relation to its various moments. Stiegler is then asked to respond to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks carried out three weeks prior to the interview. After making a couple of precautionary remarks, Stiegler relates such occurrences to the problem of what he calls 'spiritual poverty', to the intensification of 'negative sublimation' that can occur when there is a disconnection between the generations, and more generally to the growth of nihilism. All of these phenomena relate to the exploitation of technology by a virulent capitalism that irrationally believes that only the market is rational. After consideration of the complex historical relationship between Islam and modernization, and of both of these to Nietzsche's 'death of God', and after recalling the destructive role played by the West in the rise of fundamentalism and jihadism, Stiegler concludes by reflecting on the fact that, ultimately, 'intellectuals' have failed to use technologies in ways that produce alternatives to consumerism.

Technology, Embodiment, and Affect in Voice Sciences

“…The proposition that the voice is an imaginary organ begins with reference to researchers at the University of Delaware, who are piloting a project of growing vocal folds for close molecular analysis (Kukich, 2016). In previous research, where vocal folds could be seen but not touched, this stage, where they can be grown, touched, and (possibly) implanted, is speaking to a new ‘organological’ stage in voice studies and voice knowledge: in Stiegler’s terms, an organ, organization, technic, and organicism (Wambacq et al, 2016).…”

“…Since, Stiegler claims, physiological organs co-evolve with the technologies that enable their capture and facilitate their understanding, organs are deeply entwined with the social organizations through which knowledge comes to surface as noetic organs, which ‘means: not only organic, not only organizational’ (Stiegler, quoted in Wambacq and Buseyne, 2016: 4). As much as Stiegler’s work is sometimes misinterpreted as a fetish for the technic, the technic accounts for an entanglement between social, technical, and organic milieux that co-emerge in one another’s traces, and it is that emergence that constitutes his Simondon-influenced account of individuation as the becoming of matter into something new .…”

“…As much as Stiegler’s work is sometimes misinterpreted as a fetish for the technic, the technic accounts for an entanglement between social, technical, and organic milieux that co-emerge in one another’s traces, and it is that emergence that constitutes his Simondon-influenced account of individuation as the becoming of matter into something new . Such a process is what underlies the very conceptual matter of a General Organology as less a method than an approach , which he defends as ‘a way not only of posing questions, but of letting oneself be put into question ’ (Stiegler, quoted in Wambacq et al, 2016: 4).…”