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Bernard Stiegler on ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415620474

Memory and the Dual tcs.sagepub.com

Origin of the Human

Michael Haworth

Abstract
This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in
light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this
emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational
transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism.
This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that
I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue
that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments in the life sciences pose a challenge to
the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the
rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level,
I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of
the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective
accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos.

Keywords
Derrida, life, memory, Stiegler, technics

We are considering a passage: the passage to what is called the

human. Its ‘birth’ if there is one. (Stiegler, 1998: 135)

The injunction to think ‘beyond the human’ is a forceful one in contem-

porary debates in philosophy and the arts and humanities (or ‘posthu-
manities’)1 more broadly. In work deriving from such diverse streams of
thought as animal studies, systems theory, actor-network theory, the new
(‘speculative’) materialisms and the varied discourses surrounding cogni-
tive neuroscience, the human is demoted from its privileged position as

Corresponding author: Michael Haworth. Email: mike_haworth@hotmail.co.uk

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

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2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

an ontological exception and situated within a wider ecological network.

Pitting themselves against the concerns with human finitude and subject-
ivity that dominated much 20th-century continental philosophy, as well
as its alleged ignorance, or deliberate disregard of science, such fields are
concerned to de-emphasize human agency as well as call into question the
uniqueness of its form of perceptual access onto the world. Attention has
thus been redirected towards what Quentin Meillassoux (2008: 7) has
evocatively called the ‘great outdoors’, either in the form of our animal
others, the inner lives of objects, technological mediation, or mathemat-
ics. This identification and expurgation of anthropocentrism has left few
academic disciplines untouched.
In this context it is worthwhile to consider the work of Bernard
Stiegler, and his endeavour, primarily in the first volume of his huge
and ongoing Technics and Time series, to offer a philosophical account
of the origin of the human species and register fully the singular specifi-
city of its emergence while avoiding anthropocentrism or human excep-
tionalism and the crude distinctions that this engenders: animal and
human, nature and culture. As will be shown, according to Stiegler this
specificity is located in the transgenerational accumulation of memory,
accomplished – only – through the inheritance of technical artefacts. The
human, as distinct from every other species on earth, is distinguished by
its ability to preserve and pass on its experiences beyond its individual
lifespan so that knowledge gained once (such as the fashioning of a
particular tool) need not be learned over again by subsequent gener-
ations. This, so Stiegler maintains, arrests the natural course of life
where the memories acquired during the organism’s lifecycle are irretriev-
ably lost along with the death of that organism. As such, the arrival of
transgenerational memory constitutes an interruption to the history of
life, redoubling its movement via the detour of the technical prosthesis.
My argument in this article is twofold. First, I will contend that this
singularity of the human, as well as the exclusively technical constitution
of intergenerational memory, needs to be rethought in the light of emer-
ging neo-Lamarckian developments in the life sciences. Specifically,
research in the burgeoning field of transgenerational epigenetics compel-
lingly indicates that, contrary to scientific orthodoxy stretching back over
a century, the acquired experiences and environmental exposures of ear-
lier generations can be transmitted to the offspring through the germ line.
This implies that memories may be inherited without the influence of
socialization or the mediation of material cultural artefacts. Such
research, while in its relative infancy, marks a significant contribution
to the discourse surrounding the formation of collective memory and the
intergenerational inheritance of experience and, so I will argue, compli-
cates the picture Stiegler presents us with in Technics and Time. At the
same time it offers a persuasive recuperation of Jung and Freud’s separ-
ate accounts of a phylogenetic inheritance of ancestral experience,

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Haworth 3

something Stiegler considers inconceivable unless mediated through the

technological vehicle.
Second, we will examine Stiegler’s readings of the anthropogenetic
accounts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and André Leroi-Gourhan and the
logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he identifies therein, where an abrupt leap is
presupposed between two distinct stages of the human. This dual origin,
so Stiegler argues, is an inevitable corollary of Rousseau and Leroi-
Gourhan’s shared failure to think the co-originarity of the human and
the technical. However, I will argue that Stiegler’s narrative of the origin
of the human, through its appeal to the motif of a break with the ‘law of
life’, ultimately repeats this logic at the level of life itself. So our approach
will take a double aspect, focusing on both the empirical and the logical
grounds for Stiegler’s account of the rupture that marks the passage to
the human. At either level, so I will argue, the distinction between before
and after cannot be rigorously upheld.

Epiphylogenesis, or, the Pursuit of Life by Other Means

The terms in which Stiegler sets out his project to account for the passage
to the human builds on the work of his mentor Jacques Derrida, in
particular a crucial section of the Grammatology where Derrida appeals
to the work of the palaeontologist and palaeoanthropologist André
Leroi-Gourhan. Derrida’s interest in Leroi-Gourhan is, first, that his
account of prehistoric writing practices, contemporaneous with the first
appearance of the species Homo sapiens, permits a generalization of
writing that precludes the ethnocentric distinction between societies
with and without writing. More than this, however, Leroi-Gourhan’s
appeal to the notion of programme, borrowed from cybernetics, to
describe the functioning of the human nervous system suspends the trad-
itional categories that ‘habitually serve to distinguish man from other
living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of
society, of economy, etc. etc.)’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). This concept of ‘pro-
gramme’, meaning the coded series of instructions guiding how a system
responds to new information, describes the general organization and
evolution of life at its most basic level, encompassing everything from
photosynthesis to the instinctual behaviour of the so-called ‘higher mam-
mals’, up to hydraulic pumps and computer processors. This allows
Derrida to expand the thematic of writing and the trace (or the
gramme)  to the movement of life itself, and thereby to situate the
human within a history that vastly exceeds it: the history of the unfolding
of the trace as the ‘unity of a double movement of protention and reten-
tion’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). Man is accordingly presented as a particular,
and by no means unified, configuration of the gramme,  or as a ‘stage or
an articulation in the history of life – of what I have called différance – as
the history of the gramme’  (Derrida, 1997: 84). Human exceptionality is

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4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

thus radically reduced and with this the basis on which the human can be
opposed to the animal, or to nature more generally, is swept away.
However, while accepting Derrida’s analysis, Stiegler remains uncon-
vinced that the particular ‘stage or articulation’ that constitutes the arri-
val of the human has been sufficiently theorized. The initial philosophical
move accomplished by the work of grammatology is accepted as a crucial
and irreversible one, but without defining the particular set of conditions
under which the being that the human is emerges and doing justice to its
singular modality we risk flattening out difference altogether. All we are
left with in Derrida’s account, so Stiegler argues, is a hint: the emergence
of man is said to be ‘an emergence that makes the gramme appear as such
(that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence)’ (Derrida,
1997: 84). Stiegler (1998: 138) equates this appearance of the gramme as
such with consciousness (a move that is not unproblematic as the full
passage that Stiegler cites makes clear),2 and the task remains to deter-
mine ‘what the conditions of such an emergence of the “gramme as such”
are, and the consequences as to the general history of life and/or of the
gramme’  (Stiegler,1998: 137).
The passage that marks this arrival is, according to Stiegler, a decisive
rupture with/in3 the logic and history of life, for which he borrows the
term ‘exteriorization’ from Leroi-Gourhan. This names the stage when an
entirely new form of memory is constituted that departs from the natural
course of events. What Stiegler names ‘epiphylogenetic’ memory stands in
addition to the two forms of memory existing in nature, namely, the
genetic (species memory) and the epigenetic (individual memory).
Epigenetic memory consists of the changes that an individual undergoes
throughout its lifespan which are inevitably lost to future generations
upon the death of that organism. Genetic memory, on the other hand,
is heritable but is not able to be (directly) influenced by experience. So, as
Stiegler presents it, these two systems of memory are incapable of com-
municating with one another or exchanging their functions.
Epiphylogenesis, however, forms a third type of memory, consisting of
material artefacts such as tools or written inscriptions that enable the
conservation and transmission of acquired (individual) memory so that
an experience or lesson learned does not die along with the organism but
can be inherited by future generations. As such, this allows for the con-
tinual resumption of a (scientific, philosophical, literary) project and the
institution of a tradition. Intergenerational epigenetic memory, as tech-
nical memory, is therefore the defining mark of the human tool-user.
Through such material traces I am granted access to ‘a past that is
mine but that I have nevertheless not lived’ (Stiegler, 1998: 159). To be
human is thus to inherit this ‘already-there’ (Stiegler, 1998: 159) that
preceded my arrival, the conditions of access to which are subject to
radical upheaval and transformation due to changes in the technological
apparatuses through which it is registered.

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Haworth 5

So epiphylogenesis, for Stiegler, amounts to nothing less than a:

break with the ‘law of life’ in that, considering the hermetic separ-
ation between somatic and germinal, the epigenetic experience of
the animal is lost to the species when the animal dies, while in a life
proceeding by means other than life, the being’s experience, regis-
tered in the tool (in the object), becomes transmissible and cumu-
lative. (Stiegler, 2009b: 4)

Stiegler’s insistence on the singular ontological import of this transition

to the human era is in marked contrast to Quentin Meillassoux’s delib-
erately underwhelming account of the emergence of the conditions for
consciousness. In his influential book After Finitude, which has been
pivotal in the discussions to which we alluded at the opening of this
article, Meillassoux (2008) also addresses the philosophical significance
of material traces bearing witness to a past that precedes my individual
chronology. However, the relics that interest Meillassoux are important
not because they grant access to the experiences of previous generations
of humans but because they signal a time antedating the existence of the
human altogether.
In his famous account of the ‘arche-fossil’,4 the problem such phenom-
ena are alleged to pose to ‘correlationist’ philosophy5 is that it enjoins us
to think phenomenological givenness not as the irreducible condition of
there being a world but rather as an ‘intra-worldly occurrence’
(Meillassoux, 2008: 14). What is impossible for the correlationist to
think, so Meillassoux argues, is the coming into being of the correlation
itself. For if the correlation is taken to precede all positive knowledge,
how can such a philosophy account for its emergence out of a time that
pre-existed it?
Accordingly, says Meillassoux, ‘[to] think science is to think the status
of a becoming which cannot be correlational because the correlate is in it,
rather than it being in the correlate’ (Meillassoux, 2008: 22). As opposed
to coming first, as the transcendental condition which necessarily pre-
cedes scientific knowledge about the prehistoric past, givenness is instead
argued to be a phenomenon comprehended by science. Thus weighty
philosophical questions about the emergence of the transcendental are
given a deflationary answer designed to forestall any future fetishizing of
the conditions of access to the real over the real itself. Finitude is pre-
sented as, in effect, merely a natural occurrence that emerged along with
the evolution of an organism possessing a sufficiently advanced central
nervous system. The origin of finitude, manifestation, the transcendental,
consciousness, call it what you will, is henceforth not a philosophical
problem but a scientific one. Stiegler shares with Meillassoux an empha-
sis on the empirical conditions which precede and constitute the tran-
scendental (and the Derridean quasi-transcendental in Stiegler’s case

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6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

[see Stiegler, 2001]), although while Meillassoux delegates the analysis of

these conditions to science, Stiegler insists on its philosophical status.6
With the concept of epiphylogenesis established, Stiegler goes on to
offer a highly original reading of Heidegger’s analyses of the historicity
of Dasein, through which he is able to show how all relation to time
(and hence all relation to oneself) is conditioned and made possible by
technology. This explains the undecidability of the double genitive in
the title given to part one of volume one of Technics and Time: ‘the
invention of the human’. The human invents the tool while being
invented by it in turn, in what he will call, borrowing a phrase from
Gilbert Simondon, a ‘transductive relation’ (a relation in which each of
the related terms is co-constitutive of the other) (Stiegler, 2009b: 2). The
concept of epiphylogenesis is foundational for Stiegler’s subsequent
work as it allows him to develop a concrete ‘history of the supplement’
(Stiegler, 2001: 248) and formalize the precise relation between techno-
logical advances and the concomitant cultural shifts that they bring
about. In doing so he builds on, while breaking with, the ‘quasi-
formalism’ (Beardsworth, 2013: 210) of the Derridean ‘logic of the sup-
plement’ (Stiegler, 2001: 248).
The particular articulation of life that man represents is thus a break
with life as such: ‘the pursuit of life by means other than life’ (Stiegler,
1998: 17, emphasis added). From this point on the living enters into a
relationship with the non-living and thereby inaugurates the possibility of
cultural inheritance and history. Picking up on the passage quoted (p. 3),
where Derrida appears to suggest that différance is the history of life,7
Stiegler argues that Derrida fails to take account of the fact that the
emergence of technical memory (as the pursuit of life by other means)
marks a ‘rupture in différance’ (Stiegler, 1998: 138). Stiegler thus finds in
différance an equivocation between offering an account of life in general
(‘pure phusis’) (Stiegler, 1998: 139) and life in relation to the non-living or
the technical, dating from ‘after the rupture’ that marks the emergence of
transgenerational (epiphylogenetic) memory.
It is Stiegler’s concern to taxonomize this distinction and carry out
what Derrida apparently failed to do. So if différance is the history of ‘life
in general’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139), what takes place with epiphylogenesis,
when life begins to further itself by other (non-living) means, is a verit-
able doubling of différance, or a ‘différance of différance’ (Stiegler, 1998:
141). For, once again, in the course of life prior to exteriorization ‘all
summation of epigenetic events is lost for specific memory with the loss
of the individual who was their support’ (Stiegler, 1998: 177), while after
the rupture acquired knowledge can be inherited by subsequent gener-
ations and built upon in a movement of exponential accumulation. Thus
the emergence of the human, for Stiegler, cannot be contained within the
existing formulation of différance, as the pursuit of life by other means
differs and defers the différantial movement of life itself.

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Haworth 7

It is not difficult to imagine Derrida’s response here, which would be to

refuse the distinction; there is no ‘indecision’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139) or
equivocation between a first and a second order of différance (before
and after the rupture) because différance already describes the inextric-
ability and inseparability (de facto and de jure) of life and death. So the
notion of a rupture brought about by ‘pure phusis’ entering into relation
with the non-living is based on a mistake. ‘Pure life’ (a term that appears
only once in The Fault of Epimetheus [Stiegler, 1998], on page 140 to
describe the period preceding the advent of epiphylogenesis, but whose
usage I aim to show is far from an aberration)8 amounts for Derrida to
the same thing as ‘pure death’. They are ideal limits, ‘which is as much as
to say fictions’, generated and undermined by the play of différance,
which is the ‘necessarily impure’ root of each (Derrida, 1987: 284).
This, as we can see, renders problematic Stiegler’s simple equating of
différance with life. Indeed, to say that life unfolds according to the
play of différance (as, for example, Martin Hägglund [2008] and
Francesco Vitale [2014] have argued, and for which there is ample textual
support in Derrida’s work) is quite different from the claim that ‘différ-
ance is nothing else than the history of life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 136, italics
added), or that they are coterminous.9 As we will see further on, it is
precisely this conflation that leads to Stiegler’s contention that the emer-
gence of technical memory bears directly on the structural logic of différ-
ance itself, rather than being accounted for by it.
As Tracy Colony (2011: 86) puts it, an understanding of life as différ-
ance undermines the ‘self-coincidence of life by means of life’, placing
‘default and exposure to what is other than life’ (death) at the heart of the
very movement of life itself, before the appearance of technological medi-
ation. Derrida’s two most famous engagements with Freud, ‘Freud and
the scene of writing’ (in Derrida, 2001) and ‘To speculate – On “Freud”’
(in Derrida, 1987), from 1966 and 1980 respectively, offer perhaps the
clearest exposition of this crucial point. In the earlier text we read, in
effect, that a wholly self-sufficient life (here the perfect spontaneity of
memory) could never establish a relationship with death (the ‘dead’
material memory aid) since each would exclude the other. Rather, the
very fact of this relation undermines their opposition and bears witness
to the irreducible trace of death within life, both in its concept and in its
actual course. Indeed, in the 1980 text, Derrida writes, articulating a key
motif of his later work, ‘[if] death is not opposable [to life] it is, already,
life death’ (in Derrida, 1987: 285).10 So for Derrida the ‘question of tech-
nics’ is ‘opened up’ by the relation of life with death, not the other way
around, as is the case for Stiegler (Derrida, 2001: 287). In Stiegler’s read-
ing, life is only an ‘economy of death’ after the event of exteriorization,
but for Derrida such an event is only possible because life is nothing other
than an economy of death. Epiphylogenesis can occur only because ‘pure
life’ does not, and never did, exist.

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8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Stiegler, a student and close associate of Derrida’s, cannot have been

unaware of this point,11 but his conviction that the emergence of the
tertiary form of memory identified above, and the concomitant ‘passage
to the human’, demands a different conceptual vocabulary than that
which describes life in general leads him to this strategy of distinguishing
two orders or stages of différance, regardless of how it may break with
Derridean orthodoxy.12 However, we will be questioning the originality
of this third form of memory in the light of recent scientific developments
as well as asking whether Stiegler has not, in forcing this distinction,
repeated the gesture that he ascribes to both Rousseau and Leroi-
Gourhan in their respective (and very different) accounts of the origin
of the human.

The Dual Origin of the Human

To demonstrate the pitfalls of metaphysical narratives of the birth of the
human, which project man as he is now into his prehistoric past, Stiegler
turns to Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of Inequality is held to
be an exemplary case of ‘transcendental anthropology’ (Stiegler, 1998:
105). Rousseau envisages an originary man with the upright stance and
mental capacity of modern man but shorn of language, artifice and cul-
tural acquisitions. This first man, Rousseau (1987: 34) freely admits, is a
normative ideal that ‘perhaps never existed’, but it presents a model of
what, de jure if not de facto, should have constituted the origin of the
human: a fiction that is truer than the empirical origin. Stiegler’s reading
of Rousseau, classically deconstructive in approach, focuses on the
values of proximity and the proper, which are shown to be progressively
corrupted and usurped by distanciation and artifice in what Stiegler calls
the ‘second origin’, or fall, of man. This amounts to ‘an exterior accident
which does not come from the nature of man: it happens to him and
denaturalises him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 117–18). All such transcendental
accounts, says Stiegler, must appeal to this logic of the dual origin.
In taking modern man as having come into being fully formed,
Rousseau sets himself the task of isolating his universal essence, which
will constitute his primordial state. In doing so he must necessarily
exclude anything which owes its existence to man, so the first man
cannot have manipulated tools or used language or lived in a society
of laws, all of which man invents. Before the fall into technics man
had no need of such devices as nature provided everything within
reach. So once stripped of all his mechanical prostheses and cultural
acquisitions the man that Rousseau envisages is one who is ‘practically
immobile’ (Stiegler, 1998: 113). As a result of this proximity and near-
instantaneity of satisfaction he develops no passions or desires. One can
only desire what one has not and since this first man lacks nothing he
‘does not have to submit [his] desire for pleasure to the detour and

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Haworth 9

mediacy of the principle of reality that Rousseau knew about’ (Stiegler,

1998: 114).
This implicit reference to Freud recalls to us the latter’s account – also
presented as a useful fiction whose truth rests not on its empirical ver-
ifiability – of the origin of the human psychic apparatus. This depicts a
simple reflex mechanism whose only aim and function is to minimize
excitation, which it manages to do immediately, without delay, by the
hallucinatory satisfaction of vital impulses. As soon as a need arises it is
satisfied, albeit only phantasmatically (Freud, 1958: 565–6). Thus the first
man for Rousseau, or equally Freud’s primitive progenitor to the human
psychic apparatus, ‘depends on no outside’ (Stiegler, 1998: 116). They are
autopoietic machines that make no distinction between interior and
exterior because everything is contained within. The negotiation with
the reality principle – or externality – comes about only subsequently,
with the second origin or fall into technology. Technics introduces a
detour between the original need and the satisfaction and thus ‘leads
us down the road to decay in depriving us of our originary power’
(Stiegler, 1998: 115).
The flaw in such a narrative is immediately evident, for, as Stiegler
notes, ‘[the] man of pure nature had no reason to deviate from the origin’
(Stiegler, 1998: 119). Nothing could happen to the perfectly self-
regulating first man or primitive psychic organism to lead him to
adopt artificial prostheses and so how are we to account for the desta-
bilization of the system and the consequent recourse to the detour of
technics? In other words, if man exists in such a perfect homeostatic
relationship with his environment that it is not experienced as an outside,
what brings about the upsetting of the equilibrium?
Rousseau here has recourse to fuzzy approximations: the first clothes
or dwellings that were ever adopted were, while not wholly redundant,
‘hardly necessary’ as man had up until that point coped perfectly well
without them (Rousseau, 1987: 44). If they were entirely useless, indeed
entirely alien to man’s nature, then their possibility would never have
surfaced. The possibility does arise, Rousseau says, because man has the
power to deviate from his natural state, even if it is not in his best inter-
ests to do so. This is his free will and it is what distinguishes him from the
animals, which are mere natural mechanisms. So, in accounting for the
second origin, Rousseau inevitably undermines the purity of the first
origin. The latter holds in reserve the former, which is its realization
and its ruination. If man already had the potential to depart from
nature then his ‘original state’ was always to deviate from his original
state. As Stiegler puts it, while the originary man may have had no reason
to depart from his natural origin, ‘he nevertheless had the possibility: if
this had not been the case, the providential accident would have had no
effect on him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 119). Thus the origin is an impossible one
not only empirically speaking but even in its very concept.

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10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

In contrast to Rousseau’s transcendentalism, André Leroi-Gourhan

(1993) offers an empirical account grounded in archaeological and pale-
ontological evidence and the known facts of the evolutionary series.
Rather than imagining the present-day human form as invariable,
Leroi-Gourhan traces the emergence of the human species out of that
which preceded it and in doing so critiques ‘cerebralist’ theories which
assign a determining role to the brain.
For Leroi-Gourhan, the beginnings of the human lie in the adoption
of the upright stance, not in a sudden advance in brain size and capability
that gives rise to self-consciousness. This move from the quadrupedal to
the bipedal at one and the same time frees the hand for the manipulation
of tools and frees the face for verbal communication. It is through this
simultaneous opening of the possibility of language and technology,
made possible (but not inevitable) by skeletal changes, that the
human’s intellectual capacities increase. Thus cortical development is
effect rather than cause, placed within a network of practical evolution-
ary solutions to environmental conditions instead of governing the whole
scene.
So, unlike Rousseau’s self-sufficient human who precedes artificial
prostheses such as tools, language, society, and invents them through
an act of sovereign free will, for Leroi-Gourhan technology and the
human are synchronous. While the Rousseauian man ‘has no outside’,
it is for Leroi-Gourhan the very capacity to exteriorize – thoughts, mem-
ories, intentions and so on – that distinguishes the human.
Stiegler’s project is significantly indebted to Leroi-Gourhan’s, in par-
ticular the concept of exteriorization, which, as we saw above, becomes
epiphylogenesis, and of the ‘technical tendency’, which ascribes an evo-
lutionary dynamic to technology all of its own that develops independ-
ently of human agency. However, in this account of the evolution of the
human, despite its rigour and its scientificity, Stiegler sees the same logic
of the dual origin at work that was identified previously in Rousseau.
The problem arises when Leroi-Gourhan is motivated to draw a dis-
tinction between two stages of humanization: Homo faber and Homo
sapiens. This is a transformation from a proto-human, whose intelligence
is merely technical and oriented solely to vital impulses, to the human
proper, who possesses ‘reflective, individual, spiritual, essentially non-
technical intelligence’ (Stiegler, 1998: 157). This, as Stiegler points out,
undermines Leroi-Gourhan’s earlier insistence on the non-primacy of
cortical development, for if tool- and language-use were already in
place, but the progenitor species was not yet fully human, the shift
that signals the arrival of the human proper can only be a cognitive
one – a spiritual intelligence that develops independently of technology.
This evidences a residual metaphysical tenor in Leroi-Gourhan’s proced-
ure, in that it opposes the instinctual intelligence (nature) of Homo faber
to the creative intelligence (culture) of Homo sapiens and, in doing so,

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Haworth 11

brings technics back under the anticipatory power of the human. Leroi-
Gourhan thus evades the truly aporetic structure of the origin of the
human, namely, as we saw above, that the human is invented by
the tool which s/he invents. The creative, anticipatory intelligence that
allows the human operator to put the tool to use in its projects derives, in
turn, from the tool itself (through epiphylogenesis). Leroi-Gourhan,
while almost reaching this conclusion, ultimately draws back from it,
according to Stiegler.13
As a result, Leroi-Gourhan, like Rousseau, relies on the postulate of a
second origin, although to the opposite effect of Rousseau. While
Rousseau considers the human prior to the second origin (the fall) to
be the exemplary man, Leroi-Gourhan considers the human after the
second origin (Homo sapiens) to be the first fully recognizable human
species. And while for Rousseau technology is an external addition to the
fully formed human, in Leroi-Gourhan symbolic intelligence is added to
an already existing technological capacity. Both, in the final analysis,
assume a succession where there should be contemporaneity, however, nei-
ther can in all rigour keep apart the two origins that they establish.14
So for Stiegler, it is only by doing justice to – without trying to resolve
– the aporia at the origin of the human that it can be accounted for
without the recurrence of metaphysical motifs. Neither man nor tool
comes ‘first’; rather it is a movement, conceived as an exteriorization
with no preceding interior. The exteriorizing process (technics as material
memory support) constitutes the interior that is exteriorized, which once
again comes back to epiphylogenesis. The question, which we raised
earlier, is whether in his formulation of the rupture with pre-technical
life that epiphylogenesis performs, which announces the emergence of the
human species, Stiegler does not end up repeating at the level of life itself
the gesture that he so acutely pinpoints in Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan.

Transgenerational Memory and Stiegler’s Second Origin

The basis on which this rupture of technical exteriorization is established
is that, as we saw above, ‘[in] nonartificial life, nontechnical, nonarticu-
lated by the différance of différance, all summation of epigenetic events is
lost for specific memory with the loss of the individual who was their
support’ (Stiegler, 1998: 177). Technical exteriorization, by contrast, for
the first time allows for the conservation and intergenerational transmis-
sion of epigenetic events which otherwise would die along with the organ-
ism. The two forms of zoological memory are ‘the somatic memory of the
epigenetic and the germinal memory of the genetic’ and these processes
‘in principle do not communicate with each other’ (Stiegler, 2009b: 4).
This is the ‘law of life’ with which epiphylogenesis breaks (Stiegler,
2009b: 4).

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12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Evidently there could be no place within Stiegler’s schema for

Jungian archetypes, or the Freudian primal fantasy, at least in the
terms in which they are formulated by their authors. Both Freud and
Jung, in their different ways, believed that experiences and behavioural
patterns repeated over generations have passed into a cumulative
phylogenetic inheritance that makes its appearance in dreams, fantasies
and pathological behaviour. For Jung, this explains the persistence of
religious tropes, myths, fairytales and superstitions in strikingly similar
forms across geographical and generational divides (see Jung, 1969).15
For Freud, likewise, this accounts for the recurrence of familiar fanta-
sies and traumatic experiences in analysis that the analysands them-
selves has not experienced first-hand: castration, the murder of a
parent, the seduction of children, etc. Here ‘the individual reaches
beyond his own experience into primeval experience’ (Freud, 1963:
371). Such a process, as we have seen, is unthinkable for Stiegler
other than through epiphylogenesis and Freud’s adherence to this prin-
ciple is accordingly deemed ‘astonishing’, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘incredible’
(Stiegler, 2012: 179).16
However, the scientific orthodoxy that grounds the ontological signifi-
cance of the rupture of epiphylogenesis, and on which Freud and Jung’s
claims can be so easily dismissed, has begun to be questioned in recent
years by research in the life sciences. Increasingly there has been an
emphasis on the possibility of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’
(see Grossniklaus et al., 2013). That is, precisely, a third form of memory
that is already present within ‘natural’ life; a process of ‘epiphylogenetic’
transmission existing before the apparent rupture that does not necessi-
tate the detour of technics. Indeed, ‘there is now ample evidence that the
erasure of epigenetic marks is not complete at some loci, and that epi-
genetic changes that are acquired during the lifespan of an organism can
be transferred to subsequent generations as transgenerational inherit-
ance’ (Tollefsbol, 2014: 1–2). This is a challenge to the received
wisdom that Stiegler draws upon, which holds that epigenetic marks
are ‘reset at each generation’ (Meloni, 2014: 3).
While the role of epigenetic mutation in the evolution of plant and
insect life has been established for over a decade (Agrawal et al., 1999;
Cubas et al., 1999), the possibility of such inheritance in mammals
remains controversial and subject to much debate. However, a number
of recent studies have begun to suggest that neurodevelopmental dis-
orders such as autism and schizophrenia, and behavioural tendencies
such as depression, can be brought about by prenatal maternal stress,
or stress in early life, and passed on between generations (Franklin et al.,
2010; Morgan and Bale, 2011), thus constituting a heritable epigenetic
trait. Such inheritance, as we will see, complicates the distinction between
individual and collective memory before the advent of technical
exteriorization.

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Haworth 13

Further compelling confirmation was presented in a study published in

the journal Nature Neuroscience in January 2014. In the experiment a set
of mice were conditioned to react fearfully to the smell of the organic
compound acetophenone, for which the neural correlates are well estab-
lished. Subsequently an enhanced smell-detection ability for, as well as
behavioural sensitivity towards this particular odour was observed in the
two succeeding ‘odour naı̈ve’ generations. So what we are faced with here
is that a particular learned experience of the parent – the trauma asso-
ciated with a certain smell – has been inherited by the offspring. As the
authors of the study point out, there are only two mechanisms that can
account for this transmission: inheritance via socialization (the young
mouse models its behaviour on the parent and develops sensitivity to
the smell through conditioning) or inheritance via the gametes. Several
foolproof safeguards were put in place to preclude the possibility of
social conditioning through maternal influence and the mice were con-
ceived only after the odour exposure had taken place, which rules out
such influence in utero. Thus the only available explanation for the trans-
mission is that the traumatic experience is registered as an epigenetic
signature in the DNA and inherited through the germ line. This points
to an ‘under-appreciated influence on adult behaviour – ancestral experi-
ence before conception’ (Dias and Ressler, 2014: 95).
These highly significant results, supporting an emerging body of pre-
vious work (surveyed in Lim and Brunet, 2013), seem to suggest a possible
rehabilitation of the long-discredited Lamarckian notion of the inherit-
ance of acquired characteristics, on which Freud based his theory of
primal fantasy, to Stiegler’s astonishment. Often cited as a precursor to
Darwin, Lamarck has since been inextricably associated with this one
outmoded thesis, which has led in large part to his reputation suffering
in comparison with Darwin’s.17 The notion of such a form of inheritance
became particularly contentious in the 1880s, when the great evolutionary
biologist August Weismann offered an apparently incontrovertible refu-
tation. According to Weismann, inheritance only takes place via the germ
cells and, since there is no known process by means of which acquired
characteristics could affect the germ plasm, Lamarckian inheritance was
deemed impossible. This in fact remains an unexplained aspect of the
above research, for, as molecular biologist Moshe Szyf writes in the edi-
torial in the same issue of Nature Neuroscience, there is a differentiated
series of stages for the epigenetic information to travel between sperm and
olfactory receptor neurons and the question of how it is preserved across
these steps to influence the appropriate neurons, rather than other cells,
poses difficult questions. Moreover, it is not only a heightened ability to
detect this particular odour that is transmitted but the accompanying fear
associations as well, which clearly activates a more complex neural cir-
cuitry than scent alone. The task remains to determine ‘the epigenetic
marks in the sperm that are transmitted to the particular neurons involved

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14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

in this linking of fearful response to an ancestral odour experience’ (Szyf,

2014: 3). Such difficulties demonstrate that ‘the Weismann barrier’ still
presents problems, but the crucial difference is that there is now clear
motivation to seek out the modes of transmission given that it seems
highly likely that it occurs.
The implication is that strong behavioural sensitivity to the environ-
ment such as stress, fear, habit, phobias, superstition or anxiety can
indeed be inherited through the germ line and not exclusively through
socialization or technological transmission. While caution needs to be
exercised when envisaging the nature and extent of transgenerational
epigenetic inheritance in humans, since the case is largely built on evi-
dence from mice (Morgan and Whitelaw, 2008), such an influence at one
stroke weakens the principle that makes technical exteriorization a ‘break
with pure life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 140) or a ‘break with the “law of life”’
(Stiegler, 2009b: 4). After all, the mice in the above experiment also
experience a past that they have not lived but that is nevertheless their
own, a phenomenon Stiegler restricts to the human and which in fact
defines its emergence. Thus if ‘pure phusis’ already contains within itself
the means to transmit acquired experiences from generation to gener-
ation, the distinction between before and after the rupture begins to
dissolve, and along with it the argument as to the specificity of the
human within the broader unfolding of life loses some of its force.
Transgenerational, transindividual epigenetic memory is therefore nei-
ther inherently technical nor does it set apart the human tool-user
from the regular course of life.
So what we have shown here implies that collective memory and indi-
vidual memory are already co-implicated prior to the adoption of tech-
nical memory supports. Thus the distinction between our cultural
inheritance and our genetic inheritance is less assured. This means that
the Jungian (and Freudian) hypothesis of an ‘immediate’ psychical inher-
itance of a sedimented store of experiences and traumas practised and
repeated over generations can no longer simply be ruled out on the
grounds of irrationality. To be absolutely clear, we are not claiming
that the results pointed to above ‘demonstrate’ the existence of Jungian
archetypes (or the Freudian primal phantasy), but they do attenuate the
biological grounds for its disqualification (the absolute separation of
epigenetic and genetic memory). One of the key themes of Stiegler’s
later work, which draws heavily on Gilbert Simondon, is the notion of
individuation as a process, taking place against the background of a pre-
individual, collective milieu (see Stiegler, 2014). This process of individu-
ation is central also to Jung’s analytical psychology (see Jung, 1968,
1969), whose own influence on Simondon is well documented.18 This,
as we can see, opens the space for a productive synthesis of Jung,
Stiegler and Simondon on the theme of collective memory and the pro-
cess of individuation, which would require separate treatment.

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Haworth 15

To return to Stiegler’s dismissal of Freud’s explanation for the trans-

generational repetition of familiar phantasmatic forms (and Jung’s by
extension), it cannot simply be a question of saying that Freud was
right all along and that Stiegler has now been proved wrong.19 One
could still say without contradiction that Freud was wrong to espouse
a form of Lamarckism at a time when this flew in the face of rational,
scientific thought. Likewise, Stiegler was certainly not overhasty or naı̈ve
to predicate his position on a near universally accepted scientific tenet.
Nevertheless, the concept of the break with the law of life that occurs
with technical exteriorization is built upon a particular organization of
natural facts: namely, that there are only two kinds of zoological
memory, one of which can be transmitted to future generations (genetic),
one of which cannot (epigenetic). So, while one’s genes will be inherited
by one’s offspring, one’s acquired experiences will not, other than
through socialization. This is the premise on which technical exterioriza-
tion amounts to a singular event in the history of life and it is neither
necessary nor logical, it is entirely contingent and factual. So if the set of
empirical facts on which the concept of epiphylogenesis is established
now seem to have altered in line with new knowledge, this cannot fail
to have implications for the project set out in Technics and Time. This is
especially so given the importance Stiegler places on empiricity, which for
him always precedes and conditions the quasi-transcendental logic that
seems to encompass it (see Stiegler, 2001).
However, if the empirical grounds on which epiphylogenesis amounts
to a break with life now appear less secure, there remains a second basis,
which is apparently undisturbed by this objection: namely, that this is the
first time that such memories are transmitted outside the organism. So
although the rupture has been empirically undermined at the level of
intergenerational memory per se, it remains at the logico-transcendental
level characterized as life continued by other (technical) means or the
doubling of différance. However, here the distinction between before and
after again fails to stand up to scrutiny and this is where our earlier
discussion of the logic of the dual origin comes back into consideration.
For how is the relation between ‘pure phusis’ and life as the ‘economy of
death’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139) to be envisaged other than as a second origin
identical in structure to those analysed above? Here, pure life is in the
position of the man of pure nature and technics comes, as it did in
Rousseau, from without to effect a disturbance. Stiegler says, with
regard to Rousseau’s transcendental anthropology, that technics
amounts to ‘an exterior accident, which does not come from the nature
of man: it happens to him and denaturalises him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 117–18).
However, in spite of Stiegler’s insistence on the originarity of technicity,
the whole narrative of the rupture that guides the account of epiphylo-
genesis follows the same logic. While technicity (which is ‘other than life’)
is originary for the human, accounting for the transductive relation of

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16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

man and machine, it must be expelled from life before the emergence of
the human. This is a necessary corollary of the effort to distinguish the
two stages of différance or life. Indeed, as Ben Roberts has argued, it is
only because Stiegler assumes a ‘rigorous distinction between phusis and
tekhne that he is able to convince himself that it is only after the “rup-
ture” of the technical that death is the economy of life’ (Roberts, 2005:
§9).20 This is in spite of Stiegler’s insistence elsewhere on the need to
exercise ‘the greatest vigilance with respect to oppositions’ (Stiegler,
1998: 163).
We further saw above that the successive states of natural man, shorn
of artifice, followed by technical man cannot be reconciled unless the
second origin is already present within the first, which cancels out the
distinction. If this were not the case, nothing could ever have happened
to disturb the perfect equilibrium. In Stiegler’s account the situation is
the same. For, as Derrida demonstrates, the living can only enter into a
rapport with the dead if death (here technicity, which is not the same as
technology) was already intrinsic to life. Pure life, uncontaminated by
death, would foreclose any possibility of its movement being rerouted
through the detour of the technical apparatus. Indeed, there would be no
movement for it to deviate. So death does not, and could not, ‘surprise
life’ from outside (Derrida, 2001: 287). Either death is already internal to
life and the logic of différance, as articulated by Derrida, already equips
us with the means to account for the emergence of technical exterioriza-
tion, or we have two successive, irreconcilable states that unavoidably
conceive of technicity as external to life, which runs counter to Stiegler’s
whole enterprise. But if the rupture is already prepared for and compre-
hended by life in its relation to death (as effects of différance), the basis
for Stiegler’s critique of Derrida, and the argument as to the ontological
break that the arrival of the human constitutes, collapses. So, while the
emergence of technical exteriorization does indeed amount to an original
‘articulation’ and Stiegler is right to insist on its specificity (and the pol-
itical and philosophical consequences he goes on to draw are of the
highest significance), the analysis is undermined by its emphasis on the
radical ontological rupture that this constitutes. As with Rousseau,
the distinction is untenable empirically speaking as well as in its very
concept.
Now, Stiegler does, elsewhere in The Fault of Epimetheus, insist that
exteriorization ‘must not be understood as a rupture with nature but
rather as a new organisation of life’ and, further down the same page,
as ‘a rupture in life in general qua différance, but not with life’, which
seems to anticipate such concerns as we have outlined here (Stiegler,
1998: 163). Ian James, taking Stiegler at his word, critiques those who
have discovered the reappearance of oppositional structures in Technics
and Time by arguing that the ‘logic of technicity precedes the human, and
only on the basis of this precedence does it then come to constitute the

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Haworth 17

human’ (James, 2010: 214). However, as we have just seen, such an argu-
ment ends up vitiating the grounds for Stiegler’s dissatisfaction with the
grammatological project as set out by Derrida, as well as the singular
import of epiphylogenesis. If, in Stiegler’s usage, life is synonymous with
différance then the doubling, or différance, of différance must affect life at
a structural level if it is to amount to a genuine rupture.
So if there is ‘indecision around différance’ we can see that it is
Stiegler’s, not Derrida’s. It revolves around whether life is to be under-
stood as différance or différance is to be understood as life. The cri-
tique only has currency on the assumption that the latter is the case,
but this is an illegitimate conflation. For while différance may be the
‘genetico-structural condition of the life of the living’ (Vitale, 2014:
101), it is not, for that very reason, simply commensurate with or
equal to that which it conditions. However, as the ‘genetico-structural
condition’ of life, ‘[the] possibility of the “appearing as such” of the
gramme [see p. 4] is built into [it] quite independently of the factual
history of the emergence of mankind or any other species’
(Bennington, 1996: 189–90). If Stiegler, in trying to avoid the problems
outlined above, insists on epiphylogenesis being a stage in rather than
a rupture with the unfolding of life (as différance), then he cannot but
subscribe to this statement and as a result disavow his critique and the
whole logic of life continuing by means other than life, which signals
the genesis of the human.21
So, in setting out to think the specificity of the human, which is con-
sidered at risk of becoming obscured in the general history of the
gramme,  Stiegler deems it necessary to establish a conceptual distinction
between life before and after the technical exteriorization of memory. He
elsewhere insists on the crucial difference between distinction and oppos-
ition, arguing that only the latter is the truly metaphysical move, which is
something that Derrida failed to see (Stiegler, 2011: 227 n9, 2012: 165,
2013: 54). Therefore, without opposing the human to the animal, or cul-
ture to nature, Stiegler nevertheless wants to distinguish that which makes
the human what it is.22
However, as we have seen, this distinction is empirically predicated on
a rejection of Lamarckian epigenetic inheritance that now seems far from
self-evident in the light of the discoveries outlined above. Furthermore, it
has been shown to repeat the logic of the ‘second origin’ that inadvert-
ently portrays technicity as an external accident, coming from outside the
essence of life to transform its course.
Stiegler exercises the greatest rigour in establishing that the human is
not the simple causal agent behind technological development but is
equally brought into being by the very technical objects that s/he appar-
ently invents. Thus the who and the what (the human operator and the
technical tool) can be distinguished but cannot be opposed, as they are in
Rousseau and even in Leroi-Gourhan. However, the same care is not

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18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

shown in the account of the coming into being of this transductive rela-
tion itself, or the birth of epiphylogenesis.
Just as Stiegler showed how Leroi-Gourhan undermines his own
account when he attempts to differentiate between two distinct stages
of the human, which rests on the opposition ‘faber/sapiens, or technics/
spirituality’ (Stiegler, 1998: 161), we have seen that Stiegler does the
same thing at the level of life, where the distinction between life pur-
sued by its own means and life continued by means other than life
brings with it the whole series of oppositions that are elsewhere decon-
structed. There are, as we saw, two ways to approach this demarcation:
from the side of the empirical or from the side of the logico-(quasi-)
transcendental. We have correspondingly made a two-pronged critique
of this argument. Neither strand necessarily implies the other but, taken
together, they pose clear problems for the project announced in
Technics and Time.
On the empirical level, if an individual’s acquired (epigenetic)
memory is able to be preserved beyond the lifespan of the organism
prior to the advent of technical exteriorization, then transpersonal, inter-
generational memory can no longer be considered to be technical in its
essence, and therefore not the exclusive preserve of the human tool-
user. Acquired individual memory and inherited collective memory are
thus brought into relation without the technological intermediary and
this takes place right across the spectrum of life. This is, of course, not
to deny that finite memory is originally prosthetic, or exteriorizing, but
we have seen that the very appearance of material memory supports is
conditioned and made possible by that which it is supposed to inaug-
urate: life as an economy of death. For if life is to be understood as
différance, this means that it is constitutively contaminated by alterity,
and only as such is it able to enter into relation with its other.23 For, as
Derrida puts it, ‘there is no life present at first which would then come
to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance’ (Derrida, 2001: 254),
and this holds for the purported ‘doubling’ of différance as well. Thus,
from whichever level we approach it, life already anticipates the tech-
nical rupture that is supposed to happen to it with the passage to the
human.

Notes
1. See the ‘Posthumanities’ book series, edited by Cary Wolfe for the University
of Minnesota Press, in which his own important What is Posthumanism?
appeared (Wolfe, 2010).
2. Derrida (1997: 84) writes that the movement that makes the gramme appear
as such ‘goes far beyond the possibilities of “intentional consciousness”’.
3. The oscillation between these two prepositions will be considered later on.
4. If a fossil in the familiar sense of the term designates the petrified impression
of ancient animal or plant life, the ‘arche-fossil’, in Meillassoux’s

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Haworth 19

terminology, names materials such as radioactive isotopes that allow scien-

tists to form knowledge of events that occurred billions of years prior to the
emergence of Homo sapiens.
5. That is, post-Kantian philosophy that insists on the ontological primacy of
the reciprocity between being and consciousness over and above either of the
related terms.
6. In an article that appeared in a special issue of the journal New
Formations devoted to Stiegler, Mark B.N. Hansen (2012) argues that
Stiegler’s work on technics is limited by its exclusive modelling on lived
experience, or consciousness. In effect, while Meillassoux is not invoked
nor his terminology used, Hansen charges Stiegler with a form of correla-
tionism: technics is not thought in itself but only as supplement to the flux of
consciousness.
7. Although Geoffrey Bennington (1996) charges Stiegler with a failure to
appreciate the specifity of the context in which this remark is made.
8. Variants of this expression, such as ‘pure phusis’ or ‘the law of life’, appear
repeatedly, but I will argue in the final section that this is a matter of
Stiegler’s logic rather than simply a lapse in his choice of words.
9. Vicki Kirby (2009), in her excellent piece on Derrida’s La Vie La Mort
seminars, makes this same conflation. At one stage she suggests that ‘we
might risk the suggestion that diffe´rance is Life itself’ (Kirby, 2009: 118).
However, the case that the essay goes on to advance is that ‘Life is diffe´r-
ance’ (Kirby, 2009: 120), which, again, is a quite different claim.
10. La Vie La Mort (life death) is the title of the unpublished seminar series
from which this chapter of The Post Card (Derrida, 1987) derives.
11. See, for instance: ‘He [Derrida] essentially thought life as life-death, as
revenance, and as that which consists in not opposing the living and the
dead’ (Stiegler, 2009a: 102.)
12. Bennington (1996) offers a powerful critique of this move, arguing that
Stiegler is, first, wrong to simply equate différance with the movement of
life (and further mistaken to equate life with phusis), and then to assume that
the emergence of intentional consciousness must be conceived as a break in
such a movement. Bennington insists that no empirical event (such as those
discovered by paleontology concerning the origin of the human species) can
have a direct bearing on the logic of différance. Of course it is this relation of
the empirical (technics) to the quasi-transcendental (différance) that is pre-
cisely at issue in Stiegler’s reading of Derrida, which is more complex and
nuanced than Bennington gives it credit for. Since Bennington’s article,
others have made similar charges against Stiegler of reading Derrida
badly. See Beardsworth (1998), Roberts (2005) and Colony (2011). Ian
James (2010) offers a rejoinder to these critiques, as does Michael Lewis
(2013).
13. For a subtle defence of Leroi-Gourhan against Stiegler’s critique see
Johnson (2013).
14. A structurally identical critique is made of the historian Jean
Bottéro’s account of the birth of writing in Technics and Time, 2 (Stiegler,
2009: 43–55).
15. For a reading of Jung that situates his work in dialogue with the discussions
to which we alluded at the outset see Haworth (2012).

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20 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

16.

He [Freud] arrives at the absolutely astonishing position of saying

that in the end, perhaps, Lamarck was right with respect to Darwin
and that perhaps a given behaviour is transmitted in the end by cells.
It is ridiculous to say something like that and it is incredible to say it
because Freud was a rationalist [. . .]: he was a Darwinian but there he
was speaking as a Lamarckian. (Stiegler, 2009b: 179)

17. However, as Jordanova (1984) has argued in her short book on Lamarck,
the assumption that acquired characteristics could be inherited was widely
held in the 18th and 19th centuries, and, furthermore, it was by no means the
most significant aspect of Lamarck’s work as a naturalist.
18. See David Scott’s critical introduction to Simondon’s Psychic and Collective
Individuation (Scott, 2014: 91–2).
19. And this of course is by no means the extent of Stiegler’s engagement with
Freud, who takes on greater significance as a point of reference in his later
work.
20. Richard Beardsworth makes much the same argument in a point that
Roberts cites. Here, Beardsworth writes that the upshot of Stiegler’s account
of the human is that:

biological life prior to, or in its difference from anthropogenesis is

removed from the structure of originary technicity; as a result biology
is naturalized and the differentiation of technicity qua technics is only
considered in its exteriorized form in relation to processes of homini-
zation. (Beardsworth, 1998: 81)

21. As David Wills argues:

it makes no sense to speak of life that continues in a form other than

life or by means other than life. Everything that has been developed so
far argues for the technological relation as originary, as a complex
and differential, indeed differential relation. [We must assume that the
second occurrence of ‘differential’ should read ‘differantial’.] (Wills,
2006: 244)

However, equally we could say that it makes no sense to speak of the

converse, namely, of a life continuing purely by means of life, which, as
Colony (2011: 85) puts it: ‘overlook(s) the constitutive relation to alterity
that figures all nonhuman life as différance’.
22. ‘[Even] if it is never an animal/human opposition, any risk of confusing
them must be avoided’ (Stiegler, 2009b: 94). However, Michael Lewis
(2013: 66) contends that Stiegler is ‘forced to restore a kind of opposition
between man and the rest of the animals’. This points to the residual
anthropocentrism that Colony (2011) finds in Stiegler’s work.
23. In Of Grammatology arche-writing is said to be ‘the opening of the first
exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other
and of an inside to its outside’ (Derrida, 1997: 70).

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Haworth 21

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Haworth 23

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Michael Haworth is an independent scholar based in London. He com-

pleted his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2013, where his research investigated the
consequences of technologies of brain-to-brain and brain-to-computer
communication for our philosophical conception of subjective finitude
and artistic creation. He is presently working on two parallel research
projects, one of which focuses on philosophical conceptions of genius
and artistic invention while the other is concerned with the processes
of cultural inheritance and the material, psychic and social infrastruc-
tures of collective memory.

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