CARE and CARELESSNESS

in the ANTHROPOCENE
Bernard Stiegler’s Three Conversions and
Their Accompanying Heideggers

Daniel Ross

Abstract This article proposes dividing Bernard Stiegler’s work

into three phases, and that a notion of care develops and deepens as
these phases progress. To each of these phases there corresponds
a particular relationship to Heidegger’s thought: 1) the Heidegger of
Being and Time who denies the role of technics in the opening of the
possibility of authentic time; 2) as a thinker of the “they” who corrects
Simondon’s inability to think collective disindividuation while being
himself unable to think a genuine collective individuation process;
3) the later Heidegger who indeed approaches the most mysterious
and unsettling aspect of tekhnē and who foresees the most threatening
aspect of Gestell as a world in which Dasein loses its privilege as the
questioning being. Yet this third Heidegger also failed to reflect on
what Stiegler puts at the heart of the thought of his third phase: the
question of entropy, understood as describing fundamental but diverse
thermodynamic, biological, and informational tendencies. For Stiegler,
taking care in the Anthropocene necessarily entails reinscribing
philosophical concepts, including that of Ereignis, in relation to
entropy, anthropy, and the struggle against them. Beyond Heidegger,
this also entails addressing the obsolescence and self-destructiveness
of the current macroeconomic model.
Keywords Bernard Stiegler, Martin Heidegger, Anthropocene, entropy,
care

In April 2006, Bernard Stiegler (2006: 3) gave an extremely

beautiful lecture at a French institute of agronomy, in
which he drew attention to the way in which the word culture

14 5
Cultural Politics, Volume 17, Issue 2, © 2021 Duke University Press
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8947851
 Daniel Ross
contains both a sense of care and a sense
of culte, of worship, and how this is also
the case, therefore, for agriculture, which
is in fact, in one way or another, “the very
origin of culture, insofar as by culture we
mean civilisation, sedentarisation and
urbanisation: cities.” Rather than seeing
the neolithic advent of agriculture in terms
of urban versus rural, it should be under-
stood as the very condition of possibil-
ity of the ancient polis and the modern
urban city, which remains tied to this
origin however tenuous the link may have
come to appear in the epoch of industrial
agriculture and the global megalopolis.
But if agriculture must be understood as
a form of taking care through the artifices
involved in raising the crop or the herd,
it is also, Stiegler insists, a disruption of
the processes of natural selection accom-
plished through the violence of the knife
that incises the earth or cuts the throat of
the lamb. This inherently technical violence
must therefore be tempered and subli-
mated through the rituals of worship that
raise this act to another plane, for exam-
ple, that of justice. In this way, farming
becomes a matter not just of subsistence
but also of consistence, founding an exis-
tence that will eventually develop into an
urban way of life, the fate and sustainability
17:2 July 2021
of which proves to be decidedly uncertain
in the age now called the Anthropocene.
This way of framing the concept of
care and its regression to carelessness
•
derives from the second of the three
CULTURAL POLITICS
phases of Stiegler’s philosophical project,
in which, it has been argued, each of these
three phases involves a kind of “conver-
sion of the gaze” (Ross 2018: 7–24). These
are: first, the realization at the beginning
of this project that the milieu of the noetic
soul has always already involved the
technics of external memory; second,
146
the realization in 2001 that our “cinematic
age” has gone violently awry and that the
twenty-first century would begin with
spectacular evidence of this dark becom-
ing, transmitted “live” via the audiovisual
technologies that proliferated throughout
the twentieth century; and third, the real-
ization in 2014 that behind this spectacle
there ultimately lies a new planetary-scale
disruption of the terrestrial and biological
systems that support all of our culture and
agriculture, and that this “anthropic” devel-
opment is also essentially and fundamen-
tally entropic.
At the same time, Stiegler’s published
work begins with a profound reading of the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, himself
long having been accused of invoking
“a false eternity of agrarian conditions”
(Adorno 1973: 56) understood as anti-
modern, which is also to say antiurban.
Stiegler himself will tend to agree with this
assessment of Heidegger’s later phase, or
at least he will do so up until the third con-
version. If it is true that Stiegler’s work can
be divided into three phases, which are not
breaks but rather reinscriptions and inten-
sifications, then, corresponding to these
three Stieglers and accompanying them,
we can expect to find three Stieglerian
Heideggers, with quite different functions
within his work. There is, first, the Heide-
gger who exposes how the process of
becoming, that is Dasein, necessarily
draws on a past it has not lived in order to
adopt a future it must invent, but without
Heidegger being able to think the irreduc-
ibly technical conditions of such an inheri-
tance and adoption; second, the Heidegger
who exposes how the resoluteness of
Dasein, which can also be understood in
relation to Gilbert Simondon’s account of
psychic and collective individuation, can
degrade into the disindividuation of the
they and the herd, in this way correcting
Simondon’s underestimation of this threat,
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
while Heidegger himself is unable to
conceive a genuine process of collective
individuation; and third, the Heidegger who
exposes, precisely in the later work of the
supposed agrarian turn, how the question
of the violence of tekhnē is also that of
dikē, of justice, and through that produces
the question of the Ereignis to come after
Gestell, but without Heidegger himself
being able to conceive how this question,
which for him concerned the fate of cyber-
netics as the final stage of metaphysics,
must also be conceived in relation to the
second law of thermodynamics, in relation
to the entropic character of cybernetics
that becomes a market of information,
and in relation to the consequences of
this market in terms of a destruction of
the conditions of culture that alone makes
possible the care without which it will not
be possible to take care of what is now
happening all over the earth.
Technics and Retention
Stiegler’s published work gets going with
the thought that what has been repressed
in and by the history of philosophy is tech-
nics, in which this inorganic yet organized
matter must be understood as an exterior-
ization that is firstly a prosthesis of reten-
tion, that is, the constitution of an artificial
memory. Stiegler makes this case in large
part on the basis of the work of André
Leroi-Gourhan (especially Leroi-Gour-
han 1993), who is himself referred to by
Jacques Derrida (1998) in Of Gramma-
tology but ignored by most of the rest of
so-called French theory.1 But in Technics
and Time, 1 (1998), this leads Stiegler to
conduct a rather unorthodox reading of
Derrida’s concept of différance, which
Derrida himself describes in terms of
Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of exteriorization.
We have become used to thinking
of différance as the origin of the play
of difference, implying the sign’s or the
trace’s perpetual openness to retrospec-
tive reinterpretation as differences prolif-
erate, and in terms of the textual detour
through which I must pass for even spoken
language to become possible. But in 1967
Derrida (1998: 84) had already written,
“Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the
unity of man and the human adventure
thus by the possibility of the graphie in
general; rather as a stage or an articulation
in the history of life—of what I have called
differance—as the history of the grammè.”
Here the history of human inscriptivity
is viewed as but part of a much vaster
history, that of the entire history of life on
earth, in which this history is itself identi-
fied with différance. In other words, the
billions-year-old unfolding of the conser-
vation and transformation of the genetic
molecule is already a question of a lasting
inscription in matter, deferring entropy by
differentiating organs and organizing spe-
cies—where this is, precisely, a matter of
différance. Yet if that was in 1967, in 1968
Derrida (1982: 17) says that philosophy is
constructed on a set of oppositions, dif-
ferences and deferrals that amount, so he
says, to “all the others of physis—tekhnē,
nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history,
spirit,” and so on, “physis in différance”
(translated modified).
Stiegler (1998: 139) takes this as
indication of an “indecision” in Derrida
about the relationship between genetic
inscription (in organic matter) and artificial
CULTURAL POLITICS
inscription (in inorganic matter) by the liv-
ing, “a passage remaining to be thought.”
In fact, key to this indecision is Derrida’s
failure, repeated in the 1976 seminar Life
Death (2020), to clearly identify that, if the
relationship between technical différance
and genetic différance remains to be
elucidated in his work, this is also because
147
there are three memories in question here:
 Daniel Ross
technical memory is, first, a remedy for
the finitude not of genetic memory but of
nervous memory, where all living things
endowed with a nervous system function
according to the programs and latitudes
made possible by these two distinct, bio-
logical memories.
What we see in Derrida’s 1976 semi-
nar is that this confusion remains visible in
his discussion of geneticist François Jacob:
we can only wonder how Derrida (2020:
15), reader of Leroi-Gourhan, can write a
phrase such as “nervous memory (that is,
cerebral memory, thought and language
in the traditional sense),” or how he can
describe “nervous or cerebral memory”
as a “second emergence” (after genetic
memory) (translation modified). What is
meant here by “cerebral memory”? Either
it means more or less the same thing as
nervous memory (referring to the cerebel-
lum common to all vertebrates), in which
case it has nothing to do with “thought
and language in the traditional sense,” or
else it means what Francesco Vitale (2018:
63) seems to assume, that it refers not to
nervous memory but to cultural memory,
in which case it is not a second but a third
emergence, arising some 500 million years
after nervous memory and corresponding
to a coemergence with technical memory
17:2 July 2021
(see also Ross 2020).
Whereas genetic memory is subject
to intergenerational transmission but
remains unmodified over the course of an
•
individual’s life, regardless of the variety or
CULTURAL POLITICS
intensity of that individual’s experiences,
the memory of the nervous system may
indeed accumulate over the life of the indi-
vidual organism, but the lessons retained
by that individual do not survive its own
death. Technical différance, however, is an
exteriorized temporalization that as such
equally amounts to a spatialization: artificial
14 8
memory is the advent of a cumulative
means of overcoming the retentional
finitude that consists in the fact that these
two biological retentional systems do not
communicate. The cumulative character
of this third kind of memory, combined
with the spatial discreteness of this
accumulation within localized communi-
ties, means that what is retained tends
to complicate the behavioral programs
that had formerly tended to species-wide
uniformity. (This does not mean that these
communities do not communicate with
one another at all, but only that they tend
toward their own synchronic and dia-
chronic cohesiveness separate from those
other communities, with which they may
very well interact and exchange.) What is
accumulated becomes an idiomatic way
of relating to the milieu, and behavior
becomes localized and differentiated, no
longer relying on what in the case of other
animals we call instinct but, rather, on
what in the case of beings like ourselves
we call knowledge. Furthermore, the artifi-
cial organs produced by this technical form
of life themselves change the milieu in
which it must live, and for this reason this
form of life requires knowledge, which is
to say, the accumulation of lessons making
possible idiomatic behavioral selections.
This is ultimately the unthought and
unacknowledged context of Heidegger’s
account of the temporality of Dasein in
Being and Time (2010). Dasein, the being
that we ourselves are, the being for whom
being is a question, and the being consti-
tuted essentially in terms of the knowledge
and non-knowledge of its own mortality, is
a historical and factical being in the sense
that it inherits a past it has not lived, which
it must then adopt by projecting itself into
a future that remains always indeterminate
thanks to Dasein’s fundamental character
of being-toward-death. Dasein’s potential
to exist within authentic temporality lies
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
in its resolutely taking up the possibilities
granted to it by its nonlived past, not as
behavioral programs simply taken over by
Dasein but as what grants the possibility
of making decisions concerning one’s own
existence.
Most of the time, however, Das-
ein flees from its potential for authentic
temporality, denying it via procedures that
amount to determining the indeterminate.
That Dasein’s being is a question for it may
lie in the fact that its existential character
is grounded in care, Sorge, yet the fact that
it flees from the knowledge of its mortal-
ity and into average everydayness means
that its involvement tends to degrade into
the busyness of Besorgen, which makes
possible the forgetting of the question of
being itself and makes equally possible all
those ways in which Dasein falls prey to
inauthenticity, and firstly to the inauthen-
tic temporality of what Heidegger (1992:
18E–19E) elsewhere calls “clock time,”
determinable time, that is, calculable time:
“Once time has been defined as clock
time then there is no hope of ever arriving
at its original meaning again.”
What Stiegler shows in Technics and
Time is that one can find a similar indeci-
sion in Heidegger to that found in Derrida,
a passage remaining to be thought. For
if, on the one hand, busyness and the
forgetting of being amount to possibilities
constituted by a kind of originary technic-
ity of Dasein, by the fact that Dasein is
originarily dependent on its “equipment”
and a system of references by which one
piece of equipment is ultimately related to
all the others, and firstly by the clock itself,
through which it neglects the existential
aspect of its careful character, on the other
hand, and nevertheless, on what basis
does Dasein access its nonlived past,
through which it opens up the possibility
of the resolute projection of undetermined
anticipatory possibilities, other than
through the documents, artifacts, and
archives of that past, all of which are also
forms of equipment, that is, technical?
Is not every artifact, Stiegler argues, in
some way a clock by which it becomes
possible to reduce that past to something
“determined,” a stamp of time, and hence
potentially to reduce it to an object of busy-
ness and carelessness? However, does
not every artifact also open up the very
indeterminacy of the future that Heideg-
ger calls being-toward-death precisely by
functioning as a kind of mirror of Dasein, a
futural relationship that requires Dasein to
take resolute responsibility for its future by
taking care of it?
What Heidegger comes close to
admitting with the concept of world histo-
riality, but what he ultimately withdraws
from consideration, is that this originarily
technical character of Dasein is both what
opens up and what closes off Dasein’s
memory and its future, that is, the source
of its knowledge and its non-knowledge,
and firstly of the fact that its end is both
certain and indeterminate. There is no
access to the infinitude of the indetermi-
nate other than through the determinate.
In short, exteriorization is both what makes
it possible to “make (a) différance” by
caring for an indeterminate future, and
what tends to close off that possibility by
reducing existence to the stereotypical,
the dogmatic, or the careless “common
understanding” of das Man.
CULTURAL POLITICS
Grammatization and Proletarianization
Stiegler (2019a: 76) begins The Age of
Disruption, published in French in 2016,
by describing the events he experienced
on September 11, 2001, and later in the
book he describes how it was “a day in
whose events I saw signs of a precipitation
149
towards the worst.” In the first volume of
 Daniel Ross
Qu’appelle-t-on panser?, published in 2018,
he describes how he gave his brother a
copy of Technics and Time, 3, when it
was published shortly before 9/11, saying
to him that he hoped that what he had
described in that book would turn out to
be wrong, only to find, a matter of a few
weeks later, that what he had feared had
in fact eventuated (Stiegler 2018b: §20).
It was this event, combined with the
massacre committed on March 27, 2002,
by Richard Durn (who claimed to have lost
the feeling of existing and murdered eight
Nanterre councilors and injured nineteen
others), as well as the rise of the National
Front vote in the French elections of April
21, 2002, that led to the second conversion
of Stiegler’s gaze, after which he began to
“write only in an absolutely direct, visible,
legible and primary relation to questions of
political economy: by politicizing phenome-
nological questions” (Stiegler 2019a: 76).
This politicizing of phenomenologi-
cal questions brought together Stiegler’s
earlier critique in Technics and Time, 2 of
Edmund Husserl’s account of time con-
sciousness with an adoption and complica-
tion of Simondon’s description of psychic
and collective individuation. This would
involve a triple move: first, arguing that the
bifurcation that occurs in the shift from
17:2 July 2021
biological evolution (or vital individuation)
to psychic and collective individuation is
always and irreducibly entangled with tech-
nical individuation as that which opens the
•
third kind of memory described in Technics
CULTURAL POLITICS
and Time, 1; second, that this question of
the consequences of artificial memory is
what Husserl’s account makes it possi-
ble to see without himself having seen
it; and third, that the epochs of psychic,
collective, and technical individuation can
be understood as a succession of stages
brought about by changes in the way that
150
artificial memory affects our individual and
collective “phenomenological” existence.
The study of this history and its conse-
quences would therefore be a “general
organology” in which the psychic organs
of the individual, the social organizations
of the collective, and technical organs
are understood as inextricably linked—
between them there is a “transductive”
relationship, which means that none of
these three processes of individuation can
continue without the other two. What this
general organology yields for Stiegler’s
work is a genealogy of the sensible and,
more specifically, the introduction of a fun-
damental analytical concept, “grammatiza-
tion,” and a fundamental political concept,
proletarianization. These would dominate
the critique elaborated in Stiegler’s second
period.
Stiegler’s concept of grammatization
continues the history of the supplement
that, as he points out, Derrida called for as
itself a necessary supplement to his own
account of the logic of the supplement,
but which the latter did not himself carry
out.2 Borrowed from the linguist Sylvain
Auroux (1994), but extended beyond the
realm of language and writing that were
Auroux’s concerns, grammatization refers
in Stiegler to every technical evolution of
the processes by which temporal flows
are spatialized, in so doing rendering them
discrete and reproducible. Auroux used the
term to describe the process necessary
for speech to be turned into alphabetical
writing, as an operation both of linguistics
and of domination (leading to “linguicide”),
followed by the revolutions of gramma-
tization that were the printing press and
computing. Stiegler introduces the thought
that fundamental to the possibility of the
Industrial Revolution was not just the print-
ing press or the steam engine but also Jac-
quard’s loom and all the related machines
that turned the temporal gestures of the
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
manual worker into the spatialized pro-
grams of industrial machinery. This would
be followed in the twentieth century by the
grammatization of the temporality of aural
and visual perception that occurred with
the analogue machinery of the gramo-
phone, radio, cinema, and television, while,
at that century’s end, digital computation
would lead to the grammatization of every-
thing in the thoroughly reticulated mne-
motechnical system in which we currently
find ourselves.
In works from this period such as
For a New Critique of Political Economy,
Stiegler (2010) points out, again drawing
on Simondon, that in the Grundrisse Karl
Marx himself (unlike most Marxism, and
recalling that this book was not published
until 1939) sees the rise of capitalism as
involving the acquisition of the gestural
knowledge of the tool-equipped worker so
that it may be programmed into automated
industrial machinery. The worker is dispos-
sessed of both his or her tools and his or
her knowledge, and it is the latter that is
the most important meaning of proletari-
anization, as workers are reduced to wage
laborers. In this way, Stiegler argues that
Marx rediscovers the lesson of Socrates in
the Phaedrus: the duplicity of writing lies
in the fact that it is a pharmakon that may
either help or harm memory, and so help
or harm knowledge—for which reason
Stiegler (2010: 28) calls Plato the first
thinker of the proletariat. General organol-
ogy and the genealogy of the sensible
must in this way be understood as irreduc-
ibly “pharmacological.”
If grammatization is always a matter
of the spatialization of temporal fluxes
and flows, then it becomes necessary to
consider what difference this makes to
what, in his quest to phenomenologically
describe the character of temporal expe-
rience, Husserl (1991: 61) calls “temporal
objects,” that is, objects that exist in and
as a temporal flow, such as a melody. Hus-
serl distinguishes primary retention from
secondary retention but dismisses the pos-
sibility that external artifacts (“resembling
objects” of “image-consciousness”) make
any significant contribution to the tempo-
rality of experience (61). Derrida (1973: 65)
then deconstructs Husserl’s distinction
between these two kinds of retention
on the grounds that it amounts to two
modifications of nonperception, and, while
Stiegler accepts Derrida’s deconstruction,
he insists that for the technical beings
that we are, artifacts, in their retentional
character (which is at first accidental but
later becomes deliberate with hypomnesic
tertiary retentions, which begin to appear
from the Upper Palaeolithic onward)
must be understood as “tertiary reten-
tions.” And, as he will argue in numerous
works, these fundamentally condition and
overdetermine the relationship of primary
retention and secondary retention.
In other words, however valid Derri-
da’s deconstruction of Husserl may have
been, Stiegler nevertheless insists on
the necessity of distinguishing primary,
secondary, and tertiary retention, which
are woven together to form the fabric of
experience. Consequently, protention,
the futural aspect of present experience,
which for Husserl was more or less limited
to the expectation of the immediately
following moments, can no longer be kept
within such strict temporal or perceptual
CULTURAL POLITICS
limits, amalgamating instead with every
manner of expectation, anticipation, hope,
fear, motive, and reason—in short, the
question of protention in this way melds
into and cannot be divorced from the ques-
tion of desire. Yet the protentional capacity
of the technical beings that we ourselves
are is not something “natural”: it must be
151
carefully cultivated, and this means first
 Daniel Ross
of all that the ability to pay attention must
be cultivated, which is the first task of
every kind of education. But this task must
occur within the pharmacological situa-
tion that results from the fact that tertiary
retentions may foster both attentional and
protentional capacities (by generating what
Stiegler calls long circuits of the trans-
individuation of knowledge) or ravage
these capacities (for example, by combin-
ing televisual tertiary retentions with the
techniques of marketing in a systematic
effort to distract attention from anything
but the shortest-term satisfactions).
In works such as Symbolic Misery
(two volumes), Stiegler shows that tertiary
retention is the basis of the “detachabil-
ity” of the drives, which are not instincts
precisely thanks to this detachability (see
esp. Stiegler 2015: chaps. 1 and 4). While
the drives always end in the satisfaction
of finite aims, through this detachability it
becomes possible to bind them to other
aims, and especially to those that do not
exist but consist, as the infinite objects of
desire (such as the objects of taste and
love, and including the ideas)—essentially
the process that Sigmund Freud refers
to as sublimation. What this ultimately
makes possible is Stiegler’s critique of
the consumerist economy, in which the
17:2 July 2021
libidinal economy is harnessed to the
productive economy, and the marketing
techniques enabled by audiovisual gram-
matization are used to influence consumer
•
desire by reattaching it, not to the infinite
CULTURAL POLITICS
and long-term objects of desire but to the
finite and very short-term objects prolif-
erated by consumer society, ultimately
desublimating and disenchanting desire,
depleting libidinal energy in favor of a cycle
of addiction based on the drives unbound.
Such techniques strive to, as far as possi-
ble, eliminate the incalculability associated
152
with the desire for infinite objects because
what is infinite cannot be calculated—all
of which amounts to a new realm of
proletarianization in the twentieth century,
no longer of work knowledge but of life
knowledge, the proletarianization of ways
of living and their replacement by “brands”
and “lifestyles.”
I, We, They, and It
In this second phase of Stiegler’s work,
Heidegger generally withdraws from the
scene: he is a thinker neither of gramma-
tization nor of proletarianization. But the
introduction of Simondon onto the center
of Stiegler’s stage provides the opportunity
to frame his own thought as a triangulating
intervention into these two philosophies
of the process of psychosocial life: “I put
forth my capacity for individuation—
psychic in the sense of Simondon, existen-
tial ipseity in the sense of Heidegger—in
so far as it is inscribed at the heart of a
process that invents itself and in which
I attempt to participate as an inventor”
(Stiegler 2012: 188). For both Heidegger
and Simondon, this inventive participa-
tion cannot be thought from within the
resources of previous philosophy, instead
requiring what the first calls resoluteness
and the second a phase shift, but the
question arises as to what this implies
about the relationship between what, in
his turn, Stiegler calls the I and the we.
By staging a confrontation between their
works, he tries to show that neither Heide-
gger nor Simondon succeed in describing
this articulation in a manner that avoids
idealizing or substantializing one of the
terms of the relationship. Furthermore,
each of them fails at a point that the other
alone is capable of illuminating. In Heideg-
ger, he says,
There is neither difference nor the tension in
Dasein between the I and the we; Dasein is
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
not an I. It is neither, properly speaking, a we;
it is prior to this kind of distinction, but it does
not contain this distinction either. And this is
a problem, I think, for it does not allow us to
interrogate fully the tension and the dynamic
phase-shift that is, by contrast, constitutive in
Simondon and allows us to think individuation
as a process, a process that does not denigrate
the collective and that also avoids thinking
Entschlossenheit as a decision limited by being-
towards-death. (189)
By failing to genuinely consider the
relationship between the I and the we,
Heidegger tends, in the name of the
thought of Dasein, either to fold the we
into the they or, in 1933 (Heidegger 1990),
to substantialize it as the Volk. At the same
time, the gap that Heidegger makes it
possible to see in Simondon consists in
the latter’s failure to address the possibility
of the collapse of processes of collective
individuation—the possibility of disindivid-
uation. After Technics and Time, 3, Stiegler
(2012: 190) writes, “I ended up telling
myself that . . . there is no question of the
they in Simondon,” who cannot conceive
the “possible annulment of the we in the
they.” But beyond Heidegger, this is not
just the question of the fall of the we into
a they, but of the relationship between this
possibility of the they and a prior it that
would open up this possibility of disindivid-
uation, an it that is not the id of the uncon-
scious but the “impersonal” of technics:
At the point where Heidegger ignores the ques-
tion of we—in such a way that Simondon opens
it with psychical and collective individuation—
which would perhaps have been preserved in
his calamitous political adventurism, Simondon
himself ignores the question of the they that
Heidegger opens up and into which he fell in
1933, as a failure of having been able to think
the we, but also the neutral, the impersonal
which, as technics, binds it to the I, and such
that this binding constitutes Dasein trans-
ductively: technics is the it which is not a they
and of which Heidegger precisely makes a fall.
(Stiegler 2019b: 597)
Hence Stiegler (2012: 193) concludes that
it is a matter of “reciprocally critiquing the
two gestures”: both Heidegger’s gesture
that starts with fallenness but cannot
conceive the primordial conjunction of the
I and the we and Simondon’s gesture that
tends to deny or at least underestimate
“the essential fragility of individuation.”
If politics is the participatory struggle to
inventively articulate the I with the we, a
struggle that requires both the calculation
of the future and the incalculability of that
very same future, then Heidegger’s failure
to clearly see that the technical objects
of tertiary retention are the basis of every
relationship to the future, of whatever kind,
proves to be one fundamental reason for
his political failure. Because Heidegger
fails to see the role of technical individu-
ation between psychic individuation and
collective individuation, he can perfectly
well think the possibility for collective indi-
viduation to regress to collective disindivid-
uation, but he cannot think the possibility
of a genuinely fruitful collective individua-
tion process other than as the history of a
Volk that is in fact the (dis)solution of the I
into the we. Or if we say that the “history
of being” itself is such a fruitful collective
individuation process, then we cannot fail
CULTURAL POLITICS
to note that Heidegger’s turn to this history
also corresponds with Heidegger’s failure
to complete the task begun in Being and
Time, and thus instantiates a divorce from
the existential analytic of Dasein that will
have been Heidegger’s account of some-
thing like a psychic individuation process.
Heidegger cannot see, and cannot
153
himself help falling prey to, a collective
 Daniel Ross
disindividuation process whose condition
of possibility was the new retentional and
protentional media that were radio and
cinema, which Freud, too, did not see,
despite the force and relevance of his
account of group psychology. By opening
up the question of psychic, collective, and
technical individuation, and by seeing how
Simondon’s notion of transindividuation,
as that which underlies individuation, is
always a question of a circuit of desire, it
becomes possible to see that the limitation
of the existential analytic is that Heidegge-
rian care is described in terms of being-
toward-death, as if the horizon of my own
end is simply the end as such: the notion
of care beyond my own end, of something
like being-toward-life, is fundamentally
excluded, while in 1933 that end is fun-
damentally subsumed into a future of the
people in which the singularity of individual
Dasein is no longer a matter for care.
All of this leads Stiegler (2013: chap.
6) to the conclusion in What Makes Life
Worth Living, published in French in 2010,
that if Dasein is the privileged being who
is capable of questioning, then it can only
be because Dasein is also the being who is
thrown into question—by technics, that is,
by the prostheses that transform its form
of life. Unlike Heidegger, he concludes that
17:2 July 2021
if it is technics that produces the problems
forcing Dasein itself into question, then it is
also, for pharmacological reasons, by ave-
nues opened by technics that questioning
•
can open the path to any possible remedy,
CULTURAL POLITICS
itself bound to eventually generate new
problems.
Heidegger, as a reader of Norbert
Wiener, had at least the merit of being
among the first to perceive the pharma-
cological character of what was then
called cybernetics, whereas Simondon
would “see in the then-nascent cybernetic
154
epoch the beginning of a new process
of individuation,” the “splitting of a new
process of negentropy, ushering in the
new form of individuation” (Stiegler 2019b:
598). In the same article in which he
transductively triangulates Heidegger and
Simondon, Stiegler (2012: 197) accuses
the latter of “inattention to the entro-
pic tendency of digital technology [and]
cybernetic technology.” How should we
understand these references to entropy
and negentropy: as scientific concepts
or merely as metaphors, or perhaps in a
way that becomes more than metaphor-
ical by extending their meaning beyond
the sciences of thermodynamics, statis-
tical mechanics, information theory and
biology? It is this set of questions that is
problematized after the third conversion
of Stiegler’s gaze, at which point he also
renews and reinitializes his reading of
Heidegger.
Anthropocene as Entropocene
On November 22, 2014, Stiegler (2018a:
chap. 1) delivered a lecture entitled “The
Anthropocene and Neganthropology,”
the first of several in which he begins to
disseminate a new set of terms: entropy,
negentropy, anthropy, neganthropy, entro-
pology, neganthropology, exosomatization,
exorganism, Entropocene, and Neganthro-
pocene. What this theoretical apparatus
makes clear for the first time in his work
is that what lay behind this third conver-
sion was not just the question of entropy
and negentropy inherited from Ludwig
Boltzmann, Erwin Schrödinger, and Claude
Shannon but also the realization that the
question of entropy, of all kinds, lies at the
heart of the problems that have come to
be associated with what has come to be
called the Anthropocene epoch. In addition
to paying close attention to the increas-
ingly alarming statements by the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change and
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
other dire warnings about the pace and sig-
nificance of climate change, Stiegler had at
some point engaged in reading the work of
the geochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky, the
biophysicist Alfred J. Lotka, the economist
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and the cyber-
neticist Norbert Wiener, each of whom
was concerned in one way or another with
the relationship of the concept of entropy
to the fate of life. The technical life of the
noetic soul that Stiegler had theorized in
his first phase, and the triple individuation
of organological life that he had theorized
in his second phase, was now reconceived
as a process of exosomatization whose
pharmacological characteristics were
understood to derive from the always only
ever local and temporary character of the
struggle against all manner of entropic
tendencies.
The Anthropocene can be understood
as the great acceleration of the anthropiza-
tion of the biosphere that began with the
Industrial Revolution. It began, in other
words, with the transformation of the ther-
modynamic milieu brought by the inven-
tion of the steam engine and then other
combustion engines, the practical problem
of the inefficiency of which led to the
theoretical problem of closed systems and
ultimately to the probabilistic formulation
of the second law of thermodynamics. And
it can be understood, today, as a situation
in which this anthropization qua technici-
zation threatens to lead to the collapse of
the planetary biological envelope, and so
potentially to its de-anthropization.
It was Vernadsky (1998) who under-
stood that this thin envelope that sur-
rounds the earth, which he named the
biosphere, can itself be considered an
open system founded on complex bio-
chemical processes, giving rise to mole-
cules seen nowhere else in the universe,
primordially and continually fostered by
a constant bath of solar radiation. It was
Schrödinger (1992) who first clearly under-
stood that the thermodynamic operations
effected within this biosphere amount to a
struggle against the entropic tendency that
he referred to somewhat misleadingly as
negative entropy. But it was Lotka (1945)
who first saw that, in the unfolding of the
antientropic processes of the biosphere,
the introduction of what he called “exo-
somatic evolution” represented a step
beyond biological evolution, amounting to
an intensification of both the entropic and
negentropic characteristics of the latter,
potentially threatening, through processes
no longer just of biochemistry but also of
technochemistry, to exceed the limits on
which the metastability of the biosphere
depends. And it was Georgescu-Roegen
(1971) who understood that this means
that the functions regulating such antien-
tropic processes are no longer biological
but economic, and that economics itself
must be reconceived as the theory and
practice of exosomatic struggle against
thermodynamic entropy.
For Stiegler, however, it is crucial
not to somehow fold these exosomatic
functions back into the endosomatic func-
tions associated with biological evolution:
entropy must not be understood simply
as the exhaustion of thermodynamic
potentials but also as the tendency for
the probable to eliminate the improbable,
which means one thing thermodynami-
cally, another thing biologically, and yet
CULTURAL POLITICS
another thing informationally, which is also
to say, “anthropically.” Even if we consider
just Schrödinger’s negative entropy, it is
not simply the reduction of thermody-
namic entropy: an advancing ice age that
destroys all life would, after all, lower
entropy much more than the proliferation
of life ever could. Rather, endosomatiza-
155
tion is a lasting improbability that operates
 Daniel Ross
through a differentiation of organs and
organisms that temporarily defers local
entropic tendencies while adding to and
even accelerating the second law of ther-
modynamics as it applies to the global sit-
uation. Likewise, exosomatization must be
understood not just as the continuation of
endosomatic counterentropic tendencies
at a new level but, rather, as the advent of
new processes, founded on and founding
new improbabilities of another kind, which
locally and temporarily defer other forms
of the tendency toward the probable, pre-
cisely anthropic forms, which are never-
theless also generated by these very same
counter-anthropic processes themselves.
“Entropy” must be understood in a sense
that exceeds and incorporates the way
this concept is understood in physics, and
even in science as a whole, without, for
all that, being reducible to a philosophical
metaphor.
Stiegler therefore calls for what would
no longer be an anthropology, or even
what Claude Lévi-Strauss (1976: 543)
referred to as an entropology, but, rather, a
“neganthropology,” based on recognizing
that the negentropic endosomatization of
vital différance is followed by the negan-
thropic exosomatization of technical and
noetic différance. For the beings that we
17:2 July 2021
ourselves are or struggle to inventively
become, exosomatization suspends biolog-
ical selection, replacing it with a process of
artificial selection requiring the intergener-
•
ational transmission of that knowledge by
CULTURAL POLITICS
which we articulate psychosocial organs
with technical organs (through processes
of education of all kinds) and the elabora-
tion of therapeutic prescriptions through
which psychosocial evolution organizes
and arranges the exchange of an ever-
changing profusion of technical organs
(through economic processes of all kinds).
156
It is in this way that noetic différance
involves knowledgeable functions that are
not just scientific but also processes of
care. After his third conversion, Stiegler
recognizes that exosomatic life today
cannot avoid the problem of taking care
of the biosphere, and that this is a matter
of a political and macroeconomic struggle
against thermodynamic entropy (atmo-
spheric pollution), biological entropy (loss
of biodiversity), and informational entropy
(loss of psychosocial diversity), in a
context where resolving the first two is
very likely impossible without addressing
the third, which is essentially a matter
of the diversity and thus the wealth of
knowledge.
All of these forms of care-filled strug-
gle are always a matter of temporalization
and spatialization, which is to say, of local-
ization. In endosomatic evolution, such
localization is biogeographical, a process
through which ecosystems are differenti-
ated, as are species within those ecosys-
tems. Such ecosystems are hypercomplex
ecologies composed of simple organisms
consisting of a single cell, each one of
which is itself a negentropic localization
bordered with a membrane, along with
complex organisms that are multicellular
localizations bordered with bark, an exo-
skeleton, skin, and so on. The biosphere
is the overarching localization operating at
the level of the entire planet, a terrestrial
biological envelope differentiating itself
within the entropic tendencies operating at
the scale of the solar system, the galaxy,
and the universe. This biosphere is itself
ultimately still thermodynamically entropic,
as is every thermodynamic or biochemical
process, and in fact no doubt accelerates
entropy; but, within the terrestrial local-
ity, it continues to produce antientropic
effects, maintaining and proliferating
improbabilities in a way that has thus far
lasted some 3 billion years.
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
In exosomatic evolution, localization
is not biogeographical, but techno-
biogeographical. From out of a default of
origin undecidably distributed between the
who and the what described in Technics
and Time, 1, there emerges a new set
of localizations. Stiegler refers to these
neganthropic localizations in terms of what
he calls exorganisms: the simple exorgan-
ism that is I-and-my-flint-tool, I-and-my-
dwelling, or I-and-my-smartphone, along
with the lower-complex exorganism that
is this school, this prison, this factory, or
this university, and the higher-complex
exorganism that is this tribe, this nation, or
this civilization. Lower-complex exorgan-
isms operate by rules, but the criteria for
the selection of those rules can be derived
only from higher-complex exorganisms,
through the introduction of laws, for exam-
ple, which themselves exist but are always
formulated in relation to what does not
exist but consists. For example, the
notion of justice has never existed and will
never exist, but it cannot, for all that, be
abandoned—the possibility of formulating
and agreeing on laws depends on some
kind of belief in the consistency of this jus-
tice that does not exist. All of these exor-
ganisms are bordered neganthropic local-
izations, that is, they are both technical
and idiomatic, always instances of a here
and now, products of a double différance
that always bear the negative possibility of
intensifying entropy at a pace far beyond
the relatively slow rate of adjustment of
the endosomatic processes of the bio-
sphere, and today far more rapidly, in fact,
than the noetic processes associated with
the exosomatic and noetic beings that we
ourselves hope to remain.
Our neganthropological struggle is to
maximize the negentropy and minimize
the entropy produced by exosomatiza-
tion, where this is a matter not just of the
thermodynamic entropy producing climate
change, habitat destruction, and a new
wave of mass extinction, but the informa-
tional anthropy producing cultural destruc-
tion, behavioral standardization, fake news,
and the antipolitics of the scapegoat.
Remedying the former will be impossible
without remediating the latter. This is,
ultimately, a question of the function of
reason: the noetic faculties, the pursuit of
knowledge, and the necessity of thinking
all find their stakes in the possibility of,
as Stiegler (2018a: 241) says, “making a
différance” in exosomatization, which is
also to say of finding the quasicausality
of contemporary exosomatization. Knowl-
edge, in this conception, is a matter of
noetic capabilities that are the condition
of possibility of elaborating therapeutic
prescriptions for living within exosomatiza-
tion, where knowledge itself has technical
conditions of possibility and is therefore
a pharmakon in the sense that, always
potentially becoming rigid, dogmatic,
authoritarian, or obsolete, its prescriptions
may become toxic, that is, overwhelm-
ingly entropic. The question of thinking,
in this conception, is the question of care,
and firstly the question of taking care of a
doubly anthropic epoch: doubly because
in addition to the entropic ravages unfold-
ing across planetary systems, it has also
ravaged the capacity for care itself. Accord-
ing to Stiegler (2018a: chap. 13), it is this
doubly anthropic situation that is described
by Nietzsche in terms of nihilism, and it is
CULTURAL POLITICS
at this point that he begins to thematize
the question of care via old French, echo-
ing Derrida in associating penser with an e
with panser with an a.
What Is Today All over the Earth
In an age where the digital and algorithmic
grammatization of everything undermines
157
every form of knowledge, generating
 Daniel Ross
powerful tendencies toward proletarian-
ization and ultimately a macroeconomic
process that has come to be called dis-
ruption, what threatens us most is violent
indifférance and carelessness. But this
question of the relationship of knowledge
and violence, of the questioning that opens
up the very possibility of knowledge and
the technics that puts us violently into
question, is the question and the problem
that Heidegger raises in An Introduction
to Metaphysics (2000), as the question of
tekhnē, that is, art, skill, knowledge. The
1935 lecture course reflects on the violent
being of what is there called “man,” rather
than Dasein, in terms of the relationship
between dikē and tekhnē, which Heideg-
ger stages via his reading of the Antigone
chorus known as the “ode to man”: man
the most dreadful, violent, unsettling,
and unsettled being. But Heidegger
(2000: 169) insists that tekhnē, knowing,
is always a kind of “looking out beyond
everything subsistent” (translation mod-
ified) or, in other words, an arising of the
extraordinary from out of the ordinary that
is always a matter of the unconcealment of
and challenge to the violence of dikē itself,
which for Heidegger but not for Stiegler is
another name for being.
Yet if tekhnē is a knowing that
17:2 July 2021
happens only in setting itself to work
in the work, that is, in exosomatization,
then even for Heidegger technics is the
condition both of knowledge and of its
•
obliteration, which is what Marx already
CULTURAL POLITICS
understood in relation to the proletarianiz-
ing character of industrial machines, and
Socrates in relation to the proletarianiz-
ing character of sophistic writing. What
Stiegler (2018a) shows in the final chapter
of The Neganthropocene, via the work of
Rudolf Boehm, is that this is Heidegger’s
question, too, as the question of the hubris
158
with which Dasein’s violence challenges
the violence of dikē. And he claims, fur-
ther, that with this thought, and with the
thought not just of Gestell but of Ereignis,
Heidegger opens the question of “a quite
singular regime of différance to which even
Derrida ultimately remained indifférant”
(268), and which involves precisely the
problem of the possible end of questioning
in thoroughly anthropic indifférance—
in indifferentiation and the erasure of all
improbability.
For Heidegger, it is this violence, and
this hubris, setting truth into the work and
as work by wresting unconcealment from
concealment, that produces the history of
being as a history not of grammatization
but of the epochs of truth, from Plato to
Descartes to Leibniz and beyond. Today,
however, we have long entered the age of
what Heidegger called “modern technol-
ogy,” in which all of phusis and exosomatic
life now find themselves exposed as a
standing reserve enframed by and avail-
able for calculative extraction, an age that
has subsequently turned into the epoch of
post-truth that has lost the conditions even
of knowing itself as an epoch. May we
not, however, see this as the question of
thinking being without beings that Heideg-
ger (1972: 2) would finally raise in 1962 in
“Time and Being,” whose necessity lay, he
thought, in the fact that, unless we do so,
“there is no longer any possibility of explic-
itly bringing into view the Being of what is
today all over the earth,” let alone of decid-
ing what relation to have, what decision
to make, concerning what is today all over
the earth? What is today all over the earth
is an anthropized biosphere, and what lies
beyond that earth is now an exosphere,
including a belt of geostationary and other
satellites that ensure the thoroughgoing
reticulation of this earth across digital
networks, operating by applying powerful
probabilistic calculations to vast amounts
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
of data in a highly automatic way, designed
to function at high speed and therefore
performatively.
What is performativity? John Austin
(1975) described it as the possibility for
what we say to do what is said (the classic
example being the statement uttered by
a priest to a bride and groom in order to
effect their wedding), where this possi-
bility is seen to depend on institutional
conditions that give words their actualizing
potential. But to say something, to use lan-
guage whose history amounts to a long cir-
cuit of transindividuation, is already a form
of exosomatization, and institutions are
themselves complex exorganisms whose
existence depends, at some level, on our
belief in them. Institutions are themselves
performative in the sense that they exist
only insofar as we continue to collectively
believe in them, but where the conditions
of that belief themselves derive from
access to the nonexistent but consistent
infinities made possible by higher-complex
exorganisms. We might as well say, then,
that performativity is in fact a matter of
how exosomatization can be used to make
people dream.
Today we refer to the age of post-truth
to describe an age in which this performa-
tive use of exosomatization functions auto-
matically, that is, without knowledge, pure
exteriorization operating at a speed that is
constantly overtaking the possibility of tak-
ing the time necessary for any reinterior-
ization, and thus without any longer giving
rise to an epoch of truth. These dreams,
therefore, tend to become nihilistic night-
mares, even if they remain performatively
realizable, and violently so (which we see
with the thoroughly anthropic and antiso-
cial functioning of today’s social networks).
This is, ultimately, the question of what
Heidegger called Gestell—the reign of
calculation all over the earth, the entropic
victory of the probable over the improba-
ble that Stiegler also associates with the
nihilistic desert that, a century or so ago,
Nietzsche prophesied would take two cen-
turies to reach its culmination—and of the
need it raises for what Heidegger called
the Ereignis, for some kind of quasicausal
adoption of the therapeutic chance that
the danger of Gestell must be made to
open up, using the instruments of Gestell
to produce a bifurcation from within it and
heading out of it.
However mysterious Heidegger’s
concept of Ereignis remains for us, we
may be sure that it cannot be formulated
according to Descartes’s (1968: 78) dream
of man as “master and possessor of
nature.” The immense performative power
of the technologies of control only intensi-
fies the processes of entropic destruction
that have given rise to climate change,
post-truth, and the erstwhile presidency
of Donald Trump. This hidden, mysterious
Heidegger, to the extent he consists, is no
longer either reactionary or condemnatory,
or at least not only so, being instead the
one who, decades ahead of most others,
weighed the gravity of the decisions yet
to arise, yet bound to arise, in a cybernetic
Gestell extending across the earth, where
the challenge provoked by exosomatization
is taken to its absolute limits—the limit of a
possible end to the possibility of question-
ing. These decisions, if they can no longer
be taken in terms of illusions of mastery,
can only become questions of improbable
CULTURAL POLITICS
care, that is, questions of the cultivation of
new ways of taking care of what is all over
the earth, of fostering new differentiations
and new genuine forms of diversity (which
are not the particularities with which algo-
rithmic governmentality operates), making
possible new decisions.
For Stiegler, the questions of Gestell
159
and Ereignis in this way amount to the
 Daniel Ross
question of the Entropocene and the exit
from it that leads us into a Neganthro-
pocene, in an age where the algorithmic
processes of hyper-complex exorganisms
function automatically and performatively
to produce a world that is ultimately
without world in Heidegger’s sense, if not
indeed without Dasein, that is, without
psychic (or collective) individuation. Yet we
can draw this connection only if we also
recall the reasons that Heidegger could not
yet think the Anthropocene, that is, make
it possible for us to take care of it: first,
because he did not reflect on the signifi-
cance of the second law of thermodynam-
ics; second, because he tends, increas-
ingly, to oppose meditative thinking and
calculative thinking (for example, in Dis-
course on Thinking [1966]); third, because,
despite being perhaps the first to conceive
cybernetics as the possibility of an end
of thinking (recalling also that for Wiener
[1954: 52] cybernetics raises the threat of
a “fascist ant-state”), nevertheless Heide-
gger could not envisage the magnitude
and depth of the problem of automated
algorithmic performativity set to work at
the scale of the biosphere; and fourth,
because, as a thinker of work who almost
completely refused Marxist discourse and
did not engage with the question of auto-
17:2 July 2021
mation and proletarianization elaborated in
the Grundrisse, he was unable to address
our macroeconomic problem.
What Stiegler shows is that these
•
questions must be added to the Heideg-
CULTURAL POLITICS
gerian problematic of Gestell and Ereignis
in order to open up, in a disautomatizing
way, new noetic knowledge, new noetic
dreams, and new macroeconomic possi-
bilities, new forms of neganthropic wealth
through which we might yet hope to
engage a new social sculpture (as Joseph
Beuys put it) or a form of social garden-
16 0
ing (as Stiegler [2020: 195] puts it). The
latter suggests a process of cultivation,
which is to say, of carefully planting noetic
seeds that will need to be fertilized, where
what germinates will require raising and
even pruning, hopefully making possible,
however improbably, a new social contract
capable of addressing an exosomatization
process that has become thoroughly toxic
and nihilistic. It is a question of opening
up new neganthropic, that is, careful,
prospects, values, and investments, a
bifurcation and a transvaluation within
that planetary-scale process of terrify-
ing carelessness that is our present-day
being-toward-anthropy.
Acknowledgments
This text was originally given as a lecture at the
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, on May 11,
2018, and I would like to sincerely thank Cindy Zeiher
for the invitation to do so. The version published here
has been significantly modified.
Notes
1. Derrida’s discussion of Leroi-Gourhan in
Of Grammatology came about somewhat
by accident, however, given the fact that
Marguerite Derrida studied anthropology with
Leroi-Gourhan, and Jean Piel, editor of Critique,
asked Jacques Derrida to review Gesture and
Speech. See Bougnoux and Stiegler (2014: 84).
2. But this “logic” of the supplement that is
grammatology is precisely not a logic in the
sense of a ground of ontology, because at the
origin is not a being but an accidentality, ruling
out all ontological grounding.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity.
Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de
la grammatisation: Introduction à l’histoire des
sciences du langage. Liège: Mardaga.
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd
ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 C A R E and C A R ELESSNESS in the A NTHROPOCENE
Beuys, Joseph. 2004. What Is Art? Conversation with
Joseph Beuys. Translated by Matthew Barton
and Shelley Sacks. Forest Row, UK: Clairview.
Bougnoux, Daniel, and Bernard Stiegler. “Pour Jacques
Derrida.” In Derrida 2014: 77–101.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena.
Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy.
Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Of Grammatology. Translated
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected ed.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2014. Trace et archive, image et art.
Bry-sur-Marne, France: INA.
Derrida, Jacques. 2020. Life Death. Translated by
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the
Meditations. Translated by F. E. Sutcliffe. London:
Penguin.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1971. The Entropy Law
and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Discourse on Thinking.
Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans
Freund. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1972. On Time and Being.
Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York:
Harper and Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1990. “The Self-Assertion of the
German University,” translated by Lisa Harries.
In Martin Heidegger and National Socialism:
Questions and Answers, edited by Günther Neske
and Emil Kettering, 5–13. New York: Paragon
House.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. The Concept of Time.
Translated by William McNeill. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000. An Introduction to
Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and
Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Translated
by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the Phenomenology of
the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917).
Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht,
the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech.
Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Tristes tropiques.
Translated by John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Lotka, Alfred J. 1945. “The Law of Evolution as a
Maximal Principle.” Human Biology 17, no. 3:
167–94.
Ross, Daniel. 2018. Introduction to Stiegler 2018a:
7–32.
Ross, Daniel. 2020. “Toward an Exergue on the Future
of Différance.” Derrida Today 13, no. 2: 48–71.
Schrödinger, Erwin. 1992. What Is Life, with Mind
and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The
Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard
Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2006. “Taking Care.” Lecture,
Institut Supérieur d’Agronomie, April
7. www.academia.edu/12692394/
Bernard_Stiegler_Taking_Care_2006.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. For a New Critique of Political
Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge:
Polity.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. “The Theatre of Individuation:
Phase-Shift and Resolution in Simondon and
Heidegger,” translated by Kristina Lebedeva. In
Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, edited
by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe,
and Ashley Woodward, 185–202. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living:
CULTURAL POLITICS
On Pharmacology. Translated by Daniel Ross.
Cambridge: Polity.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2015. Symbolic Misery. Vol. 2,
The Katastrophē of the Sensible. Translated by
Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2018a. The Neganthropocene.
Translated by Daniel Ross. London: Open
Humanities.
161
 Daniel Ross

Stiegler, Bernard. 2018b. Qu’appelle-t-on panser? Vernadsky, Vladimir I. 1998. The Biosphere. Translated
1. L’immense régression. Paris: Les Liens qui by D. B. Langmuir. New York: Copernicus.
Libèrent. Vitale, Francesco. 2018. Biodeconstruction: Jacques
Stiegler, Bernard. 2019a. The Age of Disruption: Derrida and the Life Sciences. Translated by
Technology and Madness in Computational Mauro Senatore. Albany: State University of
Capitalism. Translated by Daniel Ross. New York Press.
Cambridge: Polity. Wiener, Norbert. 1954. The Human Use of Human
Stiegler, Bernard. 2019b. “Fall and Elevation: Beings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Simondon’s Apolitics,” translated by David
Maruzzella. Philosophy Today 63, no. 3: 587–602.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2020. “‘Night Gives Birth to Day’ as
the ‘Conquest of Imperfection,’” translated by
Daniel Ross. In Art in the Twenty-First Century:
Reflections and Provocations, edited by Siegfried
Zielinski and Charles Merewether, 186–97. Hong
Kong: Osage.
17:2 July 2021
•
CULTURAL POLITICS

Dan Ross has translated eleven books by Bernard Stiegler, most recently Nanjing Lectures
2016–2019 (2020), and is the author of Violent Democracy (2004) and Psychopolitical
162

Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics (2021).