Foundations of Science (2022) 27:271–280

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09736-3

The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi‑Causes

in the Entropocene

Bernard Stiegler1

Accepted: 10 December 2020 / Published online: 31 May 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Abstract
This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later
Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of
beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre
[turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what
is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxic-
ity of the technical milieu and post-truth (i.e., as the Entropocene) calling for a radical
bifurcation, they need to be reframed and re-imagined in terms of the process of exoso-
matization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated
within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus
will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of
technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a
rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis
of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called
quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their
(de-)fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the
experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-
anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causal-
ity and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene.

Keywords Enframing · Entropy · Negentropy · Quasi-causality · Heidegger

1 From Dasein to Gestell

In the first three volumes of Technics and Time, my analysis of Heideggerian ontology
was focused around the analytic of Dasein. For this reason, it privileged Being and Time,
not only because I considered—quite unlike, for example, Hubert Dreyfus—that it is Hei-
degger’s analysis of existential technicity (so to speak) that makes this work his magnum
opus, but also because, like a number of French readers—and notably Gérard Granel, who

* Bernard Stiegler
bernard.stiegler@centrepompidou.fr
1
Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI), Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

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272 B. Stiegler

was my teacher—it seemed to me that something was lost in Heidegger’s shift from the
existential analytic to the history of being.
What in the thirties Heidegger began to call the ‘history of being’ was strongly related
to what in the following decade would become his discourse on ‘modern technology’,
through which the ‘question of technology’ would be given a turn that differed markedly
from the existential analytic of Dasein. While I have pointed to the statements, especially
in ‘The Turning’ and ‘The Principle of Identity’ (in Identity and Difference), that make
Gestell a mode of unconcealment bearing the Ereignis, I have long felt that, starting from
‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Heidegger in fact intensified the opposition he
had previously introduced in Being and Time between Sorge as the indeterminacy of the
end (of Sein-zum-Tode, being-towards-death) and the determinacy of Besorgen, where the
latter, through its preoccupation and busyness, flees this indeterminacy—and where this
opposition is definitional (or so I claim, referring in this to Derrida) of metaphysics, and
precisely inasmuch as metaphysics, as Heidegger also says, is concretized as Gestell.
Over the last 5 years or so, I have thoroughly reconsidered this position. More precisely,
I have found myself ever more resolutely behind Heidegger’s discourse on modern technics
and Gestell (which is its ‘essence’), inasmuch as it posits that modern technology, concre-
tizing metaphysics as Gestell, above all bears within it a danger—and where this amounts
to the imminence of a bifurcation coming at the end of the ‘history of being’. More specifi-
cally, it seems to me today that, with respect to the discourse he produced in the fifties—
and even in the late forties—Heidegger has still not really been heard.
He has been heard:

• neither by those who tended (as I did myself) to ultimately hear in his statements on
modern technology only symptoms of the fundamentally reactionary character of his
thought, which, moreover, enabled the ‘historial’ question of the final solution to be
diluted into that of industrialization;
• nor by those (in particular the ‘French Heideggerians’) who followed Heidegger into
what they believed to be his ‘condemnation’ of modern technology, and who therefore
failed to hear what remains most powerful and mysterious in his thinking, namely, that,
as he says:

The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to

the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth.1
Or again:
Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious.2

1
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. William Lovitt, Basic Writings, revised
and expanded edition (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 338.
2
Ibid., p. 333.

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The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi-Causes in the Entropocene 273

That our absence of epoch3 is reputed to be the era of ‘post-truth’ is in this respect
highly significant. I will not elaborate on this point now, which I mention only in passing.

2 Reading Heidegger in the Anthropocene

After a period of 10 years during which I had ceased to read Heidegger (after writing Tech-
nics and Time, 3, which was based on a reading of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), I
again immersed myself in the texts belonging to the so-called ‘turn’ that extended from the
thirties to the fifties. This turn was significant both:

• from the standpoint of being, no longer considered in terms of the privileged being that
is Dasein but as a history of being that always already exceeds Dasein;
• from the standpoint of technics, such that, becoming ‘modern technology’, and ulti-
mately Gestell, it opens the question of the Ereignis in a sense that for me still remains
deeply hidden—as I believe it will remain for Heidegger himself: the Ereignis is the
hidden, it is that which is concealed as that which conceals.

As I have mentioned, in the past I sketched out analyses of texts such as ‘The Turning’,
‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ and ‘The Principle of Identity’, in which
I stressed that, contrary to the usual reading, technics, including and even firstly as ‘mod-
ern technology’, is not simply what happens to the history of being as the end of the privi-
lege of Dasein, defined precisely as the ‘privileged being’, and the concretization of meta-
physics (we must understand this word ‘concretization’ in the sense that Simondon gives to
it when he refers to the ‘process of concretization’), but rather that technics is what bears,
as the ‘danger within which the saving power grows’, the very possibility of the Ereignis.
What I now posit is that this Ereignis is the experience of the hidden as such—which
straightaway seems to possess a rather paradoxical dimension: the hidden is precisely what
does not present itself as such.
Highlighting in these texts what seemed to me to support my own understanding of
the ‘question concerning technics’—and inasmuch as it has become what I today refer to
as a ‘pharmacology’—I nevertheless tended to ignore, or to treat as being of only sec-
ondary importance, Heidegger’s own statements about what constitutes the ‘danger’. I was
inclined to see these statements as, above all, indicators of his ‘reactionary’ leanings, and
so I tended to see them as fundamentally tied to his discourse on rootedness and uproot-
ing—from An Introduction to Metaphysics to Discourse on Thinking. What I did not see
is that only after an ordeal of danger as such could there be the possibility of a trial and
ordeal of the Ereignis as the experience of the hidden as such.

3
Translator’s note For Stiegler that what makes an epoch an epoch is the way in which the regime of ter-
tiary retentions under which it operates gives rise to retentions that are collective, and on the basis of which
new circuits of transindividuation can be established, opening up new collective protentions. In the contem-
porary epoch, however, the regime of digital tertiary retention functions in such a way as to prevent new
circuits of transindividuation and therefore new collective protentions, other than protentions of the worst.
Because no process of adjustment any longer operates between the technical system and the social systems,
the latter can no longer be shaped in such a way as to open up a ‘new epoch’, making the contemporary age
the epoch of the absence of epoch. See Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness
in Computational Capitalism, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), ch. 2.

13
274 B. Stiegler

I have, since this time, further pursued my own analysis of this ‘danger’, but starting
from a different perspective—that of capitalism as the hegemony of calculation and finiti-
zation whose effect is to annihilate every object of desire (that is, every infinitized object),
or in other words of capitalism as nihilism qua fulfilment of metaphysics. This is the per-
spective I laid out in Disbelief and Discredit, where the danger is presented as the toxicity
of technics through what amounts to an industrial organology, for which Marx is a key
analyst. Since that time—and starting from the moment when, 10  years later (or 4  years
ago, in Canterbury), I introduced the concept of ‘neganthropology’ as a way of responding
to what Lévi-Strauss called entropology—I have begun to reread, much more attentively,
those texts coming in the wake of ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.
Hence I have come to believe that Heidegger was at least 50 years ahead of most of his
contemporaries (Günther Anders merits specific treatment here) and that it was he who laid
out the fundamental concepts through which it will be possible to think what we today call
the Anthropocene—which he called Gestell.
Nevertheless, as I began to argue in the spring of 2015 during a seminar at the Hum-
boldt University of Berlin, I continue to think that:

(1) in his analysis of modern technics, Heidegger systematically and paradoxically ignored
and dismissed the questions of entropy and negentropy, whether they are those that
emerge from Carnot, or from Boltzmann, or from Schrödinger, or from Wiener;
(2) from this angle, he underestimated the question of cybernetics, even though he was
undoubtedly the first philosopher who, as a reader of Wiener, did indeed weigh the
stakes it involves;
(3) he ultimately never drew the consequences of his own analysis of facticity—which in
my own terms becomes the question of the necessary default [défaut qu’il faut], where
this must be considered beyond and beneath the causality that Deleuze called, borrow-
ing from the Stoics, quasi-causality.

3 Provocation (Herausfordern)4

I now propose to expand upon this third point, which I will do after specifying the follow-
ing three preliminary points:

(1) Wiener posits that cybernetics involves a pharmacological question, where cybernet-
ics amounts to a continuation of what I have myself described, in reference to Alfred
Lotka, as a process of the exosomatization of the functions and faculties of noesis—a
process that is originarily constitutive of these functions and faculties, but where this
means that it is also originarily destitutive of these functions and faculties (hence this
is part of what, in Symbolic Misery, I describe with Freud as a process through which
organs are constantly defunctionalized and refunctionalized).
(2) The concepts of entropy and anti-entropy, which always involve a locality that defers
entropy, that postpones the entropic deadline, invite a reconsideration of being-for-
death (that is, for-entropy, which is inseparable from the drive of destruction) from

4
Translator’s note: In English translations of Heidegger, translations of Herausfordern variously include
‘challenging’, ‘challenging forth’ and ‘provocation’.

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The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi-Causes in the Entropocene 275

the perspective of what is not just negentropy but neganthropy, which is to say: which
would have always already exceeded every humanism, assuming that the latter always
leads to what Lévi-Strauss called an entropology—instead and in place of all anthro-
pology.
(3) It is only with the introduction into modern physics not just of Heisenberg’s uncer-
tainty principle but of the theory of entropy and negentropy coming out of the work of
Boltzmann, Gibbs and Schrödinger that it becomes possible to think (that is, to take
care of [panser]) Ereignis as the destiny of Gestell—but Heidegger will always rule
out this possibility because for him these questions will always be referred to those of
cybernetics, and especially of information theory, with which it is allied. This is why,
in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Heidegger writes that this is one thing that
modern physics
will never be able to renounce […]: that nature report itself in some way or other
that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of
information.5
To which Heidegger adds that, therefore, what he calls Herausfordern, which André Préau
translates into French as provocation, sets to work.
a causality that has changed once again.6

4 From the Four Causes to Poiēsis

On the basis of this question of causality, I would now like to introduce my thesis concern-
ing in what respect the Anthropocene and the ‘post-truth era’ involve an ordeal of truth,
an ordeal of Gestell and Ereignis, and of danger and that which saves. Recall here that in
his ‘questioning concerning technology’, Heidegger posits firstly that technics is generally
thought as a means in the service of an end, which amounts to what he calls.
the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.7
I will not again here go over the objections I made in Technics and Time, 1 to the definition
of the instrument as a means: every musician understands the insufficiency of such a defi-
nition, even if they also know to what degree bad musicians do indeed use their instrument
as a means. What I would like to do, however, is more deeply explore the stakes of the the-
ory of four causes, a theme that Heidegger introduces after this reference to the categories
of ends and means. And I would like to do so in order to shift the discussion towards the
question of quasi-causality that Gilles Deleuze takes up from Stoic philosophy, and which I
myself will consider from the perspective of what I will examine as the veridical power of
anti-anthropy in the process of exosomatization.
A means, as what makes possible the obtaining of an effect, is implemented by a cause
that puts this effect into effect—that puts it into operation. To think technics is always to
think causality—and more precisely the four causes (material, efficient, formal and final),
inasmuch as the efficient dimension dominates causality.

5
Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 328.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., p. 312.

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276 B. Stiegler

The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causal-
ity. This goes so far that we no longer even count the causa finalis, telic finality, as
causality.8
We must ask, however, how and when the causa finalis ceased to count. I will come back
to this question.
It is, then, a question of knowing what aition means, translated by the Romans as causa
on the basis of Aristotle, whose theory of four causes is propounded in Book II, Chapter 3
of his Physics. Following his usual practice, Heidegger challenges the Latin translation—
placing back into question the translation of aition by causa. And he proposes to render
aition in German as Ver-an-lassen—which becomes, in the French translation, faire-venir,
‘to make come’ [but rendered in English by William Lovitt as ‘an occasioning or an induc-
ing to go forward’9—trans.]. Referring to Symposium 205b, Heidegger states:
Every occasion [Veranlassung] […] is poiēsis, bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen].10
[But note that where Lovitt translates Her-vor-bringen as bringing-forth, the French trans-
lator retains the sense of to produce, preferring pro-duction—trans.]
Heidegger adds that poiēsis as production is firstly what characterizes phusis:
Physis, also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth [a pro-
duction], poiēsis.11
This poiēsis that is characteristic of phusis has, in itself, like ‘the bursting of a blossom
into bloom’, the ‘possibility of opening itself’, whereas.
what is brought forth [in French: pro-duit, pro-duced] by the artisan or the artist […]
has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another (en allōi), in
the craftsman or artist.12
Here, we must swim back upstream a little bit in the text: Heidegger questions whether
what Aristotle is talking about is the causa efficiens. In the case of the production of a sil-
ver chalice, for example, it is the silversmith who designates what with the Romans we call
the causa efficiens. The silversmith is the way of Ver-an-lassen, of ‘faire-venir’, of ‘induc-
ing to go forward’, as Verschulden (from Schuld, ‘both fault and debt’, ‘responsible and
indebted’, constituting what Being and Time calls Schuldigkeit, and which I have proposed
translating as being-in-default) that gathers together the other three ways of ‘being respon-
sible for something else’13 [des Verschuldens], which is not simply a matter of causality.
This gathering by the silversmith is a legein that is itself a consideration and a reflection:
these three ways of ‘being responsible’.
owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the ‘that’ and the ‘how’ of their
coming into appearance and into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel.14
Heidegger then introduces his well-known thesis:

8
Ibid., p. 314.
9
Ibid., p. 316.
10
Ibid., p. 317.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 314.
14
Ibid., p. 316.

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The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi-Causes in the Entropocene 277

Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment. […] Bringing-forth

propriates […] within what we call revealing [das Entbergen] […] alētheia.15
The question that arises, then, is the following:
What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything.
For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing.16
Let’s not go any further, here, into the considerations that will lead Heidegger on the path-
way to Gestell and Ereignis in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’—except to note that
Gestell designates ‘modern technology’ inasmuch as it is the destiny of modern physics
that is in turn the destiny of the history of being, as that which leads to a ‘system of infor-
mation’ that is itself a system and apparatus of calculation and computation [dispositif de
calcul]. I won’t go any further, both because there isn’t enough room to do so and because,
while he does introduce the question of ‘where danger is, grows the saving power also’, it
seems to me that Heidegger’s meditation on this question ultimately comes up short, in the
way it turns back to tekhnē as poetry (but the question will be taken up again in more fruit-
ful ways, I believe, in ‘The Turning’ and ‘The Principle of Identity’).
By way of conclusion, and not without a certain brutality, I would now like to shift
gears to my own thesis, and to do so by completely reinterpreting Heidegger’s analysis,
through a leap beyond Heidegger’s text.

5 Quasi‑Causality and Neganthropy

I have just recalled my suggestion in Technics and Time, 1 to translate Schuld by default
and Schuldigkeit by being-in-default.17 Even if we can indeed translate and hear aition by
and in the word ‘guilt’, the guilty being the accused and the category being itself what
accuses and what implicates, what ‘met en cause’, as Heidegger repeatedly points out, nev-
ertheless the fact remains that ancient Greece is not a ‘guilt-culture’ but a ‘shame-culture’.
Shame, that is, aidōs.18
The culture of aidōs is tragic culture. Here, the god who dominates the life of mortals is
not Zeus, but Prometheus. It is through Prometheus that mortals reach Zeus, as Jean-Pierre
Vernant emphasizes.19 In the conflict between the Olympians and the Titans, it is not that
mortals are continuously being accused, since it is not that they are guilty of something but
that they are placed into default. This putting in default is what tragedy stages in terms of
fate, and it does so inasmuch as the mortal worthy of his mortality can but say yes to fate,
as we are constantly reminded by Nietzsche. It is guilt-culture that, as metaphysics (it is
Nietzsche’s contribution to have made this connection), renders illegible and inaccessible

15
Ibid., pp. 317–18.
16
Ibid., p. 318.
17
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and
George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 258–59.
18
See E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and London: University of California Press,
1951), which refers on this point to Ruth Benedict.
19
Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice’, in Marcel Detienne and
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago and Lon-
don: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

13
278 B. Stiegler

the whole tragic corpus extending from Thales to Socrates (that is, including Socrates—but
excluding Plato, since the latter interprets alētheia as orthōtes).
In this ordeal of truth that is the ‘post-truth era’ as the encounter with the danger as
such—which is to say with the Anthropocene, this being the name given by climatolo-
gists and geochemists of the biosphere to what Heidegger called Gestell—a leap is required
from the theory of four causes to the ordeal of quasi-causality. (Elsewhere, I will show
that it is by again taking up Deleuze’s analysis that we must think performativity in all its
forms.)
In fact, quasi-causality is not a theory: it is the experience of the ordeal of the necessary
default, for example that of Joë Bousquet.
But where do doctrines come from, if not from wounds and vital aphorisms […]? Joe
Bousquet must be called Stoic. He apprehends the wound that he bears deep within
his body in its eternal truth as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualized
in us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: ‘My wound existed before me,
I was born to embody it.’ It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates
in us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator…20
…if not the silversmith. The Operator is the one who welcomes the event and is welcomed
by it, the one who realizes it. The event, here, is what is convoked by the Simondonian cat-
egory of the preindividual, and it is what emerges from out of the fabular après coup [and
coup de force—trans.] that Derrida analyses in terms of Jefferson’s discourse in the name
of the American people.
Unlike Deleuze, however, I do not oppose the Stoic discourse on ‘incorporeal events’ to
the Aristotelian discourse on the four causes as dimensions of being. On the contrary, my
proposal is to reinterpret all versions of the theory of four causes arising over the course of
the ‘history of being’—all those Roman and then Christian transformations of Aristotle’s
Physics, as well as its eventual abandonment by modern physics and technics—as so many
effects generated by the denial of the quasi-causal situation to which the exosomatic con-
dition of poiēsis amounts through and through, and where poiēsis would, then, no longer
be endosomatic phusis that opens itself up by itself, and would instead become noetic
tekhnē, in such a way that alētheia constitutes and establishes the precarious age of truth as
Geschichte, which is always artificially pro-duced via technics and through the process of
what I have described as the doubly epokhal redoubling.
It is right at the beginning of Logic of Sense that Deleuze introduces the concept of
quasi-cause:
In Aristotle […], all categories say themselves according to Being; and difference
passes into being between substance, as its primary sense, and the other categories,
which are related to it as accidents. For the Stoics, on the other hand, states of things,
quantities or qualities, are no less beings (or bodies) than is substance.21
After this introduction, Deleuze goes on to show that this affects the oppositional bipolar-
ity of cause and effect, and hence every form of causality.
By speaking of being-by-default and being-in-default, I am maintaining that the factic-
ity constitutive of mortals, inasmuch as it stages the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus,

20
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), p. 148.
21
Ibid., pp. 6–7, translation modified.

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The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi-Causes in the Entropocene 279

assigns to these mortals—by way of Hermes, that is, through Dikē and Aidōs—the obliga-
tion to make their (de-)fault come true, to make it truly happen, to make it advene in truth.
This happening, this advent, this ‘avenance’, this Ereignis—all this is time as the alētheia
of an incessant and irreducible exosomatization that, in Gestell, presents itself as such—
but here, however, ‘as such’ means: as the absence of epoch, as the ‘post-truth era’, as the
presence of Nothingness, as the ordeal of what remains hidden, of what does nothing but
conceal.
To interpret this remainder, or in other words to test it and undergo its ordeal, and to do
so by default, as being-in-default, means, much more radically, to advene-by-default, and
this requires us to turn back to the history of modern physics, and of what,

• with Newton, eliminates finality and, along with it, locality—topoï, cosmology thereby
becoming astrophysics,
• with Carnot, Clausius and Boltzmann, introduces the non-finality of entropy,
• with Schrödinger, and after Bergson, thinks life as the struggle against entropy, that is,
as a local différance of the end—both khōra and Lichtung,
• with Wiener, becomes that which effectively concretizes modern physics, that is, meta-
physics become mathesis universalis in the sense of Leibniz, as characteristica univer-
salis in the Gestell of planetary reticulation via the optoelectronic networks of cyber-
netics that are lightning fast, or, in fact, twice as fast as lightning: twice as fast as Zeus.

Such an analysis of modern physics and what it engenders as modern technics presupposes,
however, a completely new interpretation of Heidegger’s analyses, from ‘The Question
Concerning Technology’ to ‘Time and Being’. But to all these references we must also add
the analysis outlined by Alfred Lotka in 1945 with his theory of what he called ‘exoso-
matic evolution’, where this is pursued completely otherwise than the endosomatic evolu-
tion through which phusis is poiēsis as ‘opening by itself’.
From Lotka’s exosomatic point of view, which I consider together with the work of
Alfred Whitehead and Georges Canguilhem, noetic poiēsis is growth and openness as the
experience of truth qua function of reason in the irreducibly pharmacological form of life
that is the destining of mortals, and where the ordeal of truth is therefore vital (including in
the sense that Deleuze refers to when he mentions ‘vital aphorisms’22).
We must, then, reread all of Heidegger with Marx. It was Marx who, firstly in the Eco-
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts, then with Engels in The German Ideology, first
formulated the question concerning exosomatization, which Marx called production,
emphasizing in the Grundrisse that this production, which in industrial capitalism becomes
automatic, comes to engender a concretization of science as the apparatus of production
that is fixed capital, wherein the ordeal of truth would be disintegrated by calculation inso-
far as the latter is based on generalized proletarianization—from the machine that enslaves
the worker, who thus becomes proletarian, to the scientist excluded from algorithmic
‘black box’ processes.
To undergo the ordeal of truth at present—where everything is in this way absent, that
is, where all knowledge is lost, and all savours [saveurs], where there unfolds total proletar-
ianization—is to rethink Gestell and Ereignis after a reconsideration of the theory of nega-
tive entropy and anti-entropy as applied to the pro-duction of phusis. And it is to do so by

22
Ibid., p. 148.

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280 B. Stiegler

adding to it the theory of anthropy, neganthropy and anti-anthropy, such that it is no longer
by starting from the endosomatic organogenesis of a local organic différance that we must
think the struggle against entropy in Gestell, but, rather, by starting from an exosomatic
organogenesis that is necessarily pharmacological, which is to say that it always produces
both entropy and negentropy.
The truth then becomes that of economy, inasmuch as it enables an opening up to the
improbability of what, as the ordeal of truth, becomes the anti-anthropic quasi-cause of
anthropy. In other words, it becomes a question of knowing how an instrument can be, not
a means, but that which instructs (that is, teaches) true pro-duction, that is, instructs pro-
duction in a neganthropic way: as exosomatic différance.
To do so, we must make a leap beyond the theory of four causes and the privilege it
establishes for efficiency, so that we can give back to finality its priority, but as quasi-cau-
sality, that is, as what, poetically, and therefore incalculably, remains irreducible to calcula-
tion while requiring it, and as efficiency, by, precisely, turning it into the quasi-cause, that
is, the endless end in the incessant (as Blanchot says).
It thus becomes possible to reconsider the Operator—and the silversmith, the artisan,
the craftsman and the artist, and with Nietzsche—as the one who can engender improb-
able bifurcations in a supersaturated anthropic system. All this amounts to a program
of generalized de-proletarianization—it is not some simple assigning of culture or art to
some or other vague responsibility. It is the re-elaboration of a critique of political econ-
omy inasmuch as the latter has become a political diseconomy, where this involves totally
rethinking.

• what this has to do with work, that is, pro-duction,

• what this has to do with the relationships between automatisms and dis-automatization,
• what differentiates value from wealth, and how it would thus become possible to
develop an economy of neganthropy so that the Neganthropocene can happen, so that
we can make it advene [faire advenir].

This is what we are attempting to do with Plaine Commune. It is difficult and, in truth, des-
perate, if not hopeless. But in truth, there is nothing else to do other than what is desperate,
because it presents itself—and as never before—only by default.
It is then virtue that presents itself as such. And this is called the courage of truth.
Translated by Daniel Ross.

Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) was a French philosopher and publicist. He was the head of the Institut de
recherche et d’innovation (IRI) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he founded in 2006. In 2005 he
founded Ars Industrialis, an association for the industrial politics of the technologies of the mind, and in
2010 he established the Pharmakon philosophy school at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel in the south of Franse. He
published widely on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, and consumer culture and his best
known work is the Technics and Time series, of which three volumes have appeared. He has been called
“the most important French theorist to come after Derrida, and one of the most important thinkers anywhere
about the effects of digital technology”. He sadly passed on the 6th of August this year.

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