Elements for a General Organology

Bernard Stiegler

Abstract
These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say
an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or
when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter.
This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian
account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process
of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such
an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates’s
discussion of writing as a pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general
account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention.
By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means
pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course
of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It
is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it
becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy
at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce
new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and
desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-
scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted.

*
FIRST LECTURE

1. Introduction
I was a little unsure about how to introduce this course, and I
finally decided to discuss how I myself came to propose a general

Derrida Today 13.1 (2020): 72–94

DOI: 10.3366/drt.2020.0220
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/drt
 Elements for a General Organology 73

organology – of which it is a matter here of presenting the general

principles.1
Before giving this brief account of an intellectual adventure that began
in the early 1980s, and which led me twenty years later to this ‘general
organology’, for which I will propose in this course some Elements, I
would like:

• on the one hand, to provide some details of the relationships

between what, since at least Lamarck, has been distinguished as
organic (as distinct from what is thus considered to be inorganic)
and what I will here call organological.
• on the other hand, very briefly to outline some key features of the
context in which the perspective of a general organology seems to
me to impose itself simultaneously on the intellectual and artistic
world, the economic and industrial world, and the (geo)political
world.

2. The organic and the organological

In order to introduce not just the difference between the organic and the
organological, but the nature of the relations they maintain within what
Georges Canguilhem describes as the technical form of life, I would like
now to specify the following five points:

1. General organology attempts to establish a theory of technical life,

conceived here as a process whose evolution is indissolubly psycho-
socio-techno-logical, in addition to being relatively bio-logical,
which means that the general laws of biology are put under other
auspices [amodiées], if not modified strictly speaking2 – this process
as a whole being conceived through the Simondonian concept of a
process of individuation.
2. General organology is a method that makes possible transdiscipli-
nary approaches, which have become absolutely essential in the
current stage of organological development – that is, of technical
development, which does in general modify both psychosomatic
and social organizations but today does so in an accelerated way
that raises completely new questions: these questions induce an
epistemological, even ‘anthropological’ break (I prefer to refer
to neganthropology rather than to anthropological break), and
encounter irreducible critical problems that fall under what I call
pharmacology.3
74 Bernard Stiegler

3. To say that organology ‘amodiates’ or even modifies the general

laws of biology does not mean that it contradicts biology: it means
that it localizes biological constraints. For example, it modifies the
rule of the struggle for life, which it trans-forms into a struggle for
existence, something made possible because the ‘selection pressure’
exerted in non-technical life as the struggle for life, and as the
permanent constraint of subsistence (of ‘the survival instinct’), can
be deferred, or even totally lifted. I will return to these questions.
This localization of bio-logical constraints and possibilities results
from a composition with techno-logical (that is, organological,
and not just organic) constraints and possibilities. It amounts to
a kind of meta-evolution of the laws of evolution themselves. One
of the most important questions posed by general organology is
the precise character of this meta-evolution, which, as we will see,
involves the neurosciences – but not at all in the way pursued by
Catherine Malabou’s project.
4. What I refer to here as the organological is distinguished from
the organic in that it is composed of generally inorganic and
yet organized matter – as with any technical object. (It is true
that today disorganized and reorganized organic matter has also
appeared, such as with genetically modified organisms. There
are also atomically modified materials, called nanomaterials,
which seem to pose new epistemological problems in physics,
requiring a specific organological approach. In this sense, we are
undoubtedly entering a new organological epoch [Stiegler 2018a.)
In any case, one of the key epistemological questions raised by
general organology is the relationship between the organic and
the organological. Today, this question is focused on the theory
of the brain, and on its relationship to artificial organs, which
means that the biological question also and immediately becomes
a psycho-physiological question.4 But before turning to these
questions, we will see that Leroi-Gourhan’s 1965 analysis of
what could be called cerebrogenesis (which we should compare
to Roger Bartra’s exocerebrum, and with the neuropsychology of
Maryanne Wolf) already raises these questions – well before the
neurosciences as they have become today, thanks to brain imaging,
the possibility of which they in general don’t consider – to the
extent that it shows that we cannot understand cortical evolution
independently of the evolution of lithic organs (Bartra 2014).
5. In technical life, the relationship between the organic and the
organological is what Simondon calls transductive: in technical
 Elements for a General Organology 75

life, the organic is originally constituted in its very organicity by

the organological, and vice versa – the organological is inherently
constituted by the organic form of technical life. In other words,
in technical life, the organic cannot be thought without the
organological, and vice versa.5

3. The contemporary context: a pharmacological crisis

In the twenty-first century, humanity has entered an exceptional
situation where all those advances that had previously seemed necessary
and beneficial to industrial development find their sign reversed. Valéry
already observes in the aftermath of the First World War, as does Freud
during the interwar period in Austria, and then Husserl at the moment
of Nazism’s rise, that technological and therefore scientific becoming
contains a negative dimension, revealing what I call a pharmacological
situation (Stiegler 2013a). This pharmacological situation is now
experienced, suffered and feared by the entire planetary population
because we are reaching the limits of globalized consumerist economic
development.6
Thousands of harmful so-called side effects are generated by the global
technical system, and revealed as such in the various fields of health.
This is due largely to a situation where marketing’s social prescription
of the use of technology occurs outside of, or by circumventing, any
public regulation. Furthermore, the increasing automation enabled by
generalized digitalization, for example in finance, gives rise to new
economic problems, where speed plays a key role and seems to eliminate
all long-term prospects, in a system that seems subject to a blind,
destructive calculability because it seems to serve speculation at the
complete expense of investment.
The analogue media seem to short-circuit all social structures – from
political parties to families, more or less obviously and violently, to
the point of significantly compromising the formation of the psychic
apparatus, along with education and training. In addition, the general
connectivity made possible by the Web, search engines, social networks,
smartphones, virtual experience systems, GPS and the Internet of Things,
seems to be ruining attention – and in an inherently addictive way, as
Nicholas Carr observes in The Shallows (Carr 2010). All this has led
to an immense educational crisis – which obviously has other causes
too – and the social as such seems to be totally reconfigured, if not
to have become purely and simply obsolete, by these technologies of
transindividuation that ‘social engineering’ implements on the basis
76 Bernard Stiegler

of concepts derived from Moreno’s social graph theory, exploiting

traceability and the network effect (Halpin 2013; Hui 2016a).
Eventually notions arise about an ‘anthropological break’ or
‘posthumanism’, material that we should understand as the construction
site for neganthropology, whose timing and necessity mean that we are
most likely reaching the end of a very long process of exteriorization
(which I will discuss at length here) and the beginning of a new
process of interiorization: that is, an internal rearrangement and
reorganization of organisms that continues what has already occurred
at the industrial level with GMOs and nanomaterials – everything that
Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls transformational technologies, everything of
which the transhumanist movement is seizing hold.
As for the academic world, I consider the emergence of the projects
and programs of ‘digital humanities’ to be highly significant. General
organology fully concurs with this perspective, but broadens its scope
through what, in the framework of the work of the Institut de
recherche et d’innovation, we call ‘digital studies’. Digital studies
delineates the questions of general organology in an epoch in which
the effects of digital technology make it clear that all models of
individuation must be rethought with respect to this development – in
economics, law, education and so on. The challenge is to conceive
the question of digital writing from the pharmacological standpoint
inherited from Plato, but starting from the general organology that this
pharmacology requires as its preliminary condition. This means taking
up the achievements of Derridean deconstruction, which, contrary to
the Platonic notion of dialectics, shows the irreducibly pharmacological
character of hypomnesis, and it means doing so also in relation to
neuroscience (but completely otherwise than does Catherine Malabou).
Before moving on, I would like to stress that in relation to
such questions, I will always propose a pharmacological perspective:
whatever the situation, whether negative or positive, I will never ascribe
this negativity or this positivity to technics – nor to anything else. General
organology finds the locus of issues in the relations and arrangements
between the instances of general organology, and not in one or the
other of these instances. This methodology no doubt has its limits,
which we may have an opportunity to discuss. But we posit that, in
general, to denounce technics, economics or anything else as the cause of
‘what goes wrong’, instead of making organological relations and their
pharmacology the paramount consideration, is to look for a scapegoat in
order to dispense with thinking and acting, that is, caring – a scapegoat,
that is, a pharmakos (Stiegler 2018b).
 Elements for a General Organology 77

To conclude these general remarks, my aim with general organology

consists in:

• establishing an academic theory and practice of digital studies;

• reflecting – we will see why soon – on a new theory and practice of
forecasting [prospective] at a moment when I believe that what is
referred to as innovation, especially since Joseph Schumpeter, will
be increasingly social and decreasingly significantly technological.

I would add that the transdisciplinary method of general organology

must conduct practical experiments that fall under the umbrella of
contributory research7 – that is, the theories and practices of Kurt Lewin,
François Tosquelles and Gregory Bateson, but in the new context of
digital technologies, and as noetic technologies of contribution.

SECOND LECTURE

4. General organology and the logic of the supplement

The concrete expression of general organology occurs above all in
the hyper-critical context provoked by digital technologies, and, in
this respect, above all as digital studies. This means that the primary
subject of general organology, which is tertiary retention, and more
precisely hypomnesic tertiary retention insofar as it is irreducibly
pharmacological, confers a constitutive and therefore irreducible
bearing of noetic locality on today’s exosomatic situation. Such
locality is the sole basis from which a retrospective understanding
of philosophical and scientific – and more generally epistemic (in a
broad sense8 ) – pathways and methods can be thought or cared about
[pansable]. No understanding of philosophical and scientific pathways
and methods is possible other than via the kind of retrospective après-
coup that tertiary retention constitutes, especially hypomnesic tertiary
retention as what emerges from a process of grammatization, which
is the operator and as such the allagmatic dimension of this retro-
spection that is always both an in-spection and a pro-spection. But this
constitution is always also a destitution: it is always, ultimately, itself
pharmacological, constituting that ‘well-known’ that no longer knows
anything – and which no longer has any flavour [saveur].
Retrospection, inspection and prospection are operations made
possible by, and in turn making possible, retentions, attentions and
protentions.
78 Bernard Stiegler

Before taking up all these questions in depth, I would, as mentioned,

like to explain the context in which I arrived at the concept of general
organology, in posthumous dialogue with Derrida – after having tried to
outline an extended organology in the musical field (and starting from
organology as a branch of musicology). In fact, these notions to a large
extent arose from the five years during which I ran Ircam (Institut de
recherche et de coordination acoustique/musique).
I did not employ the notion of organology until quite late – 2003 –
more than ten years after Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of
Epimetheus, which comprised the first part of my thesis, and more than
twenty years after I began to research these matters, as part of my
master’s thesis and DEA thesis (supervised by Jean-François Lyotard).
This research concerned the relation between memory and technics,
or, to put it in Platonic language, between anamnesis, hypomnesis and
hypomnemata.
The organological question reformulates and develops the question
of technics as I encountered it a little over thirty years ago9 while
reading Of Grammatology. At that time, I was aiming not at
philosophy but at linguistics, and I immersed myself in Saussurean
questions – and in his methodological approach, whose scope and limits
still seem to me in general not to have been identified (nor, therefore,
have the most vital and current stakes of structuralism). Studying
linguistics led me to Saussure’s methodological aporias (for example,
the apparently insurmountable opposition between synchronic and
diachronic approaches), which were in truth those of structuralism
in general in its attempt to take up Saussure’s concepts. At that
time (the 1980s), Derrida had produced a discourse belonging to
what came to be called ‘poststructuralism’, through what he himself
called deconstruction, which began with a critique of Husserl’s
phenomenology.
In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, and after Speech and
Phenomena, Derrida advanced his central thesis through a critique of
Saussure – and by shifting from the question of structure (which was,
for example, still the ‘common understanding’ of the journal Tel Quel)
to more general questions of the grammē and différance – that is, to
the question of a process that, by deferring its own accomplishment,
differentiates itself, this differentiation producing traces, which is also to
say, grammēs, forms of writing and of what Of Grammatology called
‘supplements’.
Derrida’s central focus is on the place of writing in relation to
language: Of Grammatology argues that writing is not a doubling of
 Elements for a General Organology 79

language, not a second, supplementary element added to the structure of

language. On the contrary, language is ‘always already’ writing:

In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language. Not that the
word ‘writing’ has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier, but it
appears, strange as it may seem, that ‘signifier of the signifier’ no longer
defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity. ‘Signifier of the signifier’
describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure,
but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed
as ‘signifier of the signifier’ conceals and erases itself in its own production.
There the signified always already functions as a signifier. (Derrida 1988, 7)

Later in the book, Derrida shows that linguistic competence assumes,

as Saussure himself wrote, a set of mnesic traces that constitute a set
of differences. Today, these mnesic traces are observable at the neuronal
level, and this forms a new context for the questions of archi-writing and
the archi-trace that appear with Of Grammatology, and I will return to
these points later.
For me, the Derridean question of writing was truly a revelation. By
reflecting on Saussure, Derrida was able to generalize the concept to life
in general, and to posit that any trace factually produced by a living
organism – whether a ‘genetic program’ or by a social organism, in the
sense in which Aristotle refers to a social being who is also a speaking
being (zoon logon ekhon as zoon politikon) – any trace thus produced,
such as language, presupposes a logic of the supplement that itself refers
not to an ontology, that is, to a full being identical and present to itself,
but to an always-missing archi-trace, constituting itself only by dividing
itself, and as différance.
The archi-trace originally referred to something other that is absent,
or to an archi-writing that consists only of relations and differences,
constituted by a process of referral between elements in which absence
opens the play of (im)possibilities in différance and as différance. This
absence of origin is what I have tried myself to think as an originary
default [défaut d’origine] – and this amounts to a displacement that I will
discuss further, precisely because it is what leads from grammatology
to general organology (which undertakes a ‘history of the supplement’
on the basis of a guiding concept, grammatization, coming not from
Derrida but from a broad appropriation of the historical theory of
Sylvain Auroux).
These are lengthy questions, but here I will not dwell on them. I will
recall only the elements most relevant and essential to my aims. I am
providing these specifications because, in my own work, while never
abandoning Derrida’s general analysis in terms of the archi-trace and
80 Bernard Stiegler

the logic of the supplement, I have come to modulate it, and, on some
points, to challenge this analysis – and the project of general organology
passes precisely through this gap.

5. Archi-trace, trace, retentions and protentions

General organology posits that the organological – understood in the
sense of the technical and technological supplement – is what modifies
the organic, that is, the process of its différance: of its differentiation
and its delay [temporisation], its spacing and its temporalization, and in
such a way that from it a new process of individuation emerges, that is, a
new form of life. Derrida on the contrary always contests, on a thousand
occasions, everything that consists in identifying and affirming, as I have
just done, a process of differentiation between animal and human.
And in this regard, I must say that I myself do not relate the technical
form of life to the human: it is a subject I do not wish to debate because,
from a philosophical perspective, the question of the human has never
seemed to me to be of any great interest. What I am interested in is the
inhuman as the ultimate consequence of the defect that the ‘humanists’
claim to fill in, and which is also what is named evil. In saying this, I
argue that the question of knowing where, when and how man begins
is of no interest: what is interesting is to know where, when and how
there occurs in the history of life an epoch in which the organic must
compose with the organological, which thus becomes the condition of
its individuation, but also the origin by default of the differentiation of
the good and the bad (as Arnold Toynbee suggests), which later become
‘good and evil’.
This condition of noetic individuation, which Simondon calls psychic
and collective individuation, is ‘organological’ in this sense, and it is
also and in the same stroke ‘pharmacological’. But whether this begins
with Lucy, with Zinjanthropus, or 17 million years ago with the earliest
known collections of basalt minerals, which were collected by great
apes – all this is unimportant, since I see no problem if the regime of
what will come to be called man first appears in those in whom we
might not recognize ourselves. Because, in fact, I do not believe that we
would recognize ourselves much more or much better in Lucy – which
means that the question is precisely not that of man.
In Derrida, the problematic of the trace encompasses all manner of
retentional and protentional processes, whatever they may be, and not
simply those concerning noetic life, or what is usually called human
life: the Derridean problematic of the trace refers to the trace of life,
to life inasmuch as it is based on traces of previous life, and such
 Elements for a General Organology 81

that, in general, it would in this sense involve every kind of retentional

and protentional process. These notions of retention and protention
come from Husserl, and I will explain what they mean later. Let us
say for the moment that they designate processes of memorization and
anticipation or projection considered from the standpoint of Husserlian
phenomenology, but which are significantly extended when Derrida
relates them to the archi-trace.
In Husserl, retentions and protentions are phenomena existing in
the temporal flow of a consciousness itself proper to a noetic soul – in
Aristotle’s sense – which is also the soul of a ‘transcendental subject’.
In Derrida, the trace as retention and protention concerns every living
organism – if only because DNA, as it was understood at the time
he developed this grammatology, as genetic pro-gram, is a kind of
retentional as well as protentional system. In fact, this concept of genetic
‘program’ is today disputed, and biologists have abandoned this term,
with the exception of some unrepentant dogmatists. But the question of
the trace – and in this sense of retention and protention – was for all that
not in vain.
We will see later why it is so important for us, from the standpoint of
general organology, to return to these questions today: the whole project
of general organology rests on the concept of tertiary retention – which
is found neither in Husserl nor in Derrida, but which I have elaborated
after having been inspired by their thought, which I argue constitutes the
horizon and the ultimate stake of ‘The Origin of Geometry’ – on the basis
of which Derrida elaborated his own ‘program’, however ‘improbable’
and ‘unprogrammable’ it appears, and appearing, in fact, only as this
experience of the improbable program.
It is a matter, today, of closely re-analysing these concepts of
retention and protention extended to living things in general, and of
re-analysing them with respect to contemporary zoology and biology.
To my knowledge, Derrida never tried to do this himself – unless one
believes that La vie la mort undertakes this work, which does not seem
to me to be an argument one could make unreservedly. And above all,
this should be done by taking account of what neuroscience is bringing
to light: at least one lecture will be devoted to this.

6. Writing and exteriorization

In Of Grammatology, and in order to enlighten these questions,
Derrida explores the concept of exteriorization as expounded by
André Leroi-Gourhan in Gesture and Speech. He relies on the work
82 Bernard Stiegler

of this founder of modern anthropology and prehistoric science to

support his conception of writing as archi-trace – or archi-writing. In
Leroi-Gourhan, exteriorization is hominization insofar as it consists
in ‘augmenting’ life, the organic, with non-living organs, forming the
organological sphere of the organized inorganic. According to Leroi-
Gourhan, this begins 3.6 million years ago, and results in a co-evolution
of psychosomatic organs, artificial organs and social organizations.
With exteriorization, the central question that Leroi-Gourhan raises in
Gesture and Speech is the appearance of what he defines as a new
conception of memory:
In this book the term ‘memory’ is understood in a very broad sense. It
is not a property of the intelligence, but any kind of support or medium
for action sequences. That being so, we can speak of a ‘species memory’
to define the fixing of behaviour in animal species, of an ‘ethnic’ memory
that ensures the reproduction of behaviour in human societies, and in
the same way of an ‘artificial’ memory, which in its most recent form is
electronic, which, without recourse to either instinct or reflection, ensures
the reproduction of mechanical action sequences. (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 413
translation modified)

By extending this statement by Leroi-Gourhan, which clearly

contributed profoundly to the crystallization of Of Grammatology10 , I
have myself argued that, starting from hominization, we must conceive
the sexed living thing that exteriorizes itself organologically (that is,
‘extending’ its somatic organs), thus forming what Canguilhem calls
technical life, as the arrangement of the three kinds of memory that are
described in this note:

• ‘species memory’
• ‘ethnic memory’
• ‘artificial memory’.

But here, a comment about ethnic memory is needed. On the one hand,
ethnicity as such appears, according to Leroi-Gourhan himself, only
belatedly, while before ethnicity there existed a collective, group memory
forming ‘the social frameworks of memory’, as Maurice Halbwachs
will say (Halbwachs 1992). On the other hand, what Leroi-Gourhan
describes stems both from nervous memory and artificial memory:
‘ethnic memory’ is at once in the memory of individuals, and in this case
it is nervous, and in the artificial memory of things, and in this case it is
technical or artificial. It is in fact a metastable process, metastabilized
by institutions whose function is to reproduce it and gather it as it
 Elements for a General Organology 83

evolves. This is why Leroi-Gourhan occasionally refers to socio-technical

memory.
For this reason, I have renamed what Leroi-Gourhan refers to as
ethnic memory and sometimes calls socio-technical memory (a term
taken up by Augustin Berque). This reclassification redistributes Leroi-
Gourhan’s analysis through another way of distinguishing three types of
memory:

1. phylogenetic, that is, constituting, through the genome, the phylum

of a species, which August Weismann also calls germline memory;
2. epigenetic, that is, nervous, and ‘contained’ in the soma, and more
precisely in the brain;
3. epiphylogenetic, that is, the fruit of epigenetic experience, but
transmissible to the phylum that is technical life through technical
organs, and not through the physiological organs: organological,
and not just organic.

As a general rule, the memory of sexed living things consists of

two layers, one at the level of the species (genetic) and the other
nervous (epigenetic). I maintain that technical or epiphylogenetic
memory modifies the relationships between the two preceding memories
because it makes individual experience transmissible between the
generations, which had not previously been the case (contrary
to what Lamarck believed): I will come back to this point in
detail.11
It is on the basis of this notion of a third memory in its play with
the other two types of memory that I try to think the trace as Derrida
formed the concept. But we have seen why this use of the Derridian
concept is not what Derrida himself makes of it. For him, the concept of
the trace is what makes it possible to overcome all anthropocentrism
and to contest every opposition between human and animal. More
generally, deconstruction aims to contest all the oppositions bequeathed
by twenty-five centuries of philosophy and metaphysics (soul versus
body, being versus becoming, anamnesis versus hypomnesis, human
versus animal, and so on). But at the same time, his definition of
the trace does not make it possible to think what I am here calling
the epiphylogenetic, which is also to say, the organological, which is
tertiary retention – and which is the condition of what Derrida himself
will investigate in terms of the ‘as such’ in Of Spirit: Heidegger and
the Question.12
84 Bernard Stiegler

7. Hermeneutic circle and traceological privilege

I share this concern to avoid being locked in oppositions – this is
the necessity of deconstruction, and specifies Derrida’s approach with
respect to the Abbau (‘dis-integration’) of metaphysics according to
Heidegger. But:
• On the one hand, distinctions remain necessary, which do not
oppose what they distinguish, but which describe evolutionary
processes, that is, what Derrida himself called the history of the
supplement (and there would obviously be no such history if there
were no differentiations and thus no distinctions).
It is these distinctions that make it possible to posit, for example:
1) that a stone is not alive, although up to a certain point life
belongs to physics (that is, does not contradict or oppose
physics, but can temporarily and locally exempt itself from and
compose with a purely physical expression of the second law
of thermodynamics – this is the meaning of the way Schrödinger
defines life in 1944 in What is Life? – the living thing returning to
the laws of physics in totality when it dies, and in this way de-
composing and dis-integrating; on this point, see the letter from
Mallarmé to Eugène Lefébure of 17 May 1867:
. . . my sketch appears – appears –. Truly I am broken down into my
constituent parts, and when I think that that is necessary to have a very
unified view of the Universe! Otherwise one feels no other unity than
that of one’s life. In a museum in London there is ‘the price of a man’:
a long box [unreadable], with numerous pigeonholes in which can be
found starch, phosphorus, flour, bottles of water, alcohol – and great
pieces of artificial gelatine. I’m such a man. (Mallarmé 1988, 80)

2) that a plant is not an animal, although an animal is constituted by

its vegetative system;
3) that an animal is not a human.
Even if the plant owes everything to the mineral, even if the animal is
largely an organism composed of a set of organs that function like plants,
and that can thus be called vegetative, even if man is himself most of
the time locked into survival behaviour like the animal that struggles to
live, nevertheless, a stone is not a plant, a plant is not an animal, and
an animal is not a human, even though one can say that the human is
an animal – and there is thus a question of irreversibility at stake here,
 Elements for a General Organology 85

which participates in a (neg)entropic process of which différance is the

name given by deconstruction, but without it being truly thematized or
taken on board [assumé].13
• On the other hand, once distinctions are understood outside of
oppositional models, then they can be thought as compositional
functions – that is, tendencies expressed in a process.
Within a living ‘human’ organism, for example, there are obviously
tendencies that are mineral, vegetable, animal and ‘human’ (but it
is better to say, with Aristotle, noetic) properly speaking, tendencies
that constantly compose. It is also obvious that mineral tendencies are
entropic, while living tendencies are negentropic, but that the tendency
of technical life itself contains an entropic tendency, especially with
the advent of the industrial epoch. [Added in 2019: This is reflected
in what the IPCC calls ‘anthropic forcings’, while life is noetic only
insofar as it is neganthropic, that is, insofar as it struggles against
its own anthropy through the constitution of positive pharmacologies
(also called therapies and therapeutics) prescribing pharmaka for toxic
(anthropic) tendencies, and this is the issue at stake for us in a
contemporary rereading of Phaedrus and Plato’s Pharmacy.]
• Finally, I take up Heidegger’s point of view in §§3–4 of Being and
Time, where he posits that it is by starting from his own world that
Dasein can truly consider what is not this world, or what is not just
this world, namely:
1) matter as such, inasmuch as it is not matter as it presents itself
to Dasein and in its world as food, tool, raw material, and so
on, but rather as the object of physics, life as such, inasmuch
as it is not itself, nor the noetic and geschichtlich living beings
that constitute its world, but non-human life – the object of
biology.
2) Life, approached in this way, as the subject of biology, along
with matter, approached in this way, as the subject of physics,
together constitute what we have become accustomed to
calling ‘nature’, by understanding it, with Rousseau, as the
original equilibrium, physics and biology forming the ‘natural
sciences’.
But we now know – since thermodynamics – that this apparent
equilibrium is an illusion, and that it is precarious on infinitely varied
scales, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, the question of
86 Bernard Stiegler

relations of scale here becoming crucial (and this is why we should reread
Derrida with Simondon and beyond Simondon). Yet the consequences of
this initial disequilibrium have never been drawn, although Bergson and
Whitehead have opened up ways of drawing these consequences (Miquel
2019; Hui 2019).
To put it more precisely, and to differentiate myself from Heidegger,
or to displace his perspective14 , I posit that it is starting from the
epiphylogenetic trace, the trace that appears with technical life, that it
is possible for us to discern the trace that constitutes life in general, and
to access it, and not the other way around: this is a phenomenologico-
existential standpoint in the strict sense, which makes conditions of
appearance conditions of what appears, a requirement that lies at the
heart of Of Grammatology, but which, in the end, Derrida does not
quite take on, and this is so because he does not maintain Husserl’s
distinction between primary retention and secondary retention, and
consequently fails to identify the specificity of tertiary retention as such.
From that point on, the history of the supplement announced in Of
Grammatology never sees the light of day (Stiegler 2009b).
To be able to access the trace that does not emerge from
epiphylogenesis, for example, the somatic living trace as such, and
distinguished as such from the germline living trace, or to access the
germline living trace as such, but also the trace in periodic (that
is, symmetrical – unlike the aperiodic that opens asymmetry – as such)
crystalline structures, and, beyond that, in atomic and subatomic
molecular structures as such, it is necessary to start [partir] from
epiphylogenesis, on the basis [partir] of epiphylogenesis – in both senses
of the word partir.
Therefore, the trace before epiphylogenesis presents itself to us only
through epiphylogenesis – that is, by default, and thus epiphylogenesis
has a hermeneutic privilege, that of a stage of archi-writing inasmuch
as it consists of tertiary retentions, that is, technics, epiphylogenetics,
constituting a new field of recursivity, a geschichtlich recurrence,
amounting to a noetic fūdo, which is also to say what Ignace Meyerson
described as a working environment, which is also an anamnesic
possibility supported by a hypomnesic (im)possibility resulting from a
spatialization that is both an exosomatization and a grammatization,
and which makes it possible for epiphylogenetic ek-sistence, through
a retentional retrovision that is also a protentional provision, so to
speak, to embrace the global traceological field that is the history of
life on Earth – and, beyond Earth, in the Universe – as the history of the
supplement.
 Elements for a General Organology 87

In Heidegger, the hermeneutic privilege that consists in what he

himself called the hermeneutic circle is an ontological privilege: it is
the ontological privilege of Dasein insofar as it is the only being who
questions, and who, in so doing, poses the ‘question of being’, and of its
difference from beings (every being is, but being is not a being – being,
for example, is not water, as the element, the hypokeimenon, that is, the
sub-stant, according to Thales, seems to make imaginable). The privilege
of this being lies in being the being from which we must start [partir] in
order to think beings in general, and, through that, being that is not any
being. Taking off [a partir] from this point, it is a question of knowing
what partir means. All knowledge would be such a knowing-how-to-set-
off [savoir-partir].
For us, there is, if I may say so, a traceological privilege, which traces
the archi-trace, that is, which individuates it, and which, in so doing,
différantiates this archi-trace by manifesting it as the history of the trace
or the supplement concretized by what I will analyse in a later lecture
under the name of grammatization and as a history of tertiary retention.
If it is true that différance is this différance only insofar as it spatializes
and separates by delaying and temporalizing, the archi-trace can only
be its différance, which means that it cannot ‘be’, that it does not ek-
sist, but that it insists, or consists, or resists, or even that it subsists,
but never ek-sists (Stiegler 2011, 89–93). And this is because it is the
principle of ex-teriorization as différance. But this also means that
consistence can be granted to the archi-trace or archi-writing only
through the consideration of the history of the existing traces between
which it generates its différance – whether these traces are genetic, that
is, composed of DNA, epigenetic, that is, engraved [engrammées] in
‘grey matter’, or epiphylogenetic, that is, constituting the noetic milieu
as a working environment, across the history of exosomatization and
grammatization that regularly ‘shuffles the deck’.
In other words, if there is no break in the strict sense between the
animal and the human, for example, there is nevertheless a change in
the regime of individuation, individuation itself having to be understood
as a process, while, given that only psychosocial individuation enables
the trace to be considered as such, no trace considered in this way can
ever be purified of the epiphylogenetic origin – that is, the organological
origin – of this ‘as such’, and such that it is as such an originary
default.
These points might seem literally scholastic, but they are nevertheless
highly important for the concerns of this course. According to the
methodological standpoint that I am maintaining here, and if you are
willing to concede the preceding arguments, we can set off only from our
88 Bernard Stiegler

current organological situation – that is, our pharmacological situation,

which I will try to characterize as a not-being-there, or a no-longer-
being-there. Heidegger already refers to this in ‘Time and Being’ as
the task of thinking being without beings, that is, without the there
of Da-sein, but for the consideration of another there, which is also
to say, of another locality as another possibility of taking place [avoir-
lieu] – referred to as Ereignis. If you will at least provisionally grant me
these arguments, then we can enter into a discourse on the living in
general, and, through that, on the mineral, which life needs in order
to live, including in the gaseous or liquid state. It is only from such a
standpoint that we can consider the oikos – and general organology is
obviously the method that I defend as the way to pose every kind of
ecological question, and as these questions impose themselves upon us,
now and forever.
On the basis of reading Leroi-Gourhan, something became clear to
me: it is necessary to think what Jacques Derrida calls différance – which
constitutes the process of the production of traces, which he also calls
supplements – precisely as a process, while the possibility of considering
this process, starting from what Georges Canguilhem calls the technical
form of life, should be understood as a process of exteriorization, in the
sense proposed by Leroi-Gourhan, with the formidable philosophical
problem being that, as we will soon see (this will be the subject
of a coming lesson), exteriorization is a paradoxical concept, since
it is not preceded by an interiority, and therefore is not exactly an
exteriorization. [It is by reading Alfred Lotka’s fundamental article,
‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’ (Lotka 1945), that it
is possible to treat [panser] this paradox.]
It is an exteriorization that is at the same time an interiorization. In
other words, it is what, while distinguishing an outside and an inside in
a movement of going outside that is also a movement of going inside,
mutually establishes this inside and this outside by their transductive
relation – the mutuality of what Derrida called the archi-trace.
But here, the archi-trace cannot be thought abstractly, outside of
the reality of the terms that it positively constitutes as relation.
[Which is a dissemination. It calls for a hyper-material (Stiegler 2008)
conception of the trace inasmuch as it is only ever presented through
a process of materialization/dematerialization that is also a process of
functionalization/defunctionalization (Stiegler 2015).]
To summarize what we have just said:

• the trace is not anthropological or noetic, since there are traces in

all life;
 Elements for a General Organology 89

• Derrida therefore does not privilege the trace that I call

epiphylogenetic, which I myself privilege because I make it the
condition of access to the trace in general;
• in so doing, I in a way repeat Heidegger’s gesture, which postulates
a ‘privileged being’, the one who questions, and that we ourselves
are;
• [and yet it is now a matter of thinking being in beings, that
is, without Dasein, without there-being. Does this mean that we
should abandon the there? Or does it mean, on the contrary, that
we should think and take care of [panser] the there and its always
already no longer being there (its disseminating deterritorialization)
otherwise, beyond the ‘question of being’ that Dasein bore and
made as the difference of being and beings, and that we should
do so starting from a différance that would take up the question of
locality and of taking place as Ereignis on the basis of an archi-trace
considered from an epiphylogenetic standpoint?]

Am I not then forgetting all of Derrida’s arguments against Heidegger

and the privilege he accords to the question of being, which is also to say,
to ‘presence’, his rejection of writing, and so on? In fact, I do not repeat
Heidegger’s gesture in this regard, since I do the opposite: I posit that
the question is not that of being, but that of the putting into question by
technics, that is, the question of psychosocial individuation as it is made
possible by tertiary retention, which opens in becoming the possibility
and impossibility (the pharmacology) of inscribing into it by realizing the
protentions of a future, which is the future of noesis as epiphylogenesis
remaining to come.
Such are the ‘metaphysical’ considerations that support the method
called ‘general organology’. Next week, we will return to the starting
points of this method, starting from more empirical data.

8. Hauntological post-script for Derrida Today

In Speech and Phenomena and especially in Of Grammatology, Derrida
highlights the way writing has been considered by metaphysics – itself
characterized as phonologocentrism and as the self-presence of the
voice before its written reproductive exteriorization. As we have seen,
Derrida characterizes this consideration as ‘accidental doubling’ and
‘fallen secondarity’. Thus for ‘metaphysics’, writing would always be
an accident lacking an origin, an arkhē, an essence, and this accident is
90 Bernard Stiegler

always secondary, that is, arriving too late to grasp the presence in truth
of what presents itself in logos as phonē, etc.
Here we should, for example, go to China, to see how it
cosmologically shapes the sinogrammatical experience of the trace that
does not double any phonē whatsoever, or to Japan, where according to
Watsuji and Berque this generates a specific experience of fūdo as noetic
milieu. We should go and see this, then, in order to deviate a little, like
Rousseau’s ecliptic as read by Derrida, from a deconstruction itself still
perhaps imprisoned, finally, in a question of the arkhē, that is, of the
archi(trace), in order to ‘let come’ the ordeal of the trace in Gestell,
which today draws on all these sinogrammatical traces, as well as those
that are alphabetical, linear and so on. Such are the stakes of the project
initiated by Yuk Hui in The Question Concerning Technology in China
(2016b).
(Such an imprisonment, which would reveal itself in the aftermath
of the death of the one who thought and cared about [pansé] the
objective deconstruction presenting itself as a monstrosity [Derrida
1998, 5] through an archi-noetic deconstruction claiming its aftermath
(in the doubly epokhal redoubling), such an imprisonment in the
aftermath of the aftermath would belong to what, in colloquial French,
one calls a ‘first class burial’ – such as those who spend their lives
preventing the dead from living by celebrating the dead in order to
perpetually neutralize everything that could make it return as a noetic
phantom – noesis being always and above all composed of such returns,
which is the issue at stake in the reference to Pindar’s Persephone in
Meno. And of course, the epigones are then tempted to adapt to such a
burial in the hope of gaining some posthumous recognition, so to speak.
How to resist this in these times of academico-institutional hardship,
how not to become a specialist of the tiny ‘Derridean’ crenellation on
the globalized market of higher education? A major dilemma concerning
what to do about the future of what Petar Bojanic studies as the politics
of the counter-institution in the work of Derrida.)
I focus here on geo-noetico-political prospects in the Anthropocene
era of the biosphere-cum-technosphere (Gestell), and in terms
of a consideration of the neganthropological horizon called the
Neganthropocene, in order to emphasize that this accidentality (that
is, this contingency) of the tekhnē that is writing (whether linear or
ideogrammatical), and this doubling (grammatization, alphabetical or
not, scriptural or not, for example as the mechanical grammatization
of the gestures of workers that generates industrial capitalism, itself
generating the Anthropocene era and Gestell as its ultimate stage), this
 Elements for a General Organology 91

accidentality and doubling are the issues at stake in what is understood,

from The Fault of Epimetheus to Qu’appelle-t-on panser?, as the doubly
epokhal redoubling.
From The Fault of Epimetheus, which questioned Being and Time
after and in terms of this doubly epokhal redoubling (where the
supplement presents itself firstly as the techno-logical suspension of
circuits of transindividuation constituted as an epoch and/or an era of
noesis, then engendering, by doubling this [contingent or presupposed
as such, and as accidental] techno-logical redoubling, new circuits
of recursive transindividuation, which in this way constitute a new
epoch and/or era of noesis), from The Fault of Epimetheus, then, to
Qu’appelle-t-on panser?, which investigates the reading of Nietzsche by
Heidegger and investigates Nietzsche himself through the critique of this
Heideggerian interpretation, in particular with respect to Zarathustra (a
critique that also takes aim at the Hitlerian and Nazi interpretation of
Nietzsche), the issue is precisely to redouble what it no longer seems
possible to redouble, due to the disruption that outstrips and overtakes
thought and its treatments [pansements].15 The question, then, is speed
insofar as it is finite, however rapid it may be, like the (cosmologically
constant) speed of light, and the infinite speed of a bifurcation in the
dynamic system where such speed is produced, and which exceeds
physics as well as biology without for all that being ‘suprasensible’, but
as neganthropological event.
Specifying these questions and problems characteristic of the stakes
of noesis in the epoch of computational artificial intelligence will be the
final subject of the fourth volume of Technics and Time, undertaken as
a consideration of the ordeal of which ‘post-truth’ is one of the names.
Translated by Daniel Ross

References
Bartra, Roger (2014), Anthropology of the Brain: Consciousness, Culture, and Free
Will, trans. Gusti Gould, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berque, Augustin (2004), ‘Offspring of Watsuji’s theory of milieu: Fûdo’,
GeoJournal 60: 4, pp. 389–96.
Carr, Nicholas (2010), The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,
New York and London: W. W. Norton.
Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of Grammatology, corrected edition, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1992), On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser, Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press.
Halpin, Harry (2013), Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web
(Semantic Web and Beyond), New York: Springer.
92 Bernard Stiegler

Hui, Yuk (2016a), On the Existence of Digital Objects, Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.
——(2016b), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on
Cosmotechnics, Falmouth: Urbanomic.
——(2019), Recursivity and Contingency, London and New York: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Leroi-Gourhan, André (1993), Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT Press.
Lotka, Alfred J. (1945), ‘The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle’, Human
Biology 17 (1945), pp. 167–94.
Mallarmé, Stéphane (1988), Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Rosemary
Lloyd, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Miquel, Paul-Antoine (2019), Vénus et Prométhée. Essai sur la relation entre
l’humain et la biosphere, Paris: Kimé.
Stiegler, Bernard (2008), Économie de l’hypermatériel et psychopouvoir. Entretiens
avec Philippe Petit et Vincent Bontems, Paris: Mille et une nuits.
——(2009a), Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
——(2009b), ‘The Magic Skin; or The Franco-European Accident of Philosophy
after Jacques Derrida’, Qui Parle 18, pp. 97–110.
——(2011), The Decadence of Industrial Democracies: Disbelief and Discredit,
Volume 1, trans. Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold, Cambridge: Polity Press.
——(2015), Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible, trans.
Barnaby Norman, Cambridge: Polity.
——(2016), Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work, trans. Daniel Ross,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
——(2018a), The Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross, London: Open Humanities
Press.
——(2018b), Qu’appelle-t-on panser? 1. L’immense regression, Paris: Les Liens qui
Libèrent.
——(2019), The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational
Capitalism, trans. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity Press.
——(2013a), What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, trans. Daniel Ross,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
——(2013b), Pharmacologie du Front national, Paris: Flammarion.
——(2020), Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019, trans. Daniel Ross, London: Open
Humanities Press.
Tetsuro, Watsuji (1961), A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas,
Japan: Government Printing Bureau.

Notes
1. This course, which was given at the University of Zurich in 2012, and which
is devoted to introducing the main notions of general organology, does not
integrate the more recent work I have undertaken on the basis of Alfred Lotka’s
research, which led him to the notion of exosomatic evolution, on which basis I
am now trying to elaborate a more general program of neganthropology (Stiegler
2016; Stiegler 2018a; Stiegler 2018b; Stiegler 2019). In what follows, I have
sometimes made additions that partially update my 2012 analyses without really
developing them – these developments can be found, synthesized with particular
 Elements for a General Organology 93

regard to the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, in Qu’appelle-t-on panser?

Their consequences for the philosophy of Derrida will be specified in the sixth
volume of Technics and Time, which now has the subtitle, The Faculty of
Dreaming: Re-Founding Psychoanalysis in the War of Spirits – inshallah.
2. Taking up the notion of orthogenesis from Lotka’s work, general organology,
enriched by its new branch called exorganology, is indeed a modification of
the laws of biology in the human context (or rather: in the context of noetic
life insofar as it is technical and thus exosomatic), and not just an amendation
[amodiation]. Translator’s note: The literal meaning of ‘amodiation’ is leasing,
that is, the contracting of rights to another party.
3. See Stiegler 2013.
4. Here we should discuss Maryanne Wolf, which I do in the preface and afterword
of the French edition of Proust and the Squid, and we should also go back to
a reference made by Jean-Pierre Changeux to Ignace Meyerson. With respect to
Meyerson, see Bernard Stiegler (2020). The impossibility of isolating, in the case
of noetico-technical life, the biological, the physiological, the psychological and
the social will be a subject specifically examined in the sixth volume of Technics
and Time.
5. Here we should open a debate with the mesology of Augustin Berque, as he
redefines it on the basis of Watsuji Tetsuro’s thought of fūdo. Berque does not
seem to be aware of Simondon’s work, except through a reference to an article
by Victor Petit.
6. Which, in the absence of policies taking account of this situation, inevitably
leads to the designation of a scapegoat, pharmakos, and to the rise of the far
right throughout the world. See Stiegler 2013b.
7. Since this course, this has been concretized in France and in Seine-Saint-Denis
by the Contributory Learning Territory program: see recherchecontributive.org
and internation.world.
8. Expanded both in Heidegger’s sense, considering this term with Homer, and
before the metaphysical opposition between tekhnē and epistēmē effected
by Plato, and in Foucault’s sense in The Order of Things, revised in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, from the standpoint of the archive.
9. Recalling that this was written in 2012.
10. Of Grammatology emerged from two articles commissioned from Derrida by
Jean Piel for the journal Critique, one for a review of Gesture and Speech, the
other for the occasion of the publication of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of
Languages.
11. It is at this point that we should reread the first session of the seminar La vie
la mort, where Derrida challenges the opposition that François Jacob presents
at the beginning of The Logic of Life between the genetic program that ‘does
not receive lessons from experience’ and this experience itself insofar as it
constitutes the nervous memory of the individual. This deconstructive challenge
is utterly legitimate, but, once again, it is insufficient. It is legitimate in that
it alone makes it possible to understand how the opposition between genetic
program and experience is in fact, if not in law, called into question by ‘gene
therapies’, implemented starting from the 1970s on the basis of restriction
enzymes (Stiegler 2009a). And here we should also integrate the consequences
of the observations and theories of Stephen Jay Gould. But it is insufficient
because the factual overcoming of the opposition in the sense of this opposition
described by Derrida is noetically fruitful only when it makes it possible to
understand the genesis of tertiary retention and epiphylogenesis, through a new
thinking of the milieu and of the relationships of living things to it – by taking
up Jakob von Uexküll – where the ternary coupling individual-milieu-species
94 Bernard Stiegler

already constitutes pre-exo-somatic arrangements, that is, recursive dispositions

with three terms.
12. From this perspective, the deconstruction of François Jacob’s opposition in
The Logic of Life between the genetic program and epigenetic deliberation, as
Derrida takes it up in La vie la mort, is undoubtedly necessary, but, in the current
context, when these issues have become the heart of political, juridical, economic
and geopolitical questions, it is as insufficient as it is necessary. As long as the
role of tertiary retention is not specified in the becoming of life insofar as it
becomes noetic (in the sense in which Aristotle referred to the noetic soul), the
deconstruction of biology and of the philosophemes it smuggles in is bound to
seem like a refusal to hear the new questions brought by science, and contributes
to the discredit into which deconstruction has fallen, and along with it, more
generally, so-called ‘poststructuralist’ thought (when it is not instrumentalized
and turned against itself, as Berns and Rouvroy have shown, for example, and
on this point, see my commentary in Automatic Society, Volume 1).
13. I believe that this is so because Derrida, in the end, and after Jacob, understands
this question via the concept of information, which is to consider the fact of
negentropy starting from its definition in information theory. At the time of
the La vie la mort seminar, this understanding of negentropy is dominant. But
a more demanding consideration of Schrödinger’s theses, with Bailly, Longo
and Montévil, and an analysis of what tertiary retention introduces into this
conceptual field, should today open up other prospects – which are those of
neganthropology, which will be addressed in the fourth volume of Technics and
Time.
14. This displacement is the key issue emphasized by Augustin Berque with respect
to the contradictions that arise in Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical
Study (1961). See Berque 2004.
15. This outstripping and overtaking [prise de vitesse] and its consequences are
examined in States of Shock, Automatic Society, Volume 1, and The Age of
Disruption.