Stiegler Reading Derrida: The Prosthesis of Deconstruction in Technics

In his massive multi-volume work Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler explores a history of technics as epiphylogenesis—the preservation in technical objects of epigenetic experience. Epiphylogenesis for Stiegler marks a break with genetic evolution (which cannot preserve the lessons of experience), a break which also constitutes the “invention” of the human. As Stiegler puts it in the general introduction to Technics and Time: “As a‘process of exteriorisation,’ technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life.” (Technics and Time 17) Since the “human” is constituted through its exteriorisation into tools, its origin is neither biological (a particular arrangement of cells) nor transcendental (to be found in something like consciousness). The origin of the human as the prosthesis of the living is therefore fundamentally aporetic: one should speak, for Stiegler, of a non-origin or default of origin. Stiegler develops these arguments through a reading of Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan, showing on the one hand how the the empirical approach of the palaeo-anthropologist cannot avoid the transcendental question of origin and, on the other, how Rousseau’s transcendental account of the question of origin inscribes inside its account, despite itself, the thought of the human as contingent or accidental (Technics and Time 82-133). I will not expand on Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan and Rousseau here. What I intend to discuss is rather the relationship between Stiegler’s work and that of Jacques Derrida. In particular we will examine Stiegler’s discussion of Derrida in the latter half of the first volume of Technics and Time and then move on to discuss some other points from the interviews between the two men gathered in the Echographies collection. The context of Stiegler’s disagreement with Derrida in the first volume of Technics and Time is the discussion in chapter 3 of the palaeo-anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan and the “invention of the human”. At the opening of the chapter Stiegler argues: