Bernard Stigler: A walker of thought

This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 33, 2020, the original title of the original article is "Bernard Stigler: The Walker of Thought", it is strictly forbidden to reprint it privately, and infringement must be investigated

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler committed suicide on August 6, local time. He was a legendary man who was imprisoned for bank robbery and began philosophical research in prison; he re-discussed the role and place of technology in human nature with works such as Technology and Time, and is the most important representative of the critical theory camp of contemporary Western society.

Text/Zhang Yibing

Bernard Stigler

My encounter with Stigler began in 2013 when his ex-wife Malab visited Nanjing University, a famous contemporary French female philosopher who is also a disciple of Derrida, and on that day, she came to my office to drink water during a lecture and saw me in 2001 with Derrida, and tears came down in an instant. It was also the day that I learned from her that her ex-husband was Stigler. At the time, I was taken aback, because I had read La Technique et le Temps many years earlier and had been deeply amazed by Heidegger's metamorphosis in the theory of technological existence. That day's luncheon became a discussion in which I asked her about Stigler's recent thoughts.

The key word in Malabu's philosophy is the plasticity of existence and thought, and her influence in the philosophical circles of continental Europe and America is that she projects her metaphysical gaze onto genetics and brain science. It was Derrida, Heidegger and the shared focus on technology that brought her together with Stigler. One of her masterpieces that we are translating is Heidegger's Changes. In the preface to the first volume of Stigler's Technology and Time, we can see the following text: "We are bound together by tenderness to a rigorous philosophical pursuit, which unites us and also brings with it an atmosphere of strife. Apparently, their love was based on a shared interest in philosophy, but Stigler also admitted that there was "a creative and dangerous competition" between him and the equally competitive Malab, and perhaps it was this competition that kept them apart at the end. Malab seemed to regretfully tell me that "his thinking has become very radical now, and the books he is writing now are all about criticizing the new technological domination of contemporary capitalism." This made me, who was studying radical ideas in Europe, more interested in Stigler.

Fell in love with philosophy while being a prisoner

In 2015, Stiegler was invited to visit Nanjing University for the first time, and together we opened a workshop. This is the beginning of our mutual understanding. At that time, he regarded me as a monster who studied marx's officialization, always speaking cautiously; and I regarded him as a student of Derrida who studied Heidegger's technical view, so he always wanted to approach him from the context of existential and deconstructive theory. In this way, there is more curiosity and temptation between us than substantive exchanges.

Speaking of Stigler's study of Heidegger and his encounter with Derrida, one must first encounter the popular passage that Derida visits Stigler in prison for robbing a bank, and legend has it that the former found that the prisoner who wrote to him and claimed to study Heidegger was really a teachable child, so he agreed to be his doctoral thesis supervisor. Once during a dinner, I jokingly asked Stigler why he thought of robbing the bank? He said unabashedly: "Young and vigorous, I just want to get my own money back." "It was a special era, the post-1968 era. Stigler said the May storm of 1968 "can only be used as a revolt, not as a revolution." Rushing into the streets, young people simply express their dissatisfaction in a purposeless, radical and repulsive illusion of criticism, but all do not know what to do for. So once the passionate rebellion carnival passed, everyone was very disappointed. In the search for new stimuli and catharsis, there is crime. However, Stigler went to rob the bank and had a specific background in life.

Stigler was born on April 1, 1952, to a modest working-class family in Villebon-sur-Yvette, Esson province, Ile de France, to an electronics engineer and to a banker. When Stigler was young, he grew up in Sarcelles, France. When the "Red May Storm" broke out in Paris in 1968, Stigler, a sophomore in high school, took part in street barricades and joined the French Communist Party after the May storm. In 1969, after graduating from high school, Stigler began studying as a director's assistant at the French Academy of Film Freedom (CLCF), but he did not finish his studies. Because before graduating from high school, he was only 16 years old and was already working outside the home. It seems that because he did not like a fixed occupation within a certain system, he worked as a casual worker everywhere, working as a farm worker and a bartender. In 1972, Stigler worked on a farm, saving some money and buying a small restaurant. The clever Stigler soon dug up his first pot of gold, so he sold his old small restaurant and bought a more lucrative jazz bar. Most of the bars frequented by Europeans are only open at night, and such places are indispensable to people of all kinds, which of course becomes a place where the police often stare. Once, in order to testify against a customer who often came to the bar, the police asked the owner of the bar, Stigler, to appear as a witness, but he refused on the spot. So the police made an excuse to close down Stigler's shop, which also cut off Stigler's livelihood. In a fit of rage, taking advantage of his mother's familiarity with the internal situation of the bank, he robbed three banks in a row. According to his own words, this success was like an addiction that could not be stopped, until the fourth crime, just met the police patrolling the street, and was arrested on the spot. Stigler himself said he should have spent 15 years in prison for his crimes, but he was only sentenced to 8 years in prison for finding a good lawyer. Thus, from 1978 to 1983, Stigler served his sentence in the Prison of Saint-Michel and the Detention Centre in Toulouse, and was released early in the fifth year.

Stigler himself said that he really fell in love with philosophy while he was a prisoner. Ordinary people, when they go to prison to serve their sentences, will fall into a state of collapse and downward from the psychological situation and survival attitude. Stigler had a similar brief moment, saying that he had been desperate in the two weeks since his arrest, and like many others, had thought of suicide, but he quickly picked himself up. This restoration contains a yearning for philosophy. A friend heard that Stigler wanted to study philosophy and began to send him some philosophy books. Later, he entered the University of Toulouse through correspondence in prison to study philosophy. Istigrad's own recollection is that the first thing he did when he got up every morning was to read Malami's poems, then listen to the radio, and then begin to read the philosophical literature and reflections of Husserl, Heidegger, and Simon Dong. Malami's poetry is already a suspension of vulgar reality from abstract symbols and imagery, and philosophy itself is a metaphysics far from life, so for this period of supposedly dark years, Stigler has generated another state of pure ideological construction that ordinary people cannot enter. It is precisely in this state of closure and quietness that he realizes what phenomenology calls a suspended state, that is, the self-evident common sense of ordinary people is separated in parentheses to create a pure return to the first encounter of things themselves. The estrangement in prison is a natural isolation, which creates a rupture in what Heidegger calls the world around him, which may return Stigler to the original structure of philosophical thought. Years later, Stiegler did use Technology and Time as his doctoral dissertation, and under derrida's guidance, he passed the application for a doctorate at the Ecole Supérieure des Social Sciences in Paris.

See the ubiquitous technology that dominates the world around you

In 2016, Stigler came to Nanjing University again as promised, this time, we hired him as an adjunct professor at the Center for Marxist Social Theory, and signed the first three-year cooperation agreement, agreeing that he would come to Nanjing University every year to open an English course. So for the next three years, Stigler went to Nanjing between April and May to hold seminars for the students of NTU, and over the next few years, he opened courses such as "From German Ideology" to "Dialectics of Nature"—Reading Marx and Engels from the Perspective of the Anthropocene", "Reading Plato in the Post-Truth Era", "Ultra-Critical and Hyper-Materialist Epistemology", and during the teaching period, he also gave some lectures on his latest research to all students, such as "The Advent of anthropocene Society". Critique of Digital Capitalism" and other topics. Because of the increase in time, sometimes I will accompany him to look around the city of Nanjing and taste the snacks of the people of Nanjing. I noticed that in life Stigler was very easy-going and approachable, he never disguised himself as a master, a simple joke, he would laugh forward and backward, a ruins of the burned-out Dabao'en Temple, will make the art-loving Stigler immersed in those restored Oriental buildings and the situation of life in the past. How happy he was then.

Slowly, we became acquainted, and the communication between me and Stigler became casual and deeper. We talked together about Heidegger, Derrida, and Marx, whom we liked together, and because of the difference in opinions, we sometimes argued, as if Stigler, who was a few years older, often made me strong. Faced with my constant emphasis on text details and academic projects, he said to me kindly, "I am a thinker, not an academic professor at a university." Of course, we also talk about photography and fitness, which we love together, unlike when I went to the gym to pick up iron, Stigler mainly rode a mountain bike, and he quietly told me: "I am in the process of riding, through the headset microphone dictation of my new book, and then the wife enters the computer." 」 It was the secret of his new book almost every year. During this period, we also held many academic dialogues on academic issues of common concern, such as "Technology, Knowledge and Criticism", "Third Existence and Immaterial Labor", "Entropy, Negative Entropy and Entropy Increase in the Anthropocene", and "Frontiers of Epistemological Research". Our ideas collided and influenced each other, and Stiegler began to pay attention to the Marx texts I studied and expanded them into his own lectures; my ongoing epistemological research topic became the subject of a new volume of Technology and Time that he was about to begin; and I began to systematically study the three-volume edition of Stigler's main masterpiece, Technology and Time, and completed Stigler's "Technology and Time" in his face-to-face direct Q&A at any time.

In my interactions with Stegrad, he never answered the legend of Derrida's visit to prison from a positive point of view, he only said that Derrida was the teacher who directed his doctoral dissertation, and I could also feel that Stiegler did not want people to see him merely as a disciple of Derrida, and seemed to want to present himself as an original contemporary thinker. Speaking of his doctoral dissertation, Technology and Time, which he completed under Derrida' direction, he admits to being first drawn to Heidegger's book Being and Time, where Heidegger saw the place behind the being, and Stiegler saw the omnipresent technology that today dominates the world around him.

The subtitle of the first volume of Technology and Time is "Faute d'épiméthée", a contextual setting that is not much told about Epimetheus: behind the heroic deeds of Prometheus, a Greek mythological figure whom Marx liked, for stealing fire for mankind, there is a "bad deed" of his brother Epimetheus, who forgot to leave mankind a natural specialty when he was responsible for assigning all living creatures to their own ethnographic attributes, such as fish can swim, Birds can fly, monkeys can go to trees, horses can run, and so on, but people don't know anything. This "negligence of forgetting" caused a "primitive defect" in the genetics of biological germlines in human existence, so that man, compared with other animals, was born without any skill, but became a survival skill without any heritable germline. Stigler argues that it was also because of this "lag" of Epimetheus (as opposed to Prometheus's "advance") that humans invented the technology of épiphylogénéyique and the existence of a new abiotic external prosthesis (prothèse). Post-germinogenesis here refers to the unique viability of human beings that are shaped by social history that is different from the innate viability of animal species, that is to say, the biggest difference between human and animal survival is that man compensates for his own deficiencies through the development of his own external generalized technology (including writing). This is, of course, just a metaphor.

Far away, Stigler began to discuss the existence of in vitro tools from the flint fires that began at the beginning of human history, where he invoked Derrida's concept of "extension", in which animals eat directly from the fruit of trees and the bodies of other creatures, while humans create a new way of being through external holding tools and delayed cooked food. More recently, Stigler will see the music CDs in our hands or the hard disks in our mobile phones as the latest embodiment of technological retention, and he uses Husserl's view of the structure of time in The Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness as a logical pedal, for example, now we hear from the concert hall the piano piece of the first chopin's Nocturne played by Rubenstein, and every acoustic sound emitted by the player playing the piano keys will disappear after every sound, but in our auditory experience, when the next note is played, The last vanished note remains in our minds, and even this remaining note goes further back to a vanished acoustic chain, and this constant disappearance and presence of acoustic traces is continuous in our active musical context, allowing us to hear the beautiful melody of the complete Chopin classic masterpiece. In Husserl, he refers to this fading sound that the subject has just heard on the spot as the initial holding in the subject's experience, also known as the first holding or the original holding. This is the direct presence of the sound inside the human body. But when we replay the nocturne music in our minds after the concert, it is no longer an auditory experience that is happening in the present, but a reactivation of our past musical memories, which Husserl refers to as "the second existence in the recollection." However, Husserl simply excludes "traces of the past" that the subject has never experienced directly, such as the music records that have just begun to appear at that time, which are not the past (experiences) we have experienced, but the prosthetic techniques that exist as an addition to the generation of the post-germline outside our bodies. The "Nocturne" that we replay from the CD or hard disk today is neither the original memory of the subject's direct experience, nor the indirect second memory of the subject's direct experience, but a third memory that is external to the subject's experience. Stigler said that was exactly what Husserl had overlooked. He was extremely excited to name this third memory "the third hold." It was also an important foundation for his own philosophy of technology. Steigler argues that Heidegger also ignores this external technology as the third being that governs the essence of our existence.

Critical reflection on real life

After proposing his own original third theory of existence, Stigler quickly shifted to critical reflection on real life. In Stigler's view, in today's digital survival of capitalism, many important existential orders come from the most basic electronic third holding carrier of profound changes, Stigler tried to analyze the nature of these technical prosthetics from a phenomenological and existential perspective, in order to forge a new theoretical basis for the critique of contemporary digital capitalism. In Stigler's view, today's digital capitalism has completely changed the structural mode and basic quality of traditional social life, and the comprehensive model of innate reality generated by the analog-digitized network information technology construction sequence has caused the sudden emergence of existence itself out of context and the speed of light, which is the non-realistic reconfiguration of the world, the presence of remote login, and at the same time dissolves the spatial sense of the territory and the state of human presence in the real relationship. Prosthetic sexuality in online virtual reality today is an entirely new problem. The subject's existence itself is prostheticized! In every WeChat login from the smartphone, the presence of the subject is no longer really present, but an electronic virtual subject is present in the form of a network, and the digital structure of the existence replaces the negative entropy of life. Heidegger's "at this time" and "here" were all alienated. We are sitting at our parents' dinner table, but we are looking down at our smartphones, which is a terrible absence in the middle of the scene. The encounter of two vests on an online interface may be the simultaneity of the eastern time of the United States and Beijing time in China, or it will be the coexistence of two completely distant electrons. What has metaphysics lost in this new type of virtual network existence? What is lost in existence itself? If, in Kant's case, the innate conceptual synthesis structure gives us the phenomenon of being framed in space-time and space, then the other synthesis, which is constructed by the "image industry, the remote presence industry, and the virtual reality industry", is also like an innate architecture that sequences a new intuitive world in virtual space-time.

In fact, Stigler's view is not just a theoretical hypothesis, but a reality that occurs around us. All the waking time we wake up from waking to going to sleep, through the smartphone terminal and computer screen, can log in in any time and space, different anonymous subjects can be present in Beijing time and London time in a different place at the same time, the existence of full-screen immersive images and the explosion of a large amount of information, become the innate comprehensive structure of our intuitive and knowledge world, before we encounter the world, this digital innate synthesis that has been impossible to get rid of has been through the automatic integration of the seat frame we may see, Hear and touch the world and all phenomena. Kant's idea that "nature presents us in a certain form" is now rewritten as existing in the orderly form of smartphones and computer screens on the web. Today's capital, Stiegler says, takes advantage of the alienation of the subject in the new external existence of the digital network, allowing us to become a new type of brainless child, subject to money and material desires, and to become intellectually impoverished proletarian.

On the one hand, Stigler said, we can no longer escape the dazzling new capitalist world of network information technology, and in the digital synthesis of time and space, the subjective time flow of the order of the individualization is completely destroyed. Desire (désir) as a support point for the individualized internal structure was destroyed. What you think you want is not. The "pseudo-I- (false need) that Lacan once discussed is now created with a whole new digital illusion. If you don't want to be isolated from the world, you'll have to follow the operating systems in your computers and phones over and over again, or you won't be able to use the digital synthesis of the world you see and hear. But when you are obediently constantly updated, you are encoded into the "great current of the programming industry" woven by digital capital, becoming a user group to be slaughtered. We can think of computers and mobile phones that can be used, and have been artificially sentenced to death in hardware replacement and frequent system upgrades, precisely because we do not want to be left behind, and we do not want to be eliminated by this network information world.

On the other hand, if the world trade in the early colonialism context was mostly blatant forced buying and selling, and then directly armed to open the way, just like the old imperialism opened the door of China around 1840, the Opium War and the performance of the Eight-Power Alliance in slaughtering the city in Beijing. But after the end of the two world wars in which imperialism competed for colonies and world hegemony in the 20th century, the means of capitalist world trade were changed to gentle persuasion techniques, direct robbery and deception disappeared, and the capitalists became the most enticing storytellers. In Stigler's view, the multimedia audiovisual means that have emerged on top of the mold of networking and programming techniques that have been constructed today have raised this persuasive technique to an incomparable height. Why do people go crazy to buy secularized, homogenized industrial cultural products that have no personality? Just as some women in China rush to buy designer bags in luxury stores around the world, the world's "fruit powder" never stops chasing Apple's new products. Stigler's answer is that the technology of image and sound in digital capitalism today, combined with information technology and electronic communication, has a very special and unprecedented power in telling stories, inspiring faith in stories. Unbeknownst to people, American-style fast food is spread all over the world, and it seems that it is just selling burgers and fried chicken, but it is deeply embedded in the life of children from the beginning of the sequence, a "McDonald's" way of telling stories.

Sometimes when discussing academic issues with Stigler, I think of the words that Marx often said in Capital: "Your Excellency, it is your business that you are talking about." "Stigler differs from traditional Western Marxist scholars in that he will think of it and put it into practice himself. In recent years, his organization in France has brought together people from different backgrounds, such as engineers, philosophers, economists, etc., to conduct joint research and to find a new industrial spirit. In 2006, he set up a non-profit organization called the Center for Innovation and Research at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where he organized a group of engineers and programmers to develop a number of collaborative software, including collaborative annotations on audiovisual materials, a Twitter-based debate platform, and so on. These are attempts to explore the prospects of post-industrial social development under non-bourgeois ideologies and the antidotes of technology, leading to a new individuation that fundamentally transcends the enslavement of digital capitalism and builds a new kind of intellectual communism. I think this is the most exciting part of Stigler's radical thought and practice. This utopian vision of traditional Western Marxist left-wing scholars who will stop critical construction only in books and empty anger is an experiment and useful exploration of the actual revolutionary practice path. In the summer of 2018, when we were co-hosting an academic seminar in a conference room next to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, I met his comrades-in-arms from all walks of life. Stigler really worked hard.

Bernard, I remember your confident gaze at the end of last year's conversation, you used to be such a sunny protester, but how did you give up? In Celan's poetic words, you are already in that light, hoping that where the smoke will scatter, sprinkle into the world, or the tenderness and indomitability in human nature.

May God be gracious to every good soul!