Bernard Stiegler: links and phusis

Here is a wonderful site with many interviews and other recordings of Bernard Stiegler. It includes even a portion of The Ister in which he plays a prominent part in the discussion of Heidegger.

I might also include here a remark concerning Stiegler's interpretation of Heidegger's discussion of technics in Stiegler's Technics and Time (volume 1). Stiegler explains Heidegger's theory of technics in a wonderfully simple way that is absolutely productive to think about. He inserts the discussion of phusis that we find in Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics right in the middle of a recounting of Heidegger's argument in "The Question Concerning Technology," and the result is to elaborate much better than Heidegger in that later essay how modern technology "challenges" nature. This is expressed vaguely there, and Stiegler wonderfully clarifies it:

Modern technics inflicts violence upon phusis [that most basic determination of being as growth or bringing-itself-forth]; technics is no longer a modality of disclosure in accordance with the growing of being as phusis. Technics becomes modern when metaphysics expresses and completes itself as the project of calculative reason with a view to mastery and possession of nature, itself no longer understood as phusis.

-Technics and Time, I, General Introduction, 10 (my italics)

It is this "in accordance with" that shows that technology is setting against nature or rather against beings as a whole, the totality of existents. Because technics have transformed in their essence to the point at which they disregard or are no longer open to the possibility of beings to grow or bring themselves forth, to upsurge, technics dominates their possibilities, absents them from their own ability to disclose, or, in short, discloses them for them. This taking over of the bringing forth of being, this vicarious or prosthetic control is what constitutes the challenge. I could comment more on this, and perhaps be clearer, but I think the important thing is to note Stiegler has a great explanation here, that reading the Introduction into the questions concerning technics that Heidegger pursues is crucial.

The thrust of The Gift of Death

The fundamental thesis of the Gift of Death is that the experience of the apprehension of death is inseparable from an experience of responsibility. This in itself is nothing new: among the people Derrida himself discusses in his book, Patočka, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger all explicitly say the same thing. Fundamentally, the finitude of existence conditions existence itself. However, Derrida shows, using all these thinkers, that this finitude also implies a certain structure of a relation to infinitude: that is, the apprehension of death is also inseparable from responsibility because infinitude intrudes in this apprehension and in this responsibility.

This too is not unique, though: Kierkegaard and Patočka also include this explicitly--not to mention the passages from the Bible that Derrida discusses. Where Derrida is perhaps unique is in his elaboration of this dual structure of responsibility and apprehension as a double bind: that is, as a dual structure that, extended to encompass both the implications of finitude and infinitude that split it, in fact rends it apart (i.e. makes the dual structure incompatible to itself) in its being constituted thus. In other words, Derrida rigorously thinks the space between the determining forces of finitude and infinitude qua between, qua difference. And, as he shows, in order for this difference to be rigorously sustained, it must be conceived as différance.

This différance is manifest in the trembling both before God (the infinite) and before death (the finite), in the experience of what Derrida calls a gift of death.

Derrida on Merleau-Ponty

The two characteristics I isolated in the last post regarding the writing of Merleau-Ponty--namely, 1) its synesthesic descriptions of phenomena and 2) its being full of phenomenal examples/examples that can't be said to be exemplary--end up in their combination as the basic topic of Derrida's discussion of Merleau-Ponty in his amazing On Touching--Jean Luc Nancy.

There, Derrida tries to show, essentially, that Merleau-Ponty is always on the verge of making a synesthesic experience without reserve--that is, without (proper) differentiation between the senses--the sensory experience (i.e. the exemplary sensory experience) in his concept of the flesh, and yet always recoils from it in order to think the unity of this flesh (or rather its "mine-ness," its distinction from otherness).

(Intentionality steps in to fill up the gap. example, the self-touching: mp makes self-touching have to be possible... we have a presentment of its possibility.... he priveliges possibility, because for him the body is a pressing into possibilities, not impossibilities. These are notes that elaborate the full extent of Derrida's discussion and critique: I'll clean them up and finish this later today.)