From invention of the human to Digital Studies: Reading Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher whose works have profoundly influenced contemporary thought on technics and digital culture. He is the founder of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation in France, and a doctor of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has published over 30 books that engage with philosophical and political questions concerning technology. These works exist as an eclectic dialogue between disciplines such as palaeontology, psychology, European continental philosophy, critical theory, digital studies and the physical and natural sciences.

In my talk, I will attempt to chart a historical trajectory to his on-going work, while introducing some key themes such as exteriorization, tertiary retention, the digital-as-writing and negentropic Web. I will begin with his work on the role of technics in the evolutionary origin of the human and arrive at some of his arguments concerning “philosophical Engineering in the era of the Web”. I will then introduce his call for an epistemological revolution that is characterized by a reorganization of our digital and technological conditions. This revolution, he believes, will begin in the East, where “it is in the interest of Asia and Europe to part ways with the Californian model of networking”. I will conclude by describing “the stakes of Enlightenment philosophy in the era of the Web.”
Speakers – Rohit Revi
Discussant – Angus McBlane

Rohit Revi is a Phd candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. He completed his MA in Society and Culture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IITGn). His master’s thesis described the technology driven condition of deterioration of labour under neoliberal capitalism, and focussed on a contradiction inherent to the contemporary technosolutionist drive. He is currently interested in environmental politics, surveillance studies, and philosophy of technology.

Angus McBlane is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (IITGN) in Gujarat, India where he teaches Continental Philosophy and Cultural Theory. He is also a member of the Centre for Cognitive Science at IITGN. He completed his PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. His latest article ‘Expressing Corporeal Silence: Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, and Posthumanism’ was published in Dec 2016 in a special issue on Proto-Posthumanism in the journal Word and Text. His work has previously appeared in Anime and Philosophy: Wide- Eyed Wonder (Open Court, 2010), The Directory of World Cinema: Japan (Intellect 2010), and The Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (Intellect, 2013). His research focuses on Posthumanism, Phenomenology, Post-Phenomenological Philosophies, Visual Culture and Embodiment. He is currently working on developing a posthumanist philosophy of the body, and formalizing a dialogic study of Phenomenology and Indian Philosophies, especially Carvaka/Lokayata.