Bernard Stiegler > Quotes

“Human beings disappear; their histories remain.”
― Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise

“The genuine object of debate raised by the [2008 financial] crisis ought to be how to overcome the short-termism to which we have been led by a consumerism intrinsically destructive of all genuine investment in the future, a short-termism which has systematically, and not accidentally, been translated into decomposition of investment into speculation.”
― Bernard Stiegler

“My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.”
― Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out

“What is the library? If one believes Mallarmé’s antithesis, then the library would first of all be the place of instrumental spirituality. As a consequence, it would be a place of “production,” because the instrument exercises (instruire) a material, which it trans-forms. It would be the place of the life of spirit, of its genesis—but of its material genesis. In short, the library is a place of writing. It is at once the place of the conservation and elaboration of forms of knowledge—of their memory. But this memory is dead: supported by inorganic, yet organized objects, those which Husserl names “spirit-invested objects.” On the other hand, the library is trans-formed as a network, which is to say that it is digitized—and so it requires “new spiritual instruments.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“prevailing event today is the loss of individuation qua pauperization (cognitive impoverishment) and the growth of information to the detriment of knowledge. It is what has been analyzed, for example, as “cognitive overflow syndrome,” which, rather than facilitating decision-making (the synthesis that must follow from the analytic acquisition of knowledge), paralyzes it: information is not transformed into knowledge or savoir-faire but into an accumulation of hard data.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“Which is to say, the thought. In what, then, does this antithesis consist? In that the spirit would overflow the instrumentality and the instrumentalizable, the instrument being on the side of the material, that is, of the contingent and corruptible, which precisely disappears in the corruptible, whereas, on the contrary, the spiritual is what returns, resists, consists: re-appearing, not disappearing.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“To lose the feeling that life is worth living may drive one to furious madness.”
― Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology

“The Anthropocene is an 'Entropocene', that is, a period in which entropy is produced on a massive scale, thanks precisely to the fact that what has been liquidated and automated is knowledge, so that in fact it is no longer knowledge at all, but rather a set of closed systems, that is, entropic systems. Knowledge is an open system: it always includes a capacity for disautomatization that produces negentropy.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene

“however, with this the risk of entropy would mean not only that the instance of individuation displaces and reorganizes itself, but that it subsides, that is, that individuation, as negentropy, is weakened by the fact of a conflict between the psychic, the collective, and the machinic, which does not arrive at a resolution, and which is induced by a blockage resulting from the caducity of the dissociating industrial model imposed by global financier capitalism on a society that has come undone—and this, in order to maintain the exorbitant and ruinous perpetual returns of the situation, where it is capitalism itself that is in the process of destroying itself. The question of the reorganization of appropriation through the adjustment of society and of digital equipment, that is, of psychosocial individuation and techno-logical individuation, where the new informational instrumentality of forms of knowledge takes shape—these are the stakes of a new industrial model: it is only as such—as new forms of industrial society—that we will be able”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“We all know, whether we admit it or whether we prefer to know nothing about it, nor even to hear about it, that with the historical sequence that began to unfold in 2007, every step counts, and seems to be systemically overloaded with consequences that would be extremely difficult to reverse – if not absolutely irreversible. It is in this context that there arises, today, the question of care, and of its condition: the pharmakon.”
― Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology