Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus

Technics and Time #1

by Bernard Stiegler, Richard Beardsworth (Translator), George Collins (Translator)

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.

Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

Genres: Philosophy, Technology, Theory, Nonfiction, France, Anthropology, Politics

318 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Bernard Stiegler heads the Department of Cultural Development at the Pompidou Center in Paris and is co-founder of the political group Ars Industrialis. Stanford University Press has published the first two volumes of Technics and Time, The Fault of Epimetheus (1998) and Disorientation (2008), as well as his Acting Out (2008) and Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010).

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the Promethean myth of fault and forgetfulness as his guiding leitmotif, Stiegler reads Heidegger through the insights of twentieth-century technical thought on the one hand and French phenomenology's critique of genesis on the other, arguing that the fundamental ontological ground is "having-been", an existential mode polysemically referred to as "epiphylogenesis" (in a paleontological register), "tertiary memory" (after Husserl's time-consciousness), "pro-thesis", and later, "exosomatization".

The mode of having-been designates the sedimenting of invention and anticipation into inorganic technical objects, the externalization of memory into a Gestell, such that a world-building technical system inexorably comes to enframe the human and organic. Contra Rousseau's "state of nature", the origin of man is not one for which externality is alien. Man only arrives with external technicity; prior to this, "only the animal is present", for he is completely whole with himself, with only the interior instincts proper to the animal. To exit outside this whole through reflection, to de-naturalize, is to open the space for inventive reflection, and thus technicity. Man constitutes and is constituted by his externalization in one and the same moment.

From this standpoint, Stiegler ends this volume with a critique of Heidegger's account of Dasein's world-historical past, "the past that is his own but which he has never lived". Heidegger approaches but never fully reckons with having-been through his analysis of thrownness, in which he places historical thematization in the hand of Dasein while neglecting the positive constituting ground of the already-there itself. Technics qua having-been circumscribes Dasein's worldly engagements, is the autonomous system which constitutes his world.

We then see how, as the title's appropriation of Heidegger suggests, it is not being which is temporality, but technics.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love that this book attempts to address the role of technology in social change by considering the way in which humans were always-already in need of "prosthetics." The book echoes some of Donna Haraway's insight about humans being cyborgs, but in this case Stiegler puts the observation in dialogue with Heidegger's discussions of what it means to be a subject in time.

[Andrew]

In our Internet age, we seem to constantly be asking, in editorials, in think pieces, in blogs, about the degree to which technology has its own logic. There are those who believe that it develops independently of the human endeavor, and those who believe it to be a strictly human invention. These two camps roughly, but not universally, correspond to the parties who believe technology to dictate human behavior, and those who believe the opposite, respectively.

Stiegler develops an interesting sort of middle path in the first part of this first volume, drawing heavily from the full scope of human history, and especially on the archaeological research of Leroi-Gourhan. While the second part-- a meditation on dasein-- turned me off, largely because I just lacked the intimate knowledge of Heidegger to really feel I could understand it, the first part of this treatise is fascinating. If you have any interest at all in why you can't stop playing Candy Crush, give it a read.

[Brian]

The customer reviews at Amazon seemed to indicate this book is a waste of time. I can't tell you how eager I am to waste my time with it. What interests me most, off hand, is the author's return to the work of Andre Leroi-Gourhan, someone I don't believe anyone has touched since Derrida in Of Grammatology.

[Luke Echo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Techne. Tough text. The argument about the problem with a Second Origin of the "human" is quite good: The Critique of Rousseau and that line of thought that posits an un-corrupted humanity.

The later sections which critique Heidegger - his attempt to place techne prior to Dasein was more difficult to grasp hold of.

[Lev Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stieger embarks on developing an ontology of the Dasein that continues and critiques 'Being and Time' in light of Leroi-Gourhan's paleontology (which he also continues and critiques) and Derrida's overall philosophical project (which is in many ways also a continuation and critique of Heidegger's existential phenomenology already, I'm sure you're seeing the pattern already). The first half of the book essentially makes the case that there is an 'originary' technics that is coeval with the biological existence of humanity as it became man. This 'originary' technics constitutes Dasein's already-there-ness in so far as the world that were thrown into is constituted by technical objects that are themselves the possibility of any encounter with the world. This originary technics also displaces the logos of a 'human' centered technology in at least two ways: 1) Our relationship with technical objects, it is more clear in the industrial era, is constituted not by an equipmentality by which our ends form the 'for-the-sake-of-which' of our equipmentality but instead as an operator of a technical object; and 2) the development of the technical objects as inseparable from the bodily development of the human, meaning there coincides an 'epiphylogensis' that constitutes and is constituted by an 'epigenesis' of the human body. At the point in which we stood upright, our hands were freed for a different kind of encounter with the world as well as the face. We could take into account things in the world as fitting into an equipmentality through the possibilities of the hand and eye that coincided with the development of the lobes of the brain. In the anthropological records, its not the case that our brain matured and thus we started modifying objects in the world with respect to an anticipation of what it could be used for, this abstracting behavior began at the straightening of the back and an encounter of the ground with the feet as the primary limbs of mobility. This change in the encounter of the world constitutes an originary fault and de-fault, we forgot the world as it was encountered with grounded hands and a face near the ground as well (fault) and obtained a world that was encountered with free hands and a face that was able to survey things for the hands (default). This fault covering over a fault (which is not two different origins, this book maintains a fidelity of Derrida's critique of Rousseau's anthropology in Of Grammatology, but rather a simultaneous double movement, a forgetting and re-encounter with what was forgotten) is a kind of recapitulation of the Myth of Prometheus in which Epimethius in equipping every animal with some ways of surviving except for man, faults in a forgetting; the fault is then covered over by Prometheus who steals fire and gives it to man, a double fault covering over the forgetting which allows of the possibility of the future of man. This Epimethia (fault) and Promethia (de-fault) constitutes our originary prosthesis/technics with which constitutes our encounter with the world by way of forming the already-there-ness of the world. The book then launches into a deconstruction of Heidegger's insistence of trying to reach an 'authentic' encounter with the 'who' that isn't littered by the objects of Dasein's epiphylogenetics, the 'what', by showing that all the encounters with from which we could possibly have an encounter with our end is always made possible and made up by our epiphylogenetics (there's no temporality for us outside of the temporality that is subject to divisions within itself that makes it measurable, epiphylogenetics is indeed differance with respect to the self-division of time, the possibility of the exteriorization of time). The book ends with two questions that are to be addressed in the sequel: 1) 'What does the logic of the orthographic supplement (epiphylogenetics in form of the exteriorzation of memory by way of writing) consist in?'; 2) 'to what extent can the who that we are today double up on its what?'. The answering of these questions will continue to round the phenomenological hermenutics of temporality and technics and I eagerly await their 'answering' in Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation.

[David Val Campillo]

Empecé el libro siendo una persona y ahora ya no soy. Na increíble de los mejores libros que he leído nunca muy recomendable. Fumada celestial me tumbo en el cesped y me siento pleno. Despues de leer este libro y escuchar musica chuli me siento pleno. este libro me ha dejado (sin pretenderlo) en probablemente el mejor momento de mi vida :)

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een Derridiaanse lezing van Heidegger's onderscheid tussen wie en wat met op de achtergrond het onderscheid tussen mens en techniek. Heel goed. -1 ster omdat ik meer had gehoopt op een conversatie met Die Frage nach der Technik, wat uitbleef. Maar goed, dit is slechts "deel een".

[Leonard Houx · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second part is the really critical bit, where he presents a brilliant reading and critique of Heidegger--arguing that time is essentially technological, i.e. prosthetic. Although this was far from an easy read and the initial chapters feel like stuffing, this is one of the few books I have read lately where I felt like I was really being told something radical and new.

[Kevin Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you think deconstruction can't be deconstructed. If you dig 'degger. And if your moose curl for husserl(that didn't work). This book is a challenge that still brings lulz.

[Slow Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this twice and forgot to log it once lol

[Raffaello Palandri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book of the Day – Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
Today’s Book of the Day is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, written by Bernard Stiegler in 1994. Today, we will discuss the 1998 English translation published by Stanford University Press.

Bernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He is considered one of the most influential European philosophers of the 21st century.


I have chosen this book because it challenges the inside/outside boundary of cognition and memory, forcing a reconsideration of consciousness not as a self-contained Cartesian theatre, but as always already exteriorised into technical supplements.

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, Volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus — originally published in French in 1994 as La technique et le temps 1. La faute d’Épiméthée and translated into English in 1998 — represents a radical intervention into the philosophical tradition’s understanding of time, subjectivity, and technicity.

It is a work of extraordinary depth and density, drawing simultaneously on phenomenology, deconstruction, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the history of technology to pose a simple yet destabilising question: what if technics is not a secondary adjunct to human life, but the very condition of its temporality, its memory, and its being? With this question, Stiegler inaugurates a project that spans multiple volumes and decades, one that challenges the deepest metaphysical assumptions of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle to Husserl and Heidegger.

The volume opens with a philosophical myth: the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus, drawn from Plato’s Protagoras. This myth, rarely taken seriously in metaphysical discourse, becomes for Stiegler the Ur-narrative of technics. Prometheus, the fore-thinker, and Epimetheus, the after-thinker, are tasked with distributing capacities to living beings. But Epimetheus forgets to leave anything for humans. In compensation, Prometheus steals fire and technē (τέχνη), offering human beings the technical supplement they lack by nature. This myth encapsulates, for Stiegler, the structural prostheticity of the human: we are not defined by a natural essence, but by the absence of such an essence — and by the technical supports that compensate for it.

The fault of Epimetheus, then, is not merely a narrative device but a philosophical axiom. It reveals that the human is the being who must exteriorise its own becoming, through tools, through language, through the trace. What follows from this is Stiegler’s central claim: that technics is not an accidental feature of human existence, but the very condition of temporalisation, of memory, and hence of subjectivity itself. In this sense, he seeks to overturn an entire tradition that has always treated technics as external, secondary, or instrumental — from Aristotle’s marginalisation of technē as poiesis (ποίησις), to Heidegger’s relegation of technology to the status of enframing (Ge-stell).

Stiegler’s method is genealogical, deconstructive, and phenomenological, but it also extends beyond all three. He begins with Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness, particularly the distinction between primary retention (the immediate retention of what has just passed), secondary retention (the memory of what was once present), and protention (the anticipation of what is about to come). These are the structures by which consciousness constitutes the temporal object — for instance, hearing a melody as a coherent whole. However, Husserl fails to account for a crucial fact: that all our memories are supported by technical traces, by tertiary retention — writing, images, recordings, monuments.

Stiegler introduces this category — tertiary retention — to name those material supports of memory that exist outside the flow of consciousness, yet which make consciousness possible. A written diary, a photograph, a musical recording — these are not mere aids to memory; they are constitutive of memory. They shape the very field in which memory appears and thus determine the structure of experience itself. This move marks the beginning of Stiegler’s deconstruction of the phenomenological subject: the “I” is not a pre-given entity who experiences time, but the effect of technical exteriorisation. Temporality is not the inner life of the soul; it is a technical artefact, distributed across prostheses.

This intervention requires a confrontation with Heidegger, whose Being and Time famously places temporality at the centre of the question of Being. For Heidegger, Dasein is the being who projects itself toward the future, who exists as a being-towards-death, and who constitutes its meaning through care. But as Stiegler points out, Heidegger systematically excludes technics from this picture. In his ontological hierarchy, tools appear only as ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), useful within a world of significance, but not constitutive of Dasein itself. In fact, Heidegger’s “originary temporality” is derived from the internal structure of ecstatic projection, not from the material supports of memory.

Stiegler’s critique is sharp and incisive: Heidegger fails to see that Dasein’s temporality is not purely existential but already technical. Every memory, every historical transmission, every gesture of thought is mediated by tertiary retention. The “past” that Dasein inherits is not simply sedimented in Being, but is encoded in books, languages, institutions, digital archives. The “future” that Dasein projects into is preconditioned by the technical milieu in which it is immersed. There is no temporality without technicity — hence, no Dasein without prosthesis.

The figure who mediates this critique is André Leroi-Gourhan, the French palaeoanthropologist whose Gesture and Speech forms the core of Stiegler’s anthropological foundation. Leroi-Gourhan’s thesis is that the human evolves not only biologically but exosomatically — through the exteriorisation of functions into tools and symbolic systems. From the biface to the book, the evolution of technics is the evolution of memory itself. Stiegler takes this further: the technical trace is not only a support for human cognition, it is its organological condition. Memory is not internal to the brain; it is distributed across technical organs. The psyche is therefore always already exteriorised, even before the emergence of writing in the narrow sense.

This leads to one of the most consequential moves in Stiegler’s system: the concept of originary technicity. If we accept that technics precedes the human — that the human is the being who has no essence but is constituted by the necessity of technical support — then technics is not something we invent, but something that invents us. Technics is not a product of human will; it is the transcendental condition of humanisation. This completely overturns the metaphysical hierarchy that privileges the subject over the object, mind over matter, interiority over exteriority. Instead, we are forced to conceive of a co-originary process, in which the subject and technics emerge together, bound in a mutual becoming.

The implications of this thesis are vast. If memory is technical, then so is forgetting. If identity is temporal, and time is prosthetic, then identity is structurally open to technological reprogramming. If thought depends on external supports, then any alteration in the system of supports — from alphabetic writing to smartphones — alters the conditions of thought itself. These themes will be developed more explicitly in Stiegler’s later works, particularly in Acting Out and Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, where he diagnoses the consequences of digital disindividuation and the collapse of long-term memory. But even in Volume 1, the seeds of this critique are clearly sown.

It is crucial to note that Stiegler does not fall into technological determinism. His vision is pharmacological: every technical innovation is both poison and cure, both a threat to individuation and a support for it. Writing, as Plato already feared in the Phaedrus, may externalise memory and thus weaken interior recollection — but it also allows for the transmission of knowledge across generations. Digital technologies may fragment attention and automate behaviour — but they also offer unprecedented means for reflection, collaboration, and collective intelligence. The task, then, is not to reject technics, but to care for it — to develop a politics of memory, an organology of attention, a care of the self that recognises our prosthetic condition and responds with ethical discernment.

In stylistic terms, Technics and Time, Vol. 1 is rigorous to the point of opacity. Stiegler’s prose is dense, his conceptual architecture intricate, and his intertextual references demanding. He engages deeply with the German and French philosophical traditions — Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan — and assumes a reader already conversant in their vocabularies. This is not a text for the uninitiated. Yet the reward for those who persist is immense: a genuinely new vision of the human, one that refuses both the naïveté of humanism and the cynicism of posthumanist technophilia.

Indeed, Stiegler’s work offers a third path: not the abandonment of the human, but its redefinition in light of our technical becoming. He is neither a nostalgic reactionary nor a celebrant of acceleration. His concern is with individuation: the process by which singularities emerge from pre-individual fields through the mediation of social, psychic, and technical supports. Technics, in this vision, is not the enemy of humanity, but its enabling condition. But only if we learn to care for it — only if we take responsibility for the exteriorised traces that constitute our collective memory.

The final pages of the volume gesture toward this responsibility. They warn of a coming crisis — a crisis of memory, of attention, of time — in which the industrialisation of tertiary retention threatens to collapse the very conditions of individuation. This is the era of what Stiegler will later call symbolic misery: a world in which meaning is no longer generated by subjects, but formatted by algorithms; a world in which history becomes a stream, and thought becomes data. Against this, he calls for a new organology: a rethinking of our prostheses, our supports, our technologies of memory — not as neutral tools, but as the very fabric of our temporality.

In conclusion, Technics and Time, Volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus is a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand the metaphysical and political implications of our technical condition. It is a work of immense philosophical ambition, challenging not only the canonical understanding of time and subjectivity, but the very framework in which these concepts have been thought. Stiegler forces us to confront the fact that we are not temporal beings who use technology, but technical beings who temporalise through prosthesis. In a world increasingly defined by digital memory, algorithmic anticipation, and automated decision-making, this insight is not merely abstract. It is urgent.

[Trey Pharis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this. Interesting extension of the Heideggerean question of time and technics. Stiegler sees technics as essential in the formation of time.

[Ricardo Sérgio Alencar Tavares · Rating 5 out of 5]

O livro Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, de Bernard Stiegler, é o primeiro volume de uma série de três obras que exploram a relação entre técnica, tempo e a condição humana. Publicado originalmente em francês em 1994 (La Technique et le Temps, 1: La faute d’Épiméthée), o livro propõe uma análise filosófica profunda sobre como a técnica molda a experiência humana do tempo e a própria constituição da humanidade.

Resumo e Temas Principais

Stiegler parte de uma releitura do mito grego de Prometeu e Epimeteu, conforme narrado por Protágoras no diálogo de Platão. No mito, Epimeteu, cuja falha (a “falta” do título) consiste em esquecer de dotar os humanos com qualidades naturais, leva Prometeu a roubar o fogo (símbolo da técnica) dos deuses para compensar essa deficiência. Stiegler usa esse mito como ponto de partida para argumentar que a técnica não é apenas uma ferramenta externa, mas uma condição fundamental da existência humana. Ele propõe que os humanos são intrinsecamente “prostéticos”, ou seja, definidos por sua relação com objetos técnicos que suplementam suas capacidades biológicas.

Os principais temas do livro incluem:

1 Técnica como Co-constitutiva do Humano: Stiegler desafia a visão tradicional que opõe natureza e cultura, argumentando que a técnica é um terceiro elemento que medeia essa relação. Ele sugere que os humanos não existem antes da técnica; em vez disso, a técnica é parte do processo de “hominização”.

2 Tempo e Memória: Stiegler explora como as tecnologias (de escrita, ferramentas, máquinas) estruturam a experiência temporal humana. Ele introduz o conceito de “memória técnica” ou “epifilogenética”, que se refere à externalização da memória humana em objetos técnicos (como livros, computadores), distinta da memória genética ou individual.

3 Crítica à Metafísica Ocidental: O autor revisita filósofos como Heidegger, Husserl e Simondon para questionar a marginalização da técnica na filosofia ocidental. Ele argumenta que a técnica foi frequentemente vista como secundária em relação ao pensamento ou à essência humana, e busca reposicioná-la como central.

4 A “Falta” de Epimeteu: A falha de Epimeteu simboliza a incompletude inerente ao ser humano, que só se torna completo por meio da técnica. Essa incompletude é tanto uma fraqueza quanto uma abertura para a criatividade e a invenção.
Estrutura do Livro

O volume é dividido em duas partes principais:

1 A Invenção do Humano: Stiegler analisa o mito de Prometeu e Epimeteu, explorando como a técnica surge como uma resposta à falta originária do humano. Ele discute a relação entre técnica e temporalidade, utilizando conceitos fenomenológicos e antropológicos.

2 A Desorientação Técnica: Aqui, ele examina como as tecnologias modernas, especialmente no século XX, transformaram a experiência do tempo, levando a uma “desorientação” na relação entre o humano e o mundo.

Contexto e Relevância

Technics and Time, 1 é uma obra seminal no campo da filosofia da tecnologia. Stiegler combina insights de fenomenologia, antropologia, mitologia e teoria crítica para oferecer uma perspectiva original sobre a modernidade e a condição humana. O livro é particularmente relevante em um contexto contemporâneo, onde tecnologias como inteligência artificial, automação e digitalização levantam questões sobre a natureza do trabalho, da memória e da sociedade.

Influências e Diálogo Filosófico

Stiegler dialoga extensivamente com:

• Martin Heidegger, especialmente no que diz respeito à questão da técnica (Die Frage nach der Technik) e à temporalidade.

• Edmund Husserl, com ênfase na fenomenologia do tempo.

• Gilbert Simondon, cujas ideias sobre individuação e sistemas técnicos são centrais.

• Jacques Derrida, particularmente no conceito de “diferança” (différance), que Stiegler adapta para pensar a técnica como uma forma de diferimento temporal.

Considerações para Leitura

O texto é denso e exige familiaridade com a filosofia continental, especialmente Heidegger e Husserl.

Leitores interessados em antropologia, teoria da mídia ou estudos de ciência e tecnologia também encontrarão o livro relevante, embora sua linguagem técnica e estilo acadêmico possam ser desafiadores. A edição em inglês, traduzida por Richard Beardsworth e George Collins, é amplamente utilizada e mantém a rigorosidade do original.

[Adrian Mendizabal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernard Stiegler’s first of his three-volume work Technics and Time has a startling proposition at its core: that technics is exteriorized memory. The first part tackles the anthropological line that brings together several scholars’ notion of the evolution of man. Contrary to Darwinian theory of evolution that man descended from monkeys, Stiegler, through Leroi-Gourhan, showed that there is enough evidence that the anatomical development of humans (bipedalism and use of hands) have helped early humans to evolve on its own. Stiegler, through Leroi-Gourhan, insists such an anatomical transformation is associated with the development of technics, that the human body is itself embodied technics, the origin of prosthesis. Stiegler then proceeds to conclude that the development of prosthesis is also the end of the human, while paradoxically invents the modern human.

The second part turns towards Heidegger while replaying all over again the Prometheus-Epimetheus story of how they have invented the human based on the double fault, a being-at-fault: (1) Epimetheus, forgetting about the humans, (2) Prometheus, stealing fire from Zeus to help develop humans. The fire, as one remembers, helped the humans to cook and settle and develop polis. Stiegler proceeds by problematizing Heidegger’s notion of the Already There, in relation to technics, vis-a-vis a rereading of Heidegger’s key writings on Dasein in relation to time. The succeeding chapters dealt with the opposition and relation of the ‘who’, which Stiegler associates with Dasein, and the ‘what’ which he associated with the exteriorized memory, tradition, history, and technics. Intervening within this interlinked relation is the Derridean nonconcept of differance which for Stiegler is time or ‘the history of life.’

Albeit some disagreements with the notion of determination and calculation, all because Stiegler subscribes to Heidegger, which conceptually adopts Nietzschean idea of indeterminacy vis-a-vis the eternal return, I think the book is genuinely original in conceiving the relationship of time and technics. At one point, Stiegler suggested that time becomes time only when humans have invented the ways by which it can exteriorize memory using technics. If Dasein is time, then indeed, Dasein cannot exist without technics. In Heideggerian terms, which Stiegler also subscribes, technics co-invents the human while also giving them the means to destroy itself.

[Yalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brilliant thesis. He was a magnificent intellectual historian with a beautiful mind. But did no one teach this man how to write? The style is unique, yes. But only because it is absolutely dreadful. There was no reason why he needed three-hundred pages to say 'technics is the precondition for experiencing temporality.'

Against this, one can say that the loveliness of intellectual effort can be found in the impenetrability or opacity of a work. Yes, this is true. One is introduced into thought-styles which require you to circumvent yourself. Philosophy is difficult, and this difficulty teaches us the patience of the encounter, which is not unlike loving. And the increasingly prevalent attitude of 'everything should be transparent to me or it's unworthy' is the transference of consumer convenience into the intellectual sphere.

Even so, I feel frustrated because for all its brilliance, this research is methodologically weak and its disorganisation make it unreadable. Primarily, his discussions on paleoanthropology, which were to show how technogenesis and anthrpogenesis are two sides of the same coin, were unfocused and introduced a conceptual astigmatism into the work. Glad that I don't have to read this again.

[Dylan]

Rad as hell. This was my second try—seven or eight months later, having read Simondon and thought a lot more about Heidegger, I found I was able to get a foothold in this work and follow a number of its wild tangents. Although I will not hesitate to admit that, not having read almost any phenomenology beyond what Heidegger does with it in Being and Time, or any Derrida beyond “Plato’s Pharmacy,” I am probably missing out on A LOT of what is going on in this book. I will keep my fingers crossed that the third encounter is even more productive in that respect.

Even so, it was rewarding to get the broad strokes of this argument where I found them impenetrable before. Per Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida, all human activity is essentially technic in nature—all interiority is defined through exteriorization. As such (and with lots of other little pieces of the argument going on), technics constitutes our experience of time, full stop. This is a clumsy summary because it is a Goodreads post, but what are you gonna do. :)

Can’t wait to read volumes two and three one day! And more importantly, to reread volume one!!

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stiegler re-ciphers Heidegger in light of Derrida, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, Gille, et al., arguing that temporality does not inhere within Dasein itself, but rather only steps onto the stage via "technics." It is therefore a Virilian insistence on ontologizing technological developments that undergirds the project. The figure of "Epimetheus," therefore, serves merely to stand in for the après-coup retroaction of the deferral of différance (Stiegler insists on calling ipseity "idiomaticity"). There are perhaps intimations towards implications for object-oriented ontology (a critique of anthropocentrism, or even bio-centrism), but they aren't developed here.

[JJ Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly incredible that Heidegger found a way to make philosophy prose even worse. Mention Dasein and you’re doomed to self-parody: randomly hyphenated words, semantic satiation as a rhetorical device, etc. There are some interesting ideas here, in particular the view that there is no escaping instrumentality. I’m just glad that these guys are still coming up with speculative accounts of the evolution of human cognition.

[Sunblinding · Rating 5 out of 5]

That boy Bernard really freaked it with this one. Time qua prosthesis, anthropos and techne as co-constitutive. Probably one of the most insightful/incisive/generative readings of Heidegger outside of Derrida and Schürmann.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The extensive reference to Leroi-Gourhan and Heidegger can become tedious sometimes, but still a foundational work of Stiegler's highly intriguing philosophy of technology.

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Todavía el fantasma de la becqueriana luna flota en el cielo gótico"

[worrywott · Rating 4 out of 5]

that's a lot of heidegger

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent deconstruction of the fault of humans, time and technology. Dense both stylistically and philosophically, it remains a landmark in posthuman thought.

[Casey Sutherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.