Firstly, concerning a recent Deleuzian provocation, from Claire Colebrook‘s 2017 essay ascribing Stiegler’s philosophy a “curious problem of range,” we may consider analyzing the point about Stiegler’s forays into digital studies, which, from the perspective of a deconstructive persona, according to Colebrook, makes him an “unprincipled thinker.” Can this description hold outside of the interpretive reduction of Stiegler’s proximity to Deleuze? Will Stiegler remain an unprincipled thinker outside of Deleuzian interpretation?
Secondly, as regards Yuk Hui’s interpretive viewpoint that extends Stiegler’s tertiary retention, in line with the “historical singularity of technical development,” to the analysis of “tertiary protention,” does Stiegler’s emphasis on the human nature of protention permit a deferral of the study of the present, presumably, stuck in the indeterminacy of the temporal singularity of the now, between human and inhuman, human and posthuman, or what Stiegler’s comments about the “anthropological break,” in favor of the analysis of the total impersonalism of the “archive of the future”? At stake in tertiary retention is the acceleration of organology into what Yuk Hui describes as “archival metaphysics.” This organological gap makes sense if a kind of “passive directedness” is already defining the ‘anthropological break’ in terms of the saturation of the extension of human bodies to inorganic materials, forming an organological history that exceeds that of the human.
Thirdly, regarding Stiegler’s Kantian provocation of the superiority of the ‘amateur’ over the critic, we can interpolate the two previous interventions (Colebrook and Hui) with Stiegler’s modification of Kant’s aesthetic judgment. If Stiegler is, indeed, an unprincipled thinker, in the Deleuzian sense, does Stiegler’s deconstructive persona, as a kind of nomadic thought, make a good comparison with the concept of the amateur who experiences the crisis of reason, and is therefore transformed by this crisis? If, for Stiegler, the amateur is the “source of … the concretization of the indetermination of the Kantian aesthetic,” a derivation that provides the concretizing work of art the semblance of omnitemporality (such as the universality of the a prioris), can the amateur escape from the totalitarianism of the future archive, the archival metaphysics, which is itself based on the hyper-technical, algorithmic concretization of the indeterminacy of the human? Can the amateur prevent the inevitable slide of the anthropological break into the full pharmacological affliction of thought and desire?
Sources
Stiegler, B. (2020), ‘Elements for A General Organology,’ Derrida Today vol 13, no. 1, pp. 72-94.
Colebrook, C., (2017), ‘Impossible, Unprincipled, Contingent,’ boundary vol.2, no. 44, pp. 213-37.
Hui, Y. (2018), ‘Archives of the Future: Remarks on the Concept of Tertiary Protention,’ Inscription, Göteborg: Riksarkivet Landsarkivet.
'Being is the scandal of Nature waiting for a new host' 