I think it was Steve Shaviro who commented (maybe on Twitter, maybe on his blog or something – I don’t remember) that part of the appeal of science fiction, for him, is that much of it imagines ideas in their extremes. I mean, science fiction takes a condition or potential or situation or whatever, and imagines a world in the most extreme conditions of the whatever. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing here. And probably not articulating this well enough to do it justice. Nevertheless, I think that’s part of what philosophy and critical theory do, and I think that’s what Stiegler is doing – testing (or exploring or interrogating or whatever) the limits of what can be thought, experienced, etc.

Stiegler clearly wants his reader to know that his thought is an extension of previous philosophers’, anthropologists’, linguists’, &c’s work, which is almost a kind of metacommentary on his work. He’s taking their ideas as far as (for him) they can go. Typical to the genre, he frequently points out where they are accurate as well as where he thinks they’re wrong or else fall short.

So Stiegler seems to be asking whether the technical system can’t be thought of in terms of a life form. He invokes Derrida to suggest that “the” human isn’t necessarily the “main” referent of a life form.

Regarding the “Passage from the genetic to the nongenetic” in two forms of early man, Stiegler observes:

The whole question is thinking the highly paradoxical possibility of such a relay or passage; this possibility is the unthinkable question of an absolute past, of an inconceivable present, which can only be an infinite abyss (138).

In other words, Stiegler is saying (I think), that a genetic basis for defining the human falls apart in the context of Derridian differénce. If what Ricoeur says is true, then, “genetic codes ‘are programs’ of behavior [that…] confer form, order, and direction on life” (138).

He is especially concerned with the “who,” “what” question: traditionally, humans have been seen as the “who” who do the inventing while technology has been the “what” that has been invented. Stiegler seems to suggest that possibly it is now the human who has been invented by the technology, saying:

The technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical. Technics as inventive as well as invented. This hypothesis destroys the traditional thought of technics, from Plato to Heidegger and beyond. (137)

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is somehow deeply intertwined with the idea of the “posthuman.”

I realize that this is a rather disorganized and rambling post, but I’m still trying to make heads or tails of what Stiegler is saying. I’m hoping that, after I read the Haraway, I’ll be better able to talk coherently about it.

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