Daniel Ross

Techné 21 (2–3), pp. 386–404. Note that a longer version of this paper will be included in Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, forthcoming.
Abstract:
This article addresses the question under what conditions it is still possible to think in today's era of the Anthropocene, in which the human has become the key factor in the evolution of the biosphere, considering the fact, structurally neglected by philosophy, that thinking is thoroughly conditioned by a technical milieu of re-tentional dispositives. The Anthropocene results from modern technology's domination of the earth through industrialization that is currently unfolding as a process of generalized, digital automation, which tends to eliminate reflection and to block any genuine questioning of its own development, producing a state of generalized entropy at all levels—ecological, psychic, social, economic, and, in particular, the noetic or thinking. The radical undermining of the very possibility of thinking and questioning , thought by Martin Heidegger in terms of Enframing, should be understood as a pharmacological situation that calls for a therapeutic reversal of the toxicity of current digital technologies into a remedial instrument for realizing a negentropic turn beyond the Anthropocene and toward the Neganthropocene. This requires that thinking starts to understand itself as caring, i.e., as a taking care of itself by taking care of the technical pharmaka that thoroughly constitute and condition it and that can render human life as noetic life both deeply unlivable and profoundly worthwhile.

In Philosophy of Photography 8 (2017): 9–16. This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains and re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge.

In Mauro Magatti (ed.), The Crisis Conundrum: How to Reconcile Economy and Society (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Note that the definitive version of this text is available in Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018).

Journal of Visual Art Practice 15 (2–3): 192–203.
The control societies analysed by Deleuze are becoming societies of hyper-control, where supercomputing is applied to massive data- sets, with the ultimate goal of controlling behaviour. This control, however, is destroying all forms of knowledge, whether skills, capacities or theories, and undermining all social systems, including the economic foundations of consumerism itself. Although this situation can seem unstoppable, transformations of the technical system always have harmful effects on existing social systems, and thus require the invention of new knowledge and practices. Art has a crucial if not sufficient role to play in creating a new therapeutics for the twenty-first century.

Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24 (47) (2015). Stiegler argued in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (the third volume of Technics and Time) that we must refer to archi-cinema just as Derrida spoke of archi-writing. In this article he proposes that in principle the dream is the primordial form of this archi-cinema. The archi-cinema of consciousness, of which dreams would be the matrix as archi-cinema of the unconscious, is the projection resulting from the play between what Hus-serl called, on the one hand, primary and secondary retentions, and what Stiegler, on the other hand, calls tertiary retentions, which are the hypomne-sic traces (that is, the mnemo-technical traces) of conscious and unconscious life. There is archi-cinema to the extent that for any noetic act – for example, in an act of perception – consciousness projects its object. This projection is a montage, of which tertiary (hypomnesic) retentions form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room. This indicates that archi-cinema has a history, a history conditioned by the history of tertiary retentions. It also means that there is an organology of dreams.
Note that the definitive version of this text is available in Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2018).

A new translation of a text that was originally given as a lecture in Compiègne in 2004, then published in French as Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et connaissance: Le mort saisi par le vif. Eléments pour une organologie de la libido’, Revue d’Intelligence Artificielle 19 (2005), pp. 13–29, and more recently as ‘Désir et connaissance: Le mort saisi par le vif. Eléments pour une organologie de la libido’, La Deleuziana 6 (2017), pp. 68–81, available at: <http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Deleuziana6_68-81_Stiegler.pdf>.

It could be said that the real challenge of the Anthropocene is to confront the question of a converted gaze, in a way that requires and exceeds Kant’s notion of an extraterrestrial standpoint of standpoints. In a world where political points of view seem contained within impenetrable filter bubbles, how might Wittgenstein’s account of aspect-blindness with respect to bistable percepts point us to a new understanding of the loss of disparation caused by what Rouvroy and Berns call algorithmic governmentality? Husserl’s account of the melody as paradigmatic temporal object, which is fundamental to Stiegler’s account of the controllability of perception, desire and behavior, could be revised in such a light, because the peculiar dimensionality of the visual image is still crucially at stake in any new geopolitics of the sensible to be found or invented in a world dominated by the ubiquitous digital screen.

In: La Deleuziana 2 (2015).
In 2004 Bernard Stiegler posed “the tragic question of cinema” as that of the germ of regression to television and pornography it has always contained, just as in 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Enlightenment reason has always contained a germ of regression making possible a prostitution of theory leading only to the threat of fascism. If comparable threats attend Stiegler’s cinematic question, then this implies the need for an account of this potential for regression, that is, an account of the relationship between desire, technology and knowledge. Tracing the aporias of the origin of desire and trauma in psychoanalysis is one crucial way to pursue this account. Exiting these aporias depends on recognizing that the origin of desire has for human beings always been technical, and hence that the instruments of desire form its conditions and condition its forms. By thus analysing the staging of desire and the setting of fantasy it becomes possible to reflect, for example, on what it means that for Genet fascism was theatre, that for Syberberg Hitler was cinema, and that for Stiegler the new prostitution of the televisual graphic is digital and algorithmic. Hence arises the potentially tragic question of the possibility or otherwise, in the age of the ubiquitous screen, of a new cinematic invention and a new cinematic practice.

In: Reconstruction 11.2 (2011). The lecture was originally delivered in 2005. Via what matrix should the significance of September 11 be grasped? In 1994 Arakawa and Gins launched a form of thought that began by asking who or what you would be if you were parted from the ledge of a New York skyscraper. In the same year Stiegler commenced his own project, according to which the question of the "human" is the question of the articulation of the who with the what, a question which necessarily passes through a consideration of memory, and of mnemo-technical systems. This paper proposes to read Arakawa and Gins, and Stiegler, through the prism of September 11, and vice versa.

Only published in French translation, in Benoît Dillet and Alain Jugnon (eds.), Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler. Note that this paper, from 2008, implies that Stiegler does not refer to Gregory Bateson, whereas in fact he does do so in several texts, although as far as I know nobody has ever written on this connection.

This was originally written as a background paper (unpresented as such, and subsequently added to) for the panel of the 2018 Serpentine Galleries ‘Work’ Marathon entitled ‘Acceleration, Disruption, Bifurcation’, presented together with Gerald Moore and Shaj Mohan on 22 September 2018.

Lecture delivered on 25 July at the 2017 Épineuil-le-Fleuriel summer academy. The motto of the 2017 academy was the statement made by Friedrich Nietzsche during the 6 February 1872 lecture of his lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions: ‘Here, our philosophy must begin not with wonder but with dread’. The text presented here is an extended version of the paper presented at the academy, with thanks due to Bernard Stiegler for providing the author with his unpublished text, ‘Étre-là-bas: Phénoménologie et orientation’, which enabled some of the arguments presented here to be clarified. Thanks are due also to Jordan Schonig, for shared discussions of Wittgenstein's relationship to phenomenology. The lecture as delivered was entitled ‘Invasion of the Mind Snatchers’, but, in light of the author’s discovery of a forthcoming article with the same title by his friend Dominic Pettman, this title has been changed to respect this precedence.

Public lecture delivered to a general audience at Yachay Tech, 3 March 2016. A second part is intended, and will hopefully follow in the next few days. It really represents the starting point of an argument that will be developed further in another, forthcoming text.

Essays as part of university studies at the University of Melbourne.
Table of contents:
“The historian is a prophet facing backwards”—Friedrich Schlegel and
Michel Foucault 1
Beginning to read Heidegger on death and anxiety 31
Bernstein and Adorno on praxis 60
The pilot, the master, and the cyborg: three exemplary figures in the
history of philosophy 72
Notes toward a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the
age of mechanical reproduction” 96
Breathing space 110

Essays as part of university studies at the University of Melbourne.
Table of contents:
On Bataille’s relation to Nietzsche 1
The crypto-liberalism of Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas 18
The Wolf Man and the origins of psychoanalytic subjectivity 25
Politics, community and the imaginary 50
Preliminary reflections on Walter Benjamin 71
Unfolding Romantic history: critique of fragmented reason 90
On the young Marx 126