The Re-Enchantment of the World

In this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age. Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a 'symbolic misery' where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today's control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of marketing and therefore estranged from any experience of aesthetic inquiry. That part of the population that continues to experiment aesthetically has turned its back on those who live in the misery of this conditioning. Stiegler appeals to the art world to develop a political understanding of its role. In this volume he pays particular attention to cinema which occupies a unique position in the temporal war that is the cause of symbolic misery: at once industrial technology and art, cinema is the aesthetic experience that can combat conditioning on its own territory. This highly original work - the first in Stiegler's Symbolic Misery series - will be of particular interest to students in film studies, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy and will consolidate Stiegler's reputation as one of the most original cultural theorists of our time.

Max Weber famously argued that the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe was premised on the emergence of a distinctive set of attitudes - including the pursuit of profit for its own sake - which he called 'the spirit of capitalism'. Today, when capitalism has spread across the globe, the spirit of capitalism would appear to reign supreme. In this important book Bernard Stiegler takes a very different view: what we are witnessing today is not the triumph of the spirit of capitalism but rather its demise, as our contemporary 'hyper-industrial' societies become increasingly uncontrollable, profoundly irrational and incapable of inspiring hope. Disenchantment and despair have become the everyday lived experiences of countless individuals. Far from being a moment of liberation, May '68 was just the first symptom of our increasing disenchantment and 'spiritual misery'. The libidinal energy that originally underpinned capitalism has become an unbound force, unleashing drives that can no longer be contained. Is there an alternative? Stiegler argues that the development of alternatives must begin with a new industrial policy, designed to recognize that technologies are what Plato called pharmaka, meaning both poison and cure. Industrial society has a future only if we can create technologies that foster relations of care (otium) for people whose spirit has been exhausted by contemporary consumerism. We must develop an ecology not only to protect the planet but also to renew the exploited energies of human desire. This volume - the third in a trilogy that includes The Decadence of Industrial Democracies and Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals - will consolidate Stiegler's reputation as one of the most original philosophers and cultural theorists of our time.

In the first two volumes of Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the exteriorization process of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"- as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer-that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.