What Makes Life Worth Living

On Pharmacology

Bernard Stiegler, Daniel Ross

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745681948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a 'crisis of spirit', brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx's theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a 'pharmacology of the spirit'. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.

Part I

Pharmacology of Spirit

Is it not remarkable that this theme, spirit […] should have been dis¬inherited [forclos d'héritage]? No one wants anything to do with it any more, in the entire family of Heideggerians, be they the orthodox or the heretical, the neo-Heideggerians or the para-Heideggerians, the disciples or the experts. No one ever speaks of spirit in Heidegger. Not only this: even the anti-Heideggerian specialists take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to denounce it. Why?

Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question

1

Apocalypse Without God

1. Apocalyptic feeling and economic war

In 1919, Paul Valéry began ‘La crise de l'esprit’ with the following words: ‘We later civilizations … we too now know that we are mortal’.¹ We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century who have not been through a world war, and who form present-day humankind, now know that we are capable of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as the consequence of God's anger – of original sin – today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimism.

The cause of this mood, which became even more downbeat in 2009 after the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, is an economic war without mercy: a concealed conflict, a bottomless hypocrisy, a constant struggle, exhausting the Earth and its inhabitants, and leaving a billion of them in abominable economic misery while ruining the whole of the human world ever more quickly and ever more irreversibly, such that, in this war disguised as peace, it will not be long before everyone loses.

The name of this war is globalization – a globalization in which industrial technologies have become weapons that destroy ecosystems, social structures and psychic apparatuses. If the time has come for an armistice and, with it, for the negotiation of a new peace treaty, which would be a new contract, and not only a social contract, but a scientific, technological and global contract; if too many ruins are being accumulated in the name of ‘development’ and economic competition, then this raises a preliminary question: what relation to technics and to technologies would enable us to think the reconstruction of a global future?

The economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 has exposed the profoundly destructive nature of the globalized industrial system. Everybody now knows that it is no longer feasible to continue pursuing the ‘misgrowth’ [mécroissance] that is a global economic war disguised as a consumerist peace by the psycho-power of marketing.² Yet nobody can see how to re-find the path capable of leading to peaceful growth and development. It is this combination of knowledge and non-knowledge that leads to the spread of this ordinary, everyday apocalyptic feeling – the feeling and the knowledge that something has come to an end.

2. ‘So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues’

In what he analysed in 1919 as a crisis of mind or spirit, Valéry highlighted above all the fundamental ambiguity of this spirit – of the science, reason, knowledge and even the moral elevation that made possible so much ruination, death and devastation throughout Western Europe, beyond what any previous historical epoch could ever have imagined:

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Knowledge and Duty, then, are suspect.³

Valéry, just like Husserl a little later, and like so many thinkers who were overwhelmed between the wars, thus described the way in which the First World War revealed that spirit is always composed of two contrary sides: it is a kind of pharmakon – at once a good and an evil, at once a remedy and a poison, as Plato said about writing, which is the technology of the rational mind.

The evidence for this pharmacology, for this ambiguity and hence for this fragility of spirit, impressed itself on Valéry and his contemporaries in the form of a series of interconnected crises – military, economic and spiritual⁴ – through which science is ‘dishonoured’.⁵ After the First World War,

everything essential in the world has been affected by the war […]. The Mind [or Spirit] itself has not been exempt from all this damage. The mind is in fact cruelly stricken; it grieves in men of intellect, and looks sadly upon itself. It distrusts itself profoundly.⁶

3. ‘Sciences of fact’ and ‘humanity of facts’: the extinction of the Enlightenment

Sixteen years after Valéry, Husserl in turn spoke of a crisis of science. This crisis proceeds from a ‘change which set in at the turn of the past century’, which concerns ‘the general evaluation of the sciences’, and which aims at ‘what science in general has meant and could mean for human existence’:

The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Mere sciences of fact create a mere humanity of facts.⁷

At the time Husserl was writing these lines, Hitler had already been Chancellor for two years, and a plebiscite bestowing upon him the title of Führer had received support from 92 per cent of the German electorate.

The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need – so we are told – this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.⁸

Reading these lines in 2010, how can we doubt that this malaise in relation to science has returned with even greater force? It is thus the spirit of the Enlightenment that seems to have been extinguished, writes Husserl. The Enlightenment – that is:

the ardent desire for learning, the zeal for a philosophical reform of education and of all of humanity's social and political forms of existence, which makes that much-abused Age of Enlightenment so admirable.⁹

Having become ‘positive sciences’ and ‘mere sciences of fact’, and forming a ‘mere humanity of facts’, the Enlightenment has been inverted into Darkness. It has its hymn: ‘We possess an undying testimony to this spirit in the glorious “Hymn to Joy” of Schiller and Beethoven.’ But this hymn (which has become that of the European Union) can ‘only with painful feelings [be heard] today. A greater contrast with our present situation is unthinkable.’¹⁰

4. Economy of spirit and organology

On the eve of the Second World War, four years after Husserl published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, from which the above words are taken, Valéry returns in ‘Freedom of the Mind’ to the state of the krisis of mind or spirit, and deplores having to do so:

It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that today it is not only necessary, but imperative to interest people's minds in the fate of the Mind [or Spirit] – that is, in their own fate.¹¹

Returning to the question of Spirit in 1939 was an attempt to interest minds in their own fate and in the fate of Spirit, above all by highlighting that this proceeds from a spiritual economy¹² that cannot be considered in isolation from the material economy:¹³ these two economies, which must be distinguished as that of the useful and the useless,¹⁴ but which can never be separated, are products of the same organs.

Seventy years after Valéry returned to this question, seventy years after the onset of the Second World War, which brought horror at a level that would have been unimaginable to the Valéry of 1919, we must draw the consequences of the fact that two inseparable yet contradictory economies operate with the same organs: these two economies call for an organology, which is also a pharmacology, given that what an organ can accomplish in the material economy (that is, negotium) may be contrary to what this very same organ makes possible in the spiritual economy (that is, otium):¹⁵

The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs; more than that, the same types of signs, the same tokens of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic that function in the most indispensable actions of our life, all likewise figure in our most gratuitous, conventional, and extravagant actions.¹⁶

These two economies are always in a relation of conflict over values, because our species always lives on two planes at once, which are also two different scales of value: the plane of conservation, on which all living beings live, and a plane that exceeds this conservation:

In short, man does not have two sets of equipment, he has only one; and sometimes it functions to maintain his life, his physiological rhythm, and sometimes it furnishes the illusions and labours of our great adventure.¹⁷

And our organs – physiological and artificial – are always simultaneously at the service of these two economies, developing in parallel: ‘The same ship or rowboat brought merchandise and gods … ideas and methods’.¹⁸ And for a very long time there was a ‘parallel between the intellectual development and the commercial, industrial, and banking development of the Mediterranean and Rhine basins’.¹⁹ This, however, is no longer the case:

Culture, cultural changes, the value put on matters of the mind, the appraisal of its products, and the place we give to these in the hierarchy of man's needs – we know now that, on the one hand, all this is related to the ease and the variety of exchanges of all sorts; on the other hand, it is strangely precarious.²⁰

In 1939, Va...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Part I: Pharmacology of Spirit
• Part II: Pharmacology of Nihilism
• Part III: Pharmacology of Capital
• Part IV: Pharmacology of the Question
• Index