Technics and Time, 2 Disorientation [Hardcover]

Disorientationis the first publication in English of the second volume ofTechnics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls the industrial temporalization of consciousness. Here, demonstrating that technologyincluding alphabetical writingis memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find cardinal points to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

Technics and Time 2: Disorientationcontinues Stiegler's interrogation of prosthetic and ortho-thetic memory in light of the crisis that arises when speed and delay are irreconcilable, the crisis of human being itself. Bernard Stiegler's ambition forTechnics and Time 2: Disorientationis exhilaratingly immodest: he promises to offer nothing less than a history of temporality, from prehistoric man to the present day . . . Stiegler makes a convincing case for the vital importance of the politics of memory in the 21st century. Bernard Stiegler is Head of the Department of Cultural Development at the Pompidou Center in Paris and co-founder of the political groupArs Industrialis. In the l3¡