Introduction to Bernard Stiegler, “The National Front and Ultraliberalism” (Extract from Pharmacologie du Front national, 2013)

Abstract:The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler published Pharmacologie du Front national in 2013. It is above all a response to the 2012 French presidential election, which, despite the election of François Hollande, gave evidence of the rising influence of the far-right National Front, and thus of a growing regressive tendency in the politics of the Western representative democracies. But Stiegler’s concern in this regard can be traced back to his first book and is present throughout his work, which has always been concerned with the positive technical (default of) origin of the conjunction of desire and knowledge, and the irreducibility of the tendency for these to be undermined by what he will call the negative pharmacological side of technics. In Pharmacologie du Front national, he draws attention to a third dimension of the pharmakon: its tendency to lead to the designation of the pharmakos, or the scapegoat, as that negative side takes hold. For Stiegler, the industrial populism characteristic of today’s consumerist economico-technological model inevitably and dangerously leads to political populism. He thus calls for a new critique of ideology, one that returns to its starting point in Marx and Engels, overcomes the limitations of Marxist and Althusserian materialisms that ultimately remain grounded in an oppositional metaphysics, and provides new practical and conceptual weapons in the struggle against contemporary ideology, whose essential motto is that “there is no alternative.”