Care and Carelessness in the Anthropocene: Bernard Stiegler’s Three Conversions and Their Accompanying Heideggers

Abstract:This article proposes dividing Bernard Stiegler’s work into three phases, and that a notion of care develops and deepens as these phases progress. To each of these phases there corresponds a particular relationship to Heidegger’s thought: 1) the Heidegger of Being and Time who denies the role of technics in the opening of the possibility of authentic time; 2) as a thinker of the “they” who corrects Simondon’s inability to think collective disindividuation while being himself unable to think a genuine collective individuation process; 3) the later Heidegger who indeed approaches the most mysterious and unsettling aspect of tekhnē and who foresees the most threatening aspect of Gestell as a world in which Dasein loses its privilege as the questioning being. Yet this third Heidegger also failed to reflect on what Stiegler puts at the heart of the thought of his third phase: the question of entropy, understood as describing fundamental but diverse thermodynamic, biological, and informational tendencies. For Stiegler, taking care in the Anthropocene necessarily entails reinscribing philosophical concepts, including that of Ereignis, in relation to entropy, anthropy, and the struggle against them. Beyond Heidegger, this also entails addressing the obsolescence and self-destructiveness of the current macroeconomic model.