A lucid review of what must be a difficult book, indeed… unless you like mud-wresting with language for its own sake. Had I youth and time, I would, based on this review alone, jump in and read it… having neither (the one condition foreshortening the other), I really appreciate this.
Of the several passages that gave me pleasure, and got my mind buzzing (as an artist, you can see why… ) –I’ll leave this. ” He also sees the arts as something we need to re-center in our cultural praxis, saying in a recent interview “an artist is capable of affecting, in and of themselves, a line of transmission from Paleolithic art through to contemporary art, and this transmission is a relationship to time, to human—I don’t like the word “human,” so perhaps we could say “mortal”—experience. These lines are within the artist, not made manifest by him or her, nor are they structures of representation, and they are put into effect through their practice, through the contact with them”.
For Bernard Stiegler the philosopher has from the beginning been a self-divided being at odds with himself and his time, a creature of crime and havoc, remedy and poison. The Sophist would stake her claim in the black holes of linguistic turpitude, relishing the intricacies of illusion as the art of life. The Sophist was an admirer of what we now term the social construction of reality, a magician of language constructing the fictions by which society blesses and curses itself. While the philosopher or ‘lover of wisdom’ – or as Aristotle was want to say, philia: the lover of togetherness otherwise known as politics, the bringing together the brotherly love of the other in communicity, or a gathering of solitudes. In Stiegler the truth is that the philosopher sought to hide himself from himself, to repress the truth of his lack and inhumanity. The truth that culture is a machine…
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Jacob Russell's Magic Names 