Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler (born 1952 in Villebon-sur-Yvette, died 2020) was a French philosopher who placed technology at the centre of thinking about what it means to be human. He earned his doctorate at the EHESS and worked in dialogue with Heidegger, Husserl, Freud and Derrida, among others. His importance lies in challenging the view that technology is a neutral tool external to intellectual and cultural life.

His early years were marked by communist militancy, by leaving school early and, after a conviction for armed robbery, by a period in prison where he began studying philosophy by correspondence with Gérard Granel. Later he directed cultural development at the Centre Pompidou and founded the Institut de recherche et d'innovation. In 2005 he set up the group Ars Industrialis, and in 2010 a philosophy school in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel. His central work, Technics and Time, is a series of three volumes arguing that technics is constitutive of the human condition. On this account humans have no fixed essence and become themselves through technical prostheses that act as externalised memory, on which cultural transmission depends.

In his later series he examined how the industrialisation of culture and desire produces a "symbolic misery" and a generalised proletarianisation of knowing how to do and how to live. His influence extends to the philosophy of technology, digital media studies and debates about democracy in Europe. He died by suicide in 2020.