3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this book NOW!!! SO much better than Technics and Time . . ., April 24 2011
By Christopher Vitale "Christopher Vitale" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: For a New Critique of Political Economy (Paperback)
This is an AMAZING book. If you were frustrated by the long-winded, meandering nature of Stiegler's three volume Technics and Time, this book is the complete opposite. It's tight, to the point, powerful. It presents an entire new way of looking at the world. It condenses the laboriously arrived at findings of Technics and Time without any fat. If you want to get what's going on in that three volume monster, try out this slim volume. It's not an easy read, but Stiegler does explain all his terms fully. You may need to reread sentences and think about them every so often (I certainly did). But the payoff's enormous. Now I want to go back to Technics and Time to see some of the 'math' he did behind the scenes, skim it selectively. But most of the way through Vol 1. of Technics and Time I was like, what's the payoff. Well, now I see what it is, and it's important and powerful. A full theory of technical evolution (from the birth of tools and language) to the present. As important philosophically as economically, there's careful analyses and redefinitions of crucial notions in Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, etc.
Stiegler's basic thesis: technical objects externalize memory, inscribe hopes and fears and memories into economies, but these economies can short-circuit so as to lead to a general mnemo-proletarianism, the structures of which revealed themselves fully with the economic crash of 2008. We need to understand what happened here to understand the relation between capitalism and technics, and with this, the future of our massive systems of collective and individual evolution.
Here's a list of some of the key terms Stiegler makes use of, and which he explains in this text. Powerful stuff, buy it now!: hypomnesia, hypomnematic objects, mnesic power, psychopower, neuro-proletarianization, economy of protensions, general organology, otium/negotium, grammatization, infantile synaptogenesis, pharmacology of mnemosystems, noopolitics, transindividuational circuits, tendential fall in libidinal economy,
