This article offers a reconstruction of Derrida’s critique of Leibniz. It suggests that in attempting to fit Leibniz into his conception of the history of metaphysics and the all-embracing notion of logocentrism that underwrites it, Derrida presupposes two regimes of logocentrism: one subjective, the other theological. Subsumed into this second mode, Derrida casts Leibniz as a progenitor of structuralism and the new sciences and technologies of information in order to expose their logocentric foundations. However, in doing so, he ends up (...) sidelining the aspect of Leibniz’s ideas that anticipates the specificity of the new epoch of writing he claims to historicise. The article goes on to argue that to grasp this specificity one must look beyond the “expressivist” schema of exterior representation, which Derrida draws from Husserl’s theory of meaning, and instead look to Leibniz’s own formal-combinatorial concept of expression, which exceeds Derrida’s critical framework. (shrink)

In the ways that they currently link images and bodies, online computer games are not just a new form of commodity. As toys, they also materialise a collective, historical temporality. Disjunctions in the timing and spacing of action in computer game play suggest a different kind of temporality might be involved in the formation of contemporary collectives. These games highlight the role of ‘realtime’ in the constitution of an experience of speed. Through Giorgio Agamben's notion of the whatever body, and (...) a particular realtime game, this paper argues that computer games can help locate certain rhythms and times associated with globalised informatic collectives. The whatever body provides a way of negotiating the globalised yet inessential commonality of information, in terms of a temporality which wavers between a‐historical synchronisation and singular events. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism. This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments (...) in the life sciences pose a challenge to the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level, I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos. (shrink)

The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act (...) of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are made along (...) the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)

Touching on Nancy and Derrida offers a glimpse not only into the thesis both of Jean-Luc Nancy's critique of touch and of Derrida's Le Toucher, but also into the threshold of a technology of (the) sense to come. This glimpse is an interrogation, and one that is both historic and historical, in the sense that Derrida, in addressing Jean-Luc Nancy's work, has presented us with an encyclopedic history of touch in the philosophic tradition from Aristotle to Nancy, one in which (...) what Derrida calls “transcendental archifacticity” is accorded its proper value, and within which any seeming anthropological privilege, as an inherent aspect of the Phenomenological Reduction is, as Derrida says, ‘overshadowed.’ Such an overshadowing is both strategic, in terms of a historical phenomenological project, and tactical, in Derrida's investigative sense: tactical in terms of implementation, manifestation, manipulation (i.e. through the application of the hand, manus) and in terms of tact, tactility; to which must be tacked on, à la Nancy, con-tact, ‘with touch,’ a ‘with-touch’ in which a béance, a gash or dash, opens out in-between, ‘at the very point’ to use Derrida's repeated specification, of bifurcation and of con-tact, at the junction point of the ‘spacing out’ of a laminated différance con-noting more than it has or had ever done in Derrida's work itself. *. (shrink)

This article begins by examining the concept of the pharmakon that is developed in Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, as it is here that the idea of a medium that is simultaneously poisonous and therapeutic is developed in relation to the discursive effects of writing. The author then goes on to look at Stiegler’s attempt to reconfigure the ‘orthographic economy’ of deconstruction, particularly his account of how the ‘tertiary supports’ of virtual and information technologies have transformed the experience of the real (...) in the regime of global capitalisation. Finally, he argues that the appearance of the pharmakon as a matrix idea in his work, sharpens his account of the aporia of technological society: for the impossibility of human culture being reduced to either the disorientated life industrial populism, or to idealist notions of reflexivity, is what, for Stiegler, offers the chance of a new politics of spirit. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to evaluate the ethical and political conclusions that Ulrich Beck draws from his account of ‘civilization risks’. I have argued that the categories of ‘life’, ‘the organic’, and the ‘technological’ which are presented in Risk Society, presuppose a certain metaphysics of ‘natural’ human identity; and that it is the inscription of this identity in the politics of risk administration which opens the possibility of an absolutely legitimized regulation of nature, humanity, and society. Thus, in (...) order to evaluate the ‘risk’ entailed in the ethical and political strictures of Beck's ‘world risk society’, I have had recourse to the expositions of time, presence, identity and technology which Derrida has given in Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx. It is through these expositions that I have tried to work through the idea of an ecological politics that would remain sensitive to the events of difference and alterity precipitated by its own ‘cosmopolitan’ interventions. (shrink)