TESTI / 1 / Bernard Stiegler /
Leroi-Gourhan: the organized inorganic (Italian translation)
Through a brief but clear synthesis of André Leroi-Gourhan’s fundamental thesis (universality of technical’s evolutive laws) and concepts (exteriorisation and technical memory), in this article Bernard Stiegler casts a light onto the paleo-anthropologist’s conception of technics as a third form of memory. From the prehistory of the Zinjanthropians, through classical Athens and to contemporary era, technics is always a memory support of gestural or mental processes, hence of culture. This understanding of technics has played a crucial role in Stiegler’s theorization of the human-technics complex, as well as being central for the creation of concepts like inorganic organised beings, epiphylogenetic memory, and mnemotechnics. Following Derrida, Stiegler argues here that the technical support of memory is not merely a means for transmitting knowledge, but constitutes the very possibility of the elaboration of knowledge itself: this thesis will be central for the critique of contemporary industrialisation of memory processes started with Cinematic Times and the Question of Malaise – published in French in 1998, the same year of the present article – and continued especially in the two volumes of Symbolic Misery and throughout all the pharmacological phase of Stiegler thought.
