Introduction: The Invitation of Memory

In the thick of yet another of the century’s crises, bio-technological as much as bio-political, the passing of Bernard Stiegler clouded into a darker shade of grey our overcast skies. As an intellectual, Stiegler had never been more present in the agora. His contributions were felt increasingly stronger among non-specialist circles, beginning to influence domains far beyond the academic, artistic and experimental techno-scientific enclaves where he had been originally received. At the moment of his passing, Stiegler represented for many of us a hope.

His sharp sensibility for signs of change in the public sphere, this seismographic acuteness to register and to elucidate the symptomatic significance of events that for most of us passed as anecdotal, lent particular gravity to the interventions he initiated. We recall, for instance, his interpretation of the Nanterre massacre in 2002, in which Richard Durn was led to the murder of eight councillors and the injury of nineteen others, before taking his own life. Stiegler saw in Durn’s explicit cry for existence a ‘structural privation of his primordial narcissistic capacities’, a loss of ‘the power to signify’ and an extreme expression of the evermore common loss of individuation. Similarly, Stiegler was deeply affected by and subsequently drew attention to the testimony of the fifteen-year-old Florian, who in 2015 spoke of his generation’s complete loss of dreams and ideals, paralysed by the fear of being the last, or among the last of generations.