Fidelity, Betrayal, and the Time of Bernard Stiegler

There is something scandalously untimely (almost humanist!) about Stiegler's corpus, especially at first glance—and it is all too often a first glance that is a last glance these days. That's indeed one of the problems articulated within Stiegler's work: the quick and disinvested consumption of the archive that no longer takes care, and that holds onto the thing as if its possession were a good in itself, rather than the object opening up a space. Books, like all archival things, are transitional objects, and in that respect can open a space of desire that either turns in upon itself, or opens out to a future that is not fully one's own. To read Stiegler is to learn this about the archive—its capacity to be as toxic as it is curative—while also encountering this risk of desire in the corpus itself; so monumental is the project, and so apposite for an epoch confronting a manifestly destructive mode of autonomy, that one may well end up being dazzled by Stiegler's work. Given the range and intensity of Stiegler's project it would be easy to get bogged down.