Philosophies of Technologies

7Taking Care of Digital Technologies with Bernard Stiegler

Thinking about technology in relation to time and spirit will remain Bernard Stiegler’s great unfinished work¹ and will be an infinite source of questioning, in other words, of knowledge, for generations to come. This temporal and spiritual dimension is, for him, the condition of technology as a place for knowledge, the so-called “milieu des savoirs” (“milieu of knowledge”). Bernard Stiegler readily applied this definition of technology to the digital world (Stiegler 2014), a digital world whose organology (biological, technical and social organs) he first suggested studying in a general sense, so as to be able to consider its pharmacology. Indeed, any organ, whether biological, technical or social, can be a poison or a remedy, depending on how we care for it. In this chapter, I would like to illustrate how, in particular through the projects I have been able to carry out with him, Bernard Stiegler knew how to take care of what he called the “technologies of the spirit”: first (1), by experimenting with them through cultural projects or technological development programs, whose incompletion he could criticize, thus building a critical vision and a future for technology; then (2), by taking care of them, that is to say, by considering them as objects of collective desire, but always pharmacological, in a necessary intermittence between what is synchronic and diachronic, between the stereotype and the traumatype, between ...