Having published over 30 books on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, and consumer culture, Bernard Stiegler is recognized as one of the world’s leading thinkers of technology’s influence on society. Through rigorous investigations of emerging forms of industrialization and automation, the philosopher has had a wide influence in many fields concerned with the human future, from economics to engineering, from politics to art.

On his visit to Aarhus University, Bernard Stiegler will present a public lecture entitled “The Wealth of Internation”, inspecting the global impacts of general social automation on the prospects of human knowledge and individuation.

For almost 25 years since the landmark publication of La technique et le temps Vol. 1: La Faute d’Épiméthée, Bernard Stiegler has been recognized as one of the world’s leading thinkers of technology’s influence on culture. Through rigorous investigations of contemporary technological environments and emerging forms of industrialization, digitalization, and automation, the French philosopher has had a wide influence in all fields concerned with the human future. Considering that technics are essentially and irreducibly pharmaka—that is to say, that all tools can at once be poisons, remedies, as well as scapegoats for human predicaments—he has insisted that we investigate technologies pharmacologically, giving accounts of both positive and negative effects, and that we trace how technical entities evolve and interact organologically. Noting that the Anthropocene, as an age of deterioration and entropy, might just as well be called the “Entropocene”, much of his recent work centers on the question of how societies might build a new negentropic era, a Negentropocene, or a Neganthropocene, which learns to better negotiate between the human, the non-human and the inhuman. 

Bernard Stiegler is director of Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmith College in London and a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy. He previously was director at the International College of Philosophy, Deputy Director General of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). 

As part of the Chronopolitics and Aesthetics of Futurity research project, and made possible by Human Futures, Posthuman Aesthetics and the School of Communication and Culture, we are very proud to host this lecture that promises to be of value for all those interested in how we might better steer our technical environments in directions that favor knowledge, thought, equality, emancipation and justice.  

For further information, please contact tfh@cc.au.dk or read more here.