Output details

Cultural Politics - Special issue: Bernard Stiegler

The output consists in a special issue of Cultural Politics: An International Journal (July 2010) on the work of Bernard Stiegler, proposed and guest edited by Crogan. Crogan contributed the 10,000 word introduction to the issue and an interview with Stiegler, and in collaboration with the journal managing editors oversaw the commissioning and review of the other contributions to the issue, including securing rights to translate a chapter from a book by Stiegler (still unpublished in English).

Stiegler’s activist-oriented, philosophy of technology-based account of contemporary media and technoculture has become recognised as an increasingly influential current emerging in and across philosophy, cultural and media studies terrains in recent years (evidenced by a proliferation of English translations of Stiegler and as numerous subsequent special issues and anthologies have testified). The issue led the way in introducing and assessing the significance of Stiegler’s work in Anglophone critical and cultural theory contexts, being the first print-based special issue on Stiegler on its release.

As set out in Crogan’s introduction (‘Bernard Stiegler: Philosophy, Technics, Activism’) this issue introduces key themes and concerns in Stiegler’s work by framing them as engagements in contemporary dynamics linking culture and politics in the globalised, digital epoch through a focus on the role of technology as mediator between these spheres. The interview (‘Knowledge, care and trans-individuation: An interview with Bernard Stiegler’) examines his approach to cultural politics from this perspective and draws out the implications for contemporary debates around politics, education, and digital media transformation of his redefinition of technology as irreducible prosthetic medium of individual and collective becoming.