Philosophising by Accident ─ Interviews With Elie During

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted from 8-15 December 2002 at France Culture with Élie During, is the best introduction to Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time series. This collection includes a new interview commissioned specially for this volume.

Philosophising by Accident introduces some of the key points in Stiegler's argument about the technical constitution of the human, and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. Stiegler presents his original analysis of Plato and the beginning of philosophy in relation to the tragic culture, the method of dialectics and metaphysics. He also reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his controversial thesis about the three types of memory and refers to concepts central to his later works such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object.

While contemporary times call us to examine and analyse technical tools and new technologies, Stiegler argues that philosophy has, from its very origins, repressed technics. Rigorously examining the evolution of technics and its effects on the human will gives us greater insights into what it means to be human.

Stiegler also discusses his work as part of the National Institute for Audiovisual (INA) and refers to his unpublished Master's dissertation on Plato and Marx and the unpublished part of his doctoral dissertation.

Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher. He is head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI) which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He is also the founder of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis, and the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, Ecole de Philosophie d'Epineuil-le-Fleuriel. His works include the three-volume series Technics and Time (now out of print in France) translated into English and published by Stanford University Press (1998, 2009, 2011). Philosopher par accident was published in 2004 by Galilee and is now out of print.

Benoit Dillet is Lecturer at Loughborough University. He is co-editor of Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler(Cecile Defaut, 2013) and The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).