The Ordeal of Truth: Causes and Quasi-Causes in the Entropocene

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Al...

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Published in:	Foundations of science 2022-03, Vol.27 (1), p.271-280
Main Author:	Stiegler, Bernard
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Anthropocene Automation Bifurcations Causality Education Entropy Heidegger, Martin History Mathematical Logic and Foundations Methodology of the Social Sciences Philosophers Philosophy Philosophy of Science Social aspects Technology Technology and civilization Toxicity Truth Works
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Summary:	This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth (i.e., as the Entropocene) calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their (de-)fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene.
ISSN:	1233-1821 1572-8471