‘…In the Secret of one’s Life’: Bernard Stiegler and Philosophy in the Intimacy of his Prison Cell

Authors

Anna Kouppanou, Cyprus Pedagogical InstituteFollow

Keywords

Bernard Stiegler, prison, exteriorisation, technology, anamnesis, hypomnesis

Abstract

In his book, Acting Out, philosopher Bernard Stiegler confesses that the question once posed to him by Marianne Alphant − namely, ‘How does one become a philosopher in the intimacy and secret of one’s life?’ threw him ‘into an embarrassing position’, mainly because Stiegler became a philosopher in the intimacy of his prison cell. There is no question that from Socrates to Antonio Gramsci, there have been philosophers who have suffered shorter or longer periods of imprisonment, but this was mainly because of their philosophy – their individuated way of being and thinking. In Bernard Stiegler’s case, it appears that the terms are reversed – in other words, the philosopher emerges as the philosopher he is because of and through imprisonment. This reversal is taken provisionally here, since this paper problematises the very notions of philosophical writing, philosophical acting, and origin, repositioning thus the question of writing, authorship, technology and individuation – namely, the central notions of Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy.

Author Bio

Anna Kouppanou is an education officer at the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute. She teaches philosophy of education, children’s literature, the didactics of literature, and creative writing. She writes about philosophy of education, philosophy of technology, the concept of nearness and its digital instantiations, the concept of metaphoricity and literary theory.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.25771/re3c-cw76

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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