What Makes Life Worth Living (ePub)

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry
wrote of a 'crisis of spirit', brought about by the
instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination
of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly
that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The
economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term
gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising
technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us
to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of
mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at
breaking point.

Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which
systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate.
Returning to Marx's theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism
marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no
longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of
subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit.

The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a
'pharmacology of the spirit'. Here, pharmacology has
nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the
pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and
poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open
ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes
us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates,
Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott,
Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering
and also what makes life worth living.