Stiegler, Melancholy, Negativity

(funeral song for Bernard)

The death of Bernard Stiegler is part of his work. This in itself is not a rare exception.
Not only are other deaths part of the work of the one who has died, but perhaps
every death can well be considered part of oeuvre that all life secretes. Nevertheless,
in the case of Bernard Stiegler it seems particularly important to discern the precise
character of this belonging and how it extends the work, perhaps by causing it to
bifurcate in a singular way.

Man’s relation to death – to death insofar as for each one of us it is our death and
for all of us the death of each one – plays an essential role in Stiegler’s work since it
is in this relationship that, from the outset – from the beginning of The Fault of
Epimetheus – he sees the decisive aspect of what he calls the ‘invention of the
human’1, making of man himself a kind of artefact that would precede and call for
all possible artefactions – everything that we name technics. This originary character
is therefore itself nothing original: on the contrary, it indicates a (de)fault of origin
[défaut d’origine]. The human does not relate to an origin – which would doubtless not
even create a relation, but a continuity, or even an extension: it relates to a default
of origin that is revealed in and as the feeling of death. The feeling, which is to say
at once the perception, the experience and the knowledge that nourishes, as he says,
‘concern’ in the strongest sense of the word: care, worry [souci, inquiétude] – if not
angst [angoisse] – in the anticipation of a destiny both singular and finite – singular
because finite and finite because singular.

1 I will not give references because this is not an academic study. Moreover, the context always makes it possible to

identify the source of the quotations. In addition, I will write ‘Stiegler’ or ‘Bernard’ according to whether I think or
rather feel that it is a little more a matter of the author or of the man – and to mark that in him the two are not so
clearly distinguished, as he himself notes in more than one text. Translator’s note: Without at all wishing to affect the
status of the text as something other than an academic study, the translator has added some references to assist readers
who would like to follow up on the author’s citations.
This feeling of death – this feeling-oneself-mortal – brings, with the invention of the
human, the invention by him of the Immortals, these gods with whom is initiated
the relationship of lack and substitution that makes of the human a technician.

This feeling is ‘disastrous’ [funeste], he writes in a surprising manner – since it means

that he effects that of which he is the witness. ‘Funeste’ indeed refers to what bears
misfortune and ultimately death, as shown by the related words ‘funeral’ and
‘funerary’. Everything happens as if this feeling brings death or leads to it, even
though it seems rather to be its imprint, trace or stigma.

In reality, in a single inaugural phrase – ‘Everything will thus have come with the
feeling of death’ – Stiegler makes this feeling the origin of the human, a de-originated
origin, so to speak, the origin of what is experienced without origin and consequently
also without end (destination) other than its own end (cessation).

This feeling has a name: it is melancholy. Stiegler writes, ‘into the disastrous feeling
of death, into melancholy’. We are only on page 141 of the book.2 The motif of
melancholy – I mean of this precise term – will not be examined any further, but
later we read – after having passed through the ‘primordial melancholy’ symbolized
by interminable devouring of Prometheus’ liver – that our ‘always distanced
proximity’ from the Immortals initiates ‘an infinite regret through which the eternal
melancholy of the genos anthropos is woven’3 – an expression as strong as that of the
‘disastrous feeling’.

Melancholy will occasionally be discussed again in Technics and Time – for example,
in a manner inspired by Barthes, in relation to the melancholy of the photograph. In
his preface to the 2018 republication of La technique et le temps, Bernard, recalling work
previously undertaken on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and announcing that this motif
will be that of the intended final volume (Le défaut qu’il faut. Idiot, idiome, idiotie), evokes
epilepsy, ‘one of those mental illnesses that can give birth to genius’ – while adding,
‘like melancholy according to Pseudo-Aristotle’4, and he adds the reference to the
publication of the text (which, incidentally, is recognized as indeed being by

2 Translator’s note: That is, page 141 of La technique et le temps 1. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of
Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 131.
3 Translator’s note: Ibid., p. 190, translation modified.
4 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps (Paris: Fayard, 2018), p. 8.
Aristotle). A detail, but one that is perhaps – or perhaps not – remarkable: he writes,
in the title to which he refers, mélancholie, an old spelling5 that the translator-
commentator of the text, Jackie Pigeaud, had in the Latin form Melancholia used as
the title of another work. As if Bernard was involuntarily indulging in a slightly
archaicizing shift as far as the question of the relationship to the lost origin is
concerned.

Here, it is not this trait that matters, but that of genius. Genius will return in the text
– as the ‘genius of the arts’ (to translate entekhnē sophia) that Prometheus stole from
the Immortals, and then as the ‘genius of the Mesopotamians, older, more originary
than that of the Greeks’. From one to the other, from myth to a protohistory
revisited in order to push back the supposed ‘Greek miracle’ (and one can imagine
putting it back indefinitely), genius here bears the mark (in accordance with its name,
if one thinks about it, but Bernard does not make this explicit) of an anteriority in
the origin that implies a trace of immortality in human genius. If we keep in mind
the role played by the ‘idiot’ – a figure close to genius – idiocy is ‘an originary
disorder: an originary exception’. It represents in the default of origin a ‘carelessness,
this primordial idiocy, source of finite singularity and freedom’.6

There would thus be, alongside the default of origin or within it, even as the default
itself, the resource of another initiality, that of invention and more generally that of
acting (Bernard says), which I allow myself to gloss as the initiality of existence. The
deficiency of origin also harbours a resource. It is certainly not a compensation, or
a salvation, or a dialectical leap. But it is indeed the genius of the idiot.

Melancholy is perhaps not just black, or it may be that this blackness has a strange,
elusive and yet unmistakable glow. In a sense, this does not surprise us: we are well
aware that all of Stiegler’s work is guided by the desire to act and by the will to
believe or more precisely by this ‘necessity of belief’ that he takes from Kant as the

5 Translator’s note: The usual spelling, and the spelling used in the title of Jackie Pigeaud’s translation of Aristotle, is
mélancolie.
6 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, p. 199.
most rational affirmation of reason itself. Reason therefore involves a default of
knowing but it makes of this default its most powerful spring. ‘Reason is a necessary
default’, un default qu’il faut, writes Stiegler.7

The same logic governs the thought of the who (which is at bottom the general form
of the idiot or the genius), since it presents itself without a past in its memory, not
because it would have been forgotten but because it is yet to come. Here too there
is a necessary default, an essential resource that comes from an in-principle lack (and
the lack of a principle).

That melancholy contains an ambivalence, that the disastrous [funeste] rubs shoulders
with the brilliant [génial], is confirmed in The Age of Disruption, where we find perhaps
(to my knowledge at least) one of the last passages on this subject. It is first of all
identified as the height of the ‘loss of morale’, which here refers to culture, where
the latter must be cultivated and cared for so as to avoid demoralization and the loss
of meaning. It is tantamount to a ‘loss of reason’ that ‘since Aristotle’ has borne the
name of melancholy.8

Just prior, the same phenomenon had been designated as that ‘default of origin’ that
Heidegger named Abgrund, and that ‘since ancient Greece has been called ὕβρις:
excess, madness and crime’.9 It is this that the ‘the noetic soul constitutes’ in its default
of origin, and this is therefore also its ‘fundamental risk’.10 Let us note that if
Heidegger does indeed refer to the Abgrund in An Introduction to Metaphysics, which is
the example given here by Stiegler, it is however never in relation to hubris (generally
speaking, this relationship does not seem to be significant for Heidegger). Certainly,
Stiegler does not expressly connect them, but he does indeed posit an equivalence
between the two terms. In other words, this minimal philological circumstance
seems to betray a shift of value between Abgrund, which as Stiegler knows very well

7 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 182.

8 Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, trans. Daniel Ross

(Cambridge: Polity, 2019), p. 221.

9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
is the property of Heideggerian being, and ‘excess, madness and crime’, which is
precisely the thing that this book asks how we can escape it.11

There would be some vacillation, here, between melancholy and madness – a fleeting
vacillation, which might even seem to be due to a somewhat hasty dictation of this
passage. But this is, of course, something of which we should take note, just as we
have noted the somewhat odd use of the adjective ‘funeste’.

In any case, the possibility of hesitation and ambivalence at the edge of melancholy
will be confirmed two pages later in the same book. Speaking of the
‘neganthropological courage’ that characterizes resistance to demoralization and its
overturning, Bernard specifies that this courage that is ‘neither denying nor
repressing the disaster […] does not sink into melancholy (even if it does not cease
to challenge it and be tested by it, which it therefore does not deny)’.12 The repetition
of the verb ‘deny’ over the course of a few lines gives a double indication: on the
one hand, the denial of the disaster that is happening to us would be analogous or
parallel to the denial of melancholy and thus of the mortal default of origin; on the
other hand, if we must deny denial on these two levels, it is that it could not be far
away.

One might be tempted to deny melancholy, just as the disaster is denied by those
who see only the continuous progress of a transhumanism. But to deny melancholy
one would have to deny death – this is also what transhumanism aims for, but as a
possible future, while it is not possible to deny the default of origin to which the
feeling of disaster [sentiment funeste] attests. One cannot escape the ordeal. One can,
however, not sink into it but instead resist it, even though we are undergoing the ordeal
of the irresistible.

What this involves stems from a parallelism between the coming disaster and the
original loss of origin. This parallelism was introduced without being announced. It
tends to turn into an identification, and this turning revolves around melancholy.
The latter is not just the ‘sentiment funeste’. It is also that which is provoked by the
disaster of the Anthropocene: the rupture of the ‘feeling of existence’ through which

11 Translator’s note: The subtitle of The Age of Disruption is, in its original French edition, How Not to Go Mad.
12 Ibid., p. 224.
the ‘moral being’ is formed, as is said immediately after. What this now concerns,
namely the courage of resistance, must therefore be just as possible – and
demandable – in relation to the default of origin. This is indeed how we can
understand how it is a necessary default. Or how the idiot can be a genius.

The situation thereby produced is as follows: at the point of melancholy there seems
to intersect, without meeting, the irrepressible feeling of disaster and the feeling of
existence. The second cannot deny the first. But what does it do with it? It is this
question that seems to me to arise here. It imposes itself as the question of the
operation or the operativity of negativity. If the default is necessary, what is the
spring of this necessity?

It seems to me that Bernard is doing everything he can to set up this question, but
that he does not answer it. I hasten to add that I am not pretending in this way to
critique him. Firstly, this would require a much more meticulous journey through
the texts. In this respect, however, it is notable that melancholy, despite its extreme
importance, is not expressly problematized. It follows that it is quite possible that a
flaw [défaut] in the argumentation or the analysis is necessary here for essential or
transcendental reasons: such a fault is needed in order to pass from despondency to
courage, from nihilism to confidence. In other words, a leap is needed, à la
Kierkegaard, and not a continuous deduction. And if this is so, it is perhaps in this
way, already, that the death of Bernard belongs to his work: as the moment of a
passage to the act that all books, all conferences, all constructions of concepts could
not accomplish. Moreover, this is what is indicated, towards the end of the book, by
the need to approach the very impossibility of questioning.

When, then, is the spring of this necessity? I believe – and I say ‘I believe’ with the
emphasis given to it by Bernard – that it can be found in negativity. The entire
operation called negentropy, neganthropy, neganthropology is an operation of the
negation of negation. No doubt it takes place in the recourse to the pharmakon and
thus to the conjunction of contradictory aspects. And never would Stiegler allow it
to be understood as a dialectic, since the possibility that it could lead to a final
synthesis has been excluded. The double character of melancholy – the disastrous
feeling experiencing also the feeling of existing – responds to the same exigency.

But make no mistake about Hegel. One should not believe that the negation of
negation lies in an overhanging position. On the contrary, Hegel himself explains
that the third moment is not a result but an uninterrupted movement. In what does
this movement consist?

Paradoxically, it consists of a ‘tarrying’ [séjour]. The return in negation not only of

what was denied but also of its very negation engages the interminable movement.
This is not said by Hegel only in these abstract terms. It is said also in that very
famous passage of the Preface of Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel declares that
the spirit does not retreat before death but maintains itself in it.13 The Christological
model is obvious: it is a matter of the two days spent by Christ in the tomb – a time
about which nothing is said in the Scriptures (which nevertheless indicate its length)
but which gives rise to the iconography of Christ dead in the tomb supported by
angels. The Hegelian interpretation – which he develops in other texts – does not
exactly fit the major theological interpretation (whatever the doctrine), although it
corresponds to the hymn of Johannes Rist elsewhere cited by Hegel (‘God Himself
is dead’14) and also, in a less expected way, to the commentary by Thomas Aquinas
on Christ in the tomb: His death, he says, has not the semblance of night, but of
day. This luminous death is no other death than death itself.

There is in Hegel a suspension of the dialectic on death and in death itself. The
tarrying of the spirit is neither simply the negation of finitude and sin (and therefore
of default) nor the negation of this negation as a restored or acquired infinitude. Or
more precisely, if we bring together the texts of the Logic and the Phenomenology, the
infinite to which the finite accedes is movement, infinite transformation, or else –
the infinite present here, in place of death.

13G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §32.
14G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The Consummate Religion, trans. R. F. Brown et al.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 125.
Yet this place is no less that of melancholy. Rist’s hymn speaks of the sadness and
sorrow of knowing the death of God. I want to suggest that Stiegler is not quite as
far from Hegel as he thinks. Just as Hegel is the first thinker of an epoch that would
be ‘grey’15 (let us translate: entropic, or ‘without epoch’), so too it is he who
introduces into philosophy a melancholy that we should not be too hasty to believe
vanishes into the fulfilled Concept. On the contrary, the whole thought of which I
have just sketched the outline is, we must say again, a thought of the sojourn, of
tarrying: in some way, it is a matter of inhabiting melancholy.

Perhaps no thought since Hegel has been able to avoid this necessity. In this sense
I would like to say that Bernard comes as close as possible to this exigency. In this,
too, he is doubtless a continuator of Derrida – but again, in other ways and according
to another expectation.

His own way – it seems to me – is that of indecision about negativity. He is well

aware of the negativity of the human event (with the melancholy that is its price),
but when he sees it rushing headlong into self-destruction, he tries ins his turn to
deny it. Too astute to imagine overturning it into assured positivity, he affirms the
impossibility (this is the whole end of Disruption) of its realization, claiming for it the
status of dream or of a promise that must remain to come. Yet he also asserts that
there must be a ‘leap into a new era’.16

One can – or in any case I can – only follow him, and the same goes for when he
speaks of ‘sense arriving in non-sense’.17 The fact remains, however, that the
necessity of melancholy, and the necessity of not avoiding its ordeal, does not,
strictly speaking, give rise in him to a reflection. Instead, what takes place is his brutal
death, which in a single blow (it is indeed a matter of a blow) resounds for me like
an echo of the Hegelian ‘tarrying’ of the spirit in death. Everything happens as if –

15 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
p. 23.
16 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, p. 308.
17 Ibid., p. 307.
regardless of the physical circumstances that overwhelmed him – Bernard had
understood – or felt, experienced, here it is the same thing – that any attempt to
make the leap into a new era also means leaping or welcoming a leap into the
unthinkable, into the irremediable default, where no sense can arrive.

This is how his death belongs to his work, and this also means, immediately and
urgently, that he entrusts us with a task. It is as if I heard him to be saying: no reversal
of entropy (which, anyway, is that of the solar system: he talked about it in his first
book) can avoid the melancholy sojourn. He said, ‘melancholy is an experience of
entropy by default’.18 A very clear and decisive sentence, but at the same time
enigmatic, since it talks about the experience by default of the default of origin. The
experience of this default is impossible; yet, in the absence of making it possible,
melancholy gives neither a representation nor an evocation but nevertheless an
experience. There would thus be an experience of that of which there is no
experience. In other words, an experience that I do not have [je ne fais pas] but that
makes me [me fait] (as is the case with any true experience, which is not an act but a
suffering). Which thus makes me by undoing me (unravelling me, letting go of me
and therefore of everything). In melancholy there would not be a presentiment or a
fantasy of my death, but my death itself – something of the reality of my death.

What does this mean, beyond the observation, made by Bernard, of an experience
or an ordeal [épreuve] that one cannot deny? It may mean nothing that unfolds into
philosophical propositions. But this opens and Bernard’s death opened a meditation,
that is, a contention (more than a retention and protention), one that is difficult,
painful, risky, unmasterable but indispensable. A contention or a station, as the
ascents of Sufi Masters are marked with stations. It is not enough to advance, to
progress – even if it is a counter-progress: it is also necessary to stop, to experience
the contention of a station, perhaps the time to listen to Paul Celan letting sense
arrive and depart:

Down melancholy’s rapids

past the blank
woundmirror:
there the forty

18 In an interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Michaël Crevoisier, forthcoming.

 stripped lifetrees are rafted.

Single counter-
swimmer, you
count them, touch them
all.19

Jean-Luc Nancy, November 2020.

Translated by Daniel Ross.

19 Paul Celan, Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), p. 65.