Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler (bɛʁnaʁ stiɡlɛʁ; Seine-et-Oise, France 1 April 1952 – 5 August 2020) was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stiegler has been described as "one of the most influential European philosophers of the 21st century" and an important theorist of the effects of digital technology. Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy, studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail. He recounts his transformation in prison in his book, Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the 2009 volume Acting Out). In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et technologies. Stiegler earned his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1993 under the direction of Jacques Derrida, and obtained his Habilitation in 2007 at the université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 under the direction of Dominique Lecourt. He was a Director at the Collège international de philosophie, and a professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne, as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).