Logos and Prosthesis: Bernard Stiegler’s Theory of Tertiary Memory

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the concepts of writing and tertiary memory in Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology. It is demonstrated that tertiary memory, being a process of sensuality exteriorization (espacement) that defines the specifics of human existence, is almost identical to Derrida’s writing. Tertiary memory is expressed in everything that falls under the rubric “record”, from the most primitive tools to socio-political institutions and cybernetic technologies. Unlike Derrida, Stiegler believed that tertiary memory is most clearly expressed in material and technical objects. As an example the paper takes Stiegler’s critical analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s existential ontology. Stiegler shows that in Husserl’s phenomenology, tertiary memory is represented by tertiary retention (determining a set of symbols, signs and images that implicitly constitute phenomenological experience), while in Heidegger’s philosophy, by the world-historical, determining the objective historical heritage of humankind, without which, as Stiegler demonstrates, there can be no existential experience. Further, the article discusses Stiegler’s thesis about historical and ontological duality of tertiary memory, containing both creative and destructive potential. Referring to Derrida, Stiegler shows that technics should be understood as what Plato called pharmakon, meaning a substance that can be both poison and remedy. This thesis defines the contemporary problem of lacking reflexion of the above-mentioned structural technical duality, which leads to excessive instrumentalization of the technics and its destructive effect on humans, similar to that during the time of Greek sophists.