Stiegler as philosopher of education

This special issue builds on a recent consideration of contemporary French philosophy and its enduring impact and application to the philosophy of education (Cole & Bradley, 2018). In that work, Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy featured prominently and received treatment as a fitting contribution to the philosophy of education. With that precedent in mind, Bradley and Kennedy’s current work adds to the burgeoning interest in Stiegler’s philosophy (Bradley, 2018; Kennedy, 2019; Kouppanou, 2016; Lewin, 2016; Peters, Jandric , & Means, 2019). In their respective ways, the contributors to this special issue claim that Stiegler’s architectonic thought is essential reading for philosophers of education as it reveals the crisis-ridden moment we are living through. As such his heuristics of the pharmakon may help us to think seriously about the loss of attention and loss of interest in learning among young people across the planet. In our critical moment, a time of heightened ecological awareness and fear, a time imperiled by a looming sense of fatalism and apocalypse, a time produced by the limit and crisis of the Anthropocene, a time witnessing the vast destruction of biodiversity by unbridled capital expansion, it is Stiegler’s singular thought which explains how both student and teacher are being systematically proletarianized into non-learning and non-teaching and disrupted from learning as such – that is deprived of knowledge (Stiegler, 2019). What does this mean? Stiegler claims that both teacher and student alike suffer a loss of knowledge, a loss of how to do things (savoir faire), a loss of how to live (savoir vivre), and even how to think (savoir th eor etique). In the classroom, which can be understood as acting as a microcosm of the wider world, there is a struggle for subjectivation, that is the coming into maturity of the student. How and why is this happening in our time? This has been the gauntlet thrown down to the writers of this special issue. Collectively we are arguing that Stiegler’s highly complex thought is worth the trouble to read precisely because education, not only in the university, but in the school and the family, is being systematically destroyed by parents who obsess over smartphones rather than care for the children playing in front of their eyes, destroyed by mass use of social networking, destroyed by technologies and digitization which disrupt subjectivation as such, destroyed by the acting out of violence without rhyme or reason, destroyed when the transformation of drives into libido is disrupted. In the milieu of an exhausted form of industrial capitalism which destroys desire as such, which destroys transindividuation circuits between the generations, Stiegler insists the human being, the modern human being, must be reeducated, that is reeducated to learn how to use artificial organs, that is hypomnemata, such as language, social rules, religion and rituals, as well as digital technologies such as computers and micro-technologies. Simply, this is to invent in the imagination what capitalism cannot. For Stiegler, this is to develop a fidelity to knowledge, a relation to an object of care. It is a struggle against the loss of deep attention and the corresponding rise in hyper-attention disorders, and, consciously and disavowingly, to confront and contest the perverse addictogenic realities many of us inhabit. Therefore, Stiegler’s provocation points to the question of