Towards a Critical Culture of the Image ?
Tekhnema 4 / "The Temporal Object"/ Spring 1998
Towards a Critical Culture of the Image  J. Derrida and B. Stiegler, Echographies de la t�l�vision.
Entretiens film�s, Galil�e-INA, Paris: 1996
Richard Beardsworth
Four thousand years of linear writing have accustomed us to separating art from writing. Andr� Leroi-
Gourhan
Beginning to write without the line. Jacques Derrida
One of the most evident effects of the increasingly explicit technicization of the world is the
predominance of the image  or, more often, "tele-" image  in ever broader but converging domains of
experience. For many, the subordination of experience to the image has come to represent best the
cultural fate of modern technology. The judgment is not fortuitous. Since human consciousness is more
immediately implicated in the effects of the image than of those of other processes of technicization, the
image has become a major collective site of reflection upon technics. This is also not fortuitous. The
predominance of the image in contemporary actuality is due, precisely, to its ability to affect us quasi-
immediately. This quasi-immediacy is a consequence of at least three factors: digitalization, what is
called "real time," and the present sway held by economic "logic" over political and cultural processes.
Inextricably linked, these factors form part of a technico-economic complex that has made the image
into the prevalent contemporary vehicle of human communication, identification and symbolization at a
world level. This complex is explicitly transforming traditional and modern forms of organization
(economic, social, political and cultural) as well as the terms in which reflection and judgment (political,
cultural and ethical) upon such transformation are to be articulated. The tele-image, together with the
complex which makes it possible, have thus become the site of negotiation for the future of culture as
such.
In the last few years critical reflection upon the increasing predominance of the image within society has
as a whole tended to be reactive (in the Nietzschean sense). For it has been pitched in terms of
"resistance" to the image and to the poverty of indifferentiation that has accompanied its socio-cultural
growth. Such critiques  at times profound and welcome with regard to their adversary, the politically
empty neo-liberal affirmation of contemporary technical processes1  have often come from radically
heterogeneous cultural formations (both religions and secular, ethnic and cosmopolitan, the Left and the
Right of the political spectrum), as if the process of indifferentiation that accompany the image s rule
has until now also oriented critical reaction to it. This is at least the case in Europe.
It is in this context that Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler s Echographies de la t�l�vision. Entretiens
film�s is an important and welcome book. Made up of a long interview with Derrida, conducted by
Stiegler, on the contemporary teletechnologies, flanked by two individual pieces by each philosopher
(respectively "Artefactualit�s" and "L'image discrŁte"), Echographies constitutes a reflective
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intervention in the field of the tele-image, and the teletechnologies in general, that has important
implications for both our understanding of the image and our relation to it. For Echographies sets the
terms for a critical relation to the image which re-inscribes the above positions of economic
"affirmation" and cultural/intellectual "resistance" within an economy that exceeds their pertinence. It
does this by situating the image within its present technical and economic actuality as well as by relating
this actuality to wider questions of inscription, time and space. This is the first importance of the
volume; other reasons for its interest emerge from it.
It is, for example, to the credit of Bernard Stiegler to have arranged such an interview given that its axes
of reflection carefully foreground the political pertinence of Derridean deconstruction today: not only in
terms of its specific reflection upon technics but also, and more importantly, in terms of its more general
reflection upon the relations holding between contemporary technics, time, space, politics, and thinking
or reflection as such. The very nature of the conversation between Stiegler and Derrida gives Derrida
occasion to be precise about how his own thought appraises and responds to contemporary actuality in
political, ethical and critical terms. At a time when the political credentials of deconstruction are often
still suspected, Echographies serves, therefore, as a sharp reminder of the general importance of
Derridean thought to innovative political reflection of the future.
Echographies is, however, not just a mise au point of Derrida s philosophy. This is because Derrida s
interviewer, Bernard Stiegler, has himself a very powerful and original philosophical position regarding
the teletechnologies. As a result the interview not only borders on a true exchange of ideas, it also bears
witness to an important intellectual tension between the two men concerning the relation between
philosophy, technology and politics. As we shall see, the tension concerns ultimately the relation
between determination and the future. Now if Echographies is all the more interesting a text for not just
being an interview, it is at the same time disappointing for this very reason. For the tension between
Derrida and Stiegler is never properly articulated given that their conversation remains in form and
diction precisely too much of an interview. Stiegler s thoughts are as a result cramped, and Derrida s
responses to his questions and interventions remain too much within the ambit and terms of his own
philosophy. Having read both the interview and the separate pieces from each philosopher, the reader is
consequently left at the end with the sense that an important articulation between technology, politics
and reflection has been entered upon but not brought to a satisfactory intellectual conclusion (be it one
where the lines of disagreement are simply made clear).
In the following I will be concerned with these three aspects of the book: Derrida s important
elaboration of a critical relation to the image, Stiegler s own dense response to the question of the
contemporary teletechnologies and, finally, the nature of the tension between the two that Echographies
articulates and yet only organizes at a symptomatic level.
*
Near the beginning of the interview, having pointed out that, for deconstruction, writing is already a
teletechnology, Stiegler asks Derrida in what "specificity" contemporary teletechnologies lie. The
question returns under many guises throughout the interview, a return that suggests both the strategic
importance of the question and a certain sense of dissatisfaction on Stiegler s part with Derrida s answer
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Towards a Critical Culture of the Image ?
(one which will serve us later as guide to Stiegler s own preoccupations with this specificity and to what
the interview does not articulate in its regard). Derrida s response is both highly consistent with his
thinking upon writing and arche-writing since Of Grammatology and permits him to rehearse the ethico-
political implications of this thinking that have explicitly come forward in work from the 1980s. It thus
threads together, in a prudent and impressively economic manner, the relations holding between the
trace, writing, technology and the ethico-political purchase of the absolute future  what he has theorized
since the middle 1980s in terms of the "promise" or the "messianic."2
Derrida's response to the question of the "specificity" of the contemporary teletechnologies is twofold.
On the one hand, he stresses the fact that there is nothing new, that is, that
whatever this specificity, it does not suddenly replace a natural or immediate speech with
prosthesis, teletechnology, etc. There have always been, there always are such machines,
even in the age of handwriting, even in the course of a so-called live conversation. (p. 47)
On the other hand, he emphasizes that their singularity lies in the fact that
the greatest compatibility, the greatest coordination, the liveliest possible affinity appears
to be imposing itself today between what seems the most alive, live, and diff�rance or
delay, the delay in the exploitation or diffusion of the living. (ibid.)
With this dual response, Derrida tackles the "today" of the tele-image as a new epoch of
"writing" (rather than of an image in distinction to writing) through which moves, and is to be articulated
as such, the general movement of diff�rance, discreteness and spacing. The tele-image is accordingly
approached theoretically qua a singular synthesis of time and space (one that "appears" immediate),
which singularity is nevertheless analyzed and understood from within a differential movement of
synthesis (an economy) that includes all types of marks. This major point carries several implications
which I will group together for reasons of clarity although they are deployed by Derrida over the time of
the interview as a whole as well as in his separate piece "Artefactualit�s."
- First: any opposition of the image to the written word  together with the cultural and political stakes
accompanying such an opposition  is seen to be untenable. For both the image and the written word are
effects of what Of Grammatology called "arche-writing" (a differential structure of discrete marks, or
spacing) which includes the digital image as much as the ideogrammatic, pictographic, phonetic or
alphabetic mark. This means that just as one cannot oppose the image to the word, so, also, one cannot
not think the contemporary technologies in relatively specific terms. It is consequently from the
backdrop, as it were, of arche-writing that Derrida constantly resists seeing the teletechnological as
something "absolutely" specific: I will come back to this later when developing Stiegler s own response
to the terms of this specificity.
- Second: Derrida analyzes the above spacing of the tele-image in terms of the spacing between temporal
ecstases that the immediacy of the image in real time appears to flatten out. With the teletechnologies,
the near and far are brought together in such a way that the "spacing" of time and space is radically
reduced. For Derrida, it is this reduction which characterizes the "specificity" of contemporary actuality.
Thus critical reflection upon the tele-image is placed within a more broad thinking of the spacing of time
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and space.
- Third: for Derrida, just as this reduction of time and space carries crucial and urgent ethical and
political connotations, so it is here that the task of philosophy in relation to actuality is located (see
especially, pp. 13, 19 and 28 of his "Artefactualit�s"). For if the end of totalitarian regimes was due more
to the pervasiveness of the teletechnologies than to human rights, the post-Cold War world is one in
which time and place are now foregrounded as immediately ethical and political issues. The ethico-
political cannot, that is, be thought today either without reflecting upon time and space as such or
without articulating the relations between the spacing of time and space, on the one hand, and technics,
on the other (the most contemporary form of which are the "teletechnologies"). In foregrounding so
decisively the political nature of time and space today, Echographies makes an important contribution to
the terms in which political reflection is to be rethought after the demise of the traditional Left.
- Fourth: concomitant with the twofoldness of the above response to teletechnological specificity,
Derrida understands this reflection throughout the interview in aporetic terms. If the image takes one to
questions of time and space, to reflect upon it critically is not to argue for a particular temporal ecstasis 
for example, the past of traditionalism the present of metaphysical thinking (including that of
consumerism) or the future of avant-gardism  against de-temporalization. Nor is it to argue for a
particular locality or example (ethnic, national or cultural) against de-localization. In this sense, Derrida
is immediately concerned in Echographies with political reflection, but never with the elaboration of a
particular politics (see, especially, pp. 75-76). His thinking of the political is made in terms of aporia. As
I have argued at length elsewhere, aporetic thinking does not take Derrida away from the political, it is
at the very heart of his understanding of political invention.3 Echographies gives a clear example of this
"logic" with regard to the teletechnological.
Several times in the interview, for example, Stiegler brings to the foreground of the conversation the
issue of the "cultural exception" in the 1993 GATT talks, considering it as an important, if in itself
problematic, example of a political response to the risk of indifferentiation that accompanies the
technico-economic complex informing the tele-image. To recall briefly its history: during the GATT
talks the American negotiators attempted to make cinema part of the trade negotiations. The attempt
failed due to a concerted refusal on the part of the French, and then Europe in general, to lift its quotas
on American products, in particular, and audiovisual material, in general; quotas with which the French
state supports its own cinema industry. Now, Derrida responds to this example with the argument that, in
the context he would indeed argue for the state s regulation of the markets (pp. 92-98, especially p. 98).
The "cultural exception" is one important strategy at a world level of resisting both economic short-term
calculation and the latter s profound complicity with the temporality of "real time." Conversely, Derrida
argues that as soon as a states resistance to the market inhibits the very flexibility of consumption, and
productivity of consumption, that the markets also nourish, the market should be affirmed, reminding his
audience that the historical emergence of democracy from out of the market precludes one from making
any axiomatic opposition between the values of democracy and those of the market (pp. 95-100).
Neither for the state nor against it, neither for the particular nor against it, Derrida deploys here a
reflective logic in relation to a particular politics of the image (the neo-liberalism of the Hollywood
lobby) that is predicated on the impossible "experience" of aporia. His inscription of the tele-image
within "arche-writing" leads Derrida, consequently to show how this inscription works at the same time
towards a quasi-politics of aporia according to which the impossibility of aporia is the condition of
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political invention. In the context of the progression of this argument, Echographies provides, again, a
succinct rehearsal of Derridean themes regarding the immediate and actual.
- The above point takes us to the two most profound conclusions that come out of Derrida s initial
response. We recall that, for Derrida, the immediacy of real time and the tele-image is only ever an
apparent immediate synthesis of time and space since they are inscribed within arche-writing. This
means that the spacing of time is irreducible to technicization. As a result of this irreducibility, "real
time" is never real, but is only ever a technical "artifact." The inscription of the tele-image within arche-
writing takes us to the first conclusion, then, that a critical practice of selection is possible in the name of
something like the "contingency" of the technical. It is within the radical (that is, constitutively
"unfillable") opening between processes of technicization and the irreducible spacing of time and space
that a critical relation to the image is always possible. For Derrida, whether it be theoretical or practical,
philosophical or artistic, reflection upon the image inevitably situates itself in this "between" between,
on the one hand, the spacing or diff�rance of time and, on the other, the technical synthesis of "real
time." This "between" allows one, in turn, to evaluate and re-organize what and how real time selects to
be "live," allowing thereby for the deconstruction of the "artifactuality" of the image that presents itself
to consciousness as apparently "real" at the same time as the necessary possibility that there are always
other selections (see the chapter "Artefactualit�, homoh�g�monie," pp. 51-65, and pp. 144-5).
Opening up this divergence, reflecting upon it in terms of the diff�rance of time and space does not
offer, for Derrida, other rules of selection contra those of short-term profit that permits economic
hegemony over the image in contemporary society (the so-called globalization of "Hollywood"). For we
have just seen that Derrida s relation to any determinate invention (like state intervention) is aporetic.
These rules are to be found: they come, that is, from the future. Hence  second conclusion  with regard
to the contemporary teletechnologies Derrida places stress throughout Echographies on something like
the ethical horizon of the future, an absolute horizon that translates in "temporal" terms the radical
opening above. This future is not to be thought of as a future present (a teleological horizon to come) but
as the absolute futurity of time, described by Derrida with reference to his work in Specters of Marx, in
terms of the "promise" and the "messianic" (pp. 140-3). In Echographies this radical future orients
deconstruction s critical relation to the teletechnological reduction of time and space, giving a further
clear ethico-political dimension to the above experience of aporia. As Derrida puts it, the "imperative" is
to leave the future to the future, to leave it or make it come, in any case to leave open the
possibility of the future and, therefore, to negotiate between rhythms in order that, at the
very least, this opening is not saturated. (p. 98)
Or in the words of the earlier piece "Artefactualit�s,"
the coming of the event is what one cannot, nor must not prevent, another name for the
future itself. Not that it is good, good in itself, that everything or anything happens; not
that one must give up preventing certain things happening (there would be no decision, no
responsibility  ethical, political or other), but one only ever opposes events which one
thinks bar the future or bring death, events which put an end to the possibility of the event,
to the affirmative opening for the coming of the other. (p. 19)
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It is in these terms of absolute futurity that Derrida s above aporetic reflection upon the state and the
market makes political sense. The following comment on the part of Derrida can be understood in this
context:
[regarding the French resistance to the inclusion of cinema within the GATT talks] it was
in a sense a question of using an exemplary exception to loosen the grip pertaining to one
kind of domination and act in such a way that, following usage, time was given to time,
that all opportunities for a certain type of invention, innovation or creation in the cinema
were not muffled in advance, including for the Americans themselves. (p. 99)
Derrida s resistance to Hollywood hegemony is thus ultimately made in terms of a radical "ethics" of
time.
Bringing the above six points together, we can see that, for Derrida, critical reflection upon the image re-
inscribes it within the spacing of time and space. This spacing leads in turn to an aporetic reflection upon
political determination which is itself governed by  or, inversely, itself releases  something like a
"categorical imperative" of the event, one of "guarding" the futurity of the future [l ą-venir de l'avenir].
As a result, Derrida s responses in Echographies stress two major concerns regarding the relation
between reflection and technical actuality: i) in response to the de-localizing and de-temporalizing
effects of the contemporary teletechnologies, there can be no more pertinent and inventive a thinking
than that of letting time happen/take place (celle de laisser avoir lieu le temps), and that, therefore, the
issue today of a critical culture of the image is that of the multiplicity of time/space, the localities and
singularities, that is, accompanying the taking-place of time; and ii) that this response is "political" if one
understands by political imagination the reinvention of a critical relation to actuality, and yet other than
political if one understands by the "political" a gesture of organization and decision shaped by a
particular territory, by a particular temporality, by a particular subject or by particular rules. Bringing
these points together so economically, Stiegler s interview with Derrida in Echographies allows one a
clear and careful appreciation of the major importance of Derridean thought to future negotiations with
our times.
*
By presenting Derrida s response in isolation from the exchange with Stiegler, this review has so far not
conveyed the fact that much of what Derrida says is partly in resistance to, or out of a seeming wish to
qualify Stiegler s own appreciation of the specificity of the contemporary teletechnologies, as well as the
ethical and political consequences ensuing therefrom. The above distinction, for example, between the
political and the "other than political" nature of reflection upon technical actuality is one that Derrida
makes all the more precise (again, see especially p. 75) when Stiegler s own position during the
interview comes to stress the elaboration of "a politics of memory" and a concomitant desire for "a
political will" (p. 56, p. 62, p. 67, p. 71, and, more broadly, pp. 85-97 and pp. 115-120). Given that
Stiegler is much more than a passive interviewer in this book and that both the quality and the
concreteness of the exchange between Derrida and himself is due in part to the profundity of his own
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interventions, it is important to elaborate his own appreciation of the specificity of the contemporary
teletechnologies. Once we have done this, we can then situate the tension which, in my opening
comments, I argued ultimately marked the overall rhythms of the book and, unarticulated, made it a
disappointing text at the very moment of its interest.
Stiegler s response to this specificity shares much with that of Derrida. He is indeed the first to
recognize his debt to the Derridean concept of "arche-writing" in the elaboration of what is progressively
becoming a highly articulate philosophy of technology.4 It is in this very debt, however, that a difference
is struck: the nature of all of Stiegler s questions and, progressively, interventions in Echographies bear
this out. Given that the interview format allows Stiegler poor occasion to develop his theses properly
(his interventions are consequently often too dense, if not at times, rather turgid), I will first give a brief
background to the nature of his participation in Echographies in order to give these interventions
appropriate weight.
Informing Stiegler s initial question concerning the specificity of the contemporary teletechnologies is
his express wish, going back more than a decade, to pursue the Derridean logic of supplementarity
(formulated at length in "Plato s Pharmacy" and the sections on Rousseau in Of Grammatology5) in
terms of the history of technics. Put simply, Stiegler wishes to articulate the "logic" of Derridean quasi-
transcendentals with (the history of) technical supplementarity. As I have argued in this journal and
elsewhere, Stiegler s move is complex increasingly so, and does not simply reduce diff�rance to
empirical historicity (although there are moments in Technics and Time which give one the occasion to
think this). This reduction, as Stiegler knows, would have no purchase on Derrida s thinking.6 What he
is rather arguing through this articulation is that technics is the constitutive condition of thought and of
our relation to the temporal ecstases as such. It is with this thesis (what Stiegler best calls, I believe,
"tertiary memory") that the originality of his move lies, constituting, from out of Derrida s quasi-
transcendental problematic of arche- writing, a major and indisputable move into, and advance within,
the fields of twentieth century Continental philosophy: most particularly, phenomenology, hermeneutics
and deconstruction.7 It is where Stiegler has begun to re-articulate both modern and contemporary
concerns with time and space (since the transcendental aesthetic and analytic of Kant s Critique of Pure
Reason) with the history of human organization. This articulation presents at the same time an
impressive, often more than impressive, politico-philosophical address to the disciplines of philosophy,
the human sciences, the life and cognitive sciences and the arts.
In other words, for Stiegler, if technics is the originary supplement to all forms of life (all life is in this
sense pro-grammatic, inscribed within "arche-writing"), this supplementarity appears as such within the
human species qua the technical specificity of the human. As a result, technics is neither a means nor an
instrument (as the metaphysical tradition has always conceived it), but the way in which life lives. For
Stiegler, consequently, the Derridean problematic of "arche-writing" must always be historically
differentiated since it is nothing but its differentiations. This is what is lying behind his question to
Derrida in Echographies that concerns the "specificity" of the contemporary teletechnologies (p. 48).
Given the originary technical complexity of time and consciousness, a change in the technical support
means both a change in intelligibility and a change in relation to time and space. For Stiegler, the
contemporary technologies constitute as much a break with the past as they do a supplementation of
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arche-writing. Derrida would, of course, agree: it is the very logic of supplementarity. For Stiegler,
however, stress must be consequently placed as much on the break as on the continuity.
It is here that Stiegler s emphasis upon the specificity of the contemporary teletechnologies becomes
clear. This specificity is to be found in the particular way in which technics and time are today organized
around each other. I said above that, for Stiegler, given the temporally constitutive role of technics, a
change in technical supports will fundamentally alter the way in which we relate to time, that is, the way
in which we synthesize the past, present and future ecstases. We have seen that, for Derrida, "real time"
is a technical artifact that is so rapid in relation to human perception that it appears to hide its syntheses
 this is real time s "artifactuality." A critical relation to the image is seen to emerge, accordingly, in the
analysis of real time s processes of selection, an analysis whose horizon is the future. Stiegler is in
agreement with Derrida on the overall orientation of this reasoning. That said, his argument around
tertiary memory, its evolution and the differences within technical constitutivity lead him to stress
something within that specificity that Derrida s own emphasis on the diff�rance of the tele-image does
not take into account. At several points during the dialogue he implies that the specificity of
contemporary technicity lies in the coincidence between the flux of the object (for Stiegler, image or
sound: what he has come to call, following Husserl, the "temporal object"8) and the flux of (living)
consciousness. Without becoming embroiled in the niceties of the argument,9 I want to stress here that,
for Stiegler, contemporary modalities of archiving are an "absolutely" (p. 48) specific form of inscription
since there is today  a specific stage of human organization  no distinction possible, at a
phenomenological level, between the temporal flux of the technical object and the temporal flux of
consciousness. The effects of "real time" are in this sense to be analyzed in strict relation to the temporal
nature and effects of cinema.
Thus, briefly put, the technical object used at earlier stages of the history of technical supplementarity to
supplement the finitude of human memory (the silex of the Zinjanthropus to the writing of the
protogeometrician), this object, now itself temporalized, has become coincidental with (the flux of)
memory itself. In Stiegler-Husserlian terms, "tertiary memory" (the support of the technical object
inscribing our memory beyond our life: a past that has never been present to us) now introduces
"secondary memory" (recollection of ours or others past presents) into "primary memory" (the way in
which we temporalize time now, unify our retentions and pretensions). As a result, the relation between
perception and imagination that Derrida was the first to deconstruct in Voice and Phenomena10 has
become so entwined, Stiegler argues, that a reflective reaction to the passage of time, and therefore
events within it, risks being radically reduced. This reduction risks, in turn, reducing the possibility of
the future ecstasis. According to Stiegler, "real time" represents the example of this threat.
From the above it is clear why digitalization both effects a radical change of intelligibility and
precipitates the danger that this intelligibility could be stultified as our relation to the ecstases of time are
foreshortened by the tele-image s syntheses of time and space. If the indifferentiation of reflection today
is a necessary risk of the tele-image (one presently blocking the passage of the future more than it is
opening it), then, for Stiegler, a more determinate response is needed than Derrida countenances in his
above responses. The specificity of contemporary teletechnology calls, in his terms, for a "politics of
memory" or, more generally, a "political will" (p. 56, p. 62, p. 67, p. 71, etc.). During one intervention in
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the penultimate chapter of Echographies, "Phonographies: Meaning  from Heritage to Horizon,"
Stiegler says for example:
If it is true, on the one hand, that there is a congruence between the exactitude of
orthothetic writing and a certain form of temporality, and if it is true, on the other, that the
new modalities of archiving are modalities of recording that one could say are in a certain
manner more exact, the paradox [of today] would be that the present development of
exactitude is inscribing in the streets the slogan "no future." Beyond the production of this
slogan, initially limited to the margins of the industrial communities, entire regions, whole
countries, whole classes, or people excluded from every social class are saying today: "No
future." Moreover, all those who feel politically impotent understand this slogan. The
question, then, is how the exactitude of the modern modalities of archiving is likely to
bring about, not a form of reflexivity which would simply be the pursuit and development
of the reflexivity linked to writing, but new forms of intelligibility. (p. 117)
Stiegler s constant call to a politics of memory is to be understood in relation to the release of this new
form of reflexivity.11 For Stiegler, given that there is no absolute distinction between writing and the
image, the intelligibility forged by new forms of technical supports, specifically the analogico-digital
image, could be more interesting than reflexivity specific to writing. The fact, however, that economic
terms of selection hold sway over the general production and dissemination of images and tele-images
means that the possible terms of this intelligibility  that is, our relation to the past, the present and the
future  are curtailed. Whether it be the predominance of Hollywood production in the "globalization" of
the cinema industry or the increasing commercialization of Internet (an uncritical congruence between
the flux of capital and the flux of real time), the economic organization of the relation between technics
and our opening to the temporal ecstases is blocking the release of new forms of intelligibility and
experimentation. Calculation according to short term profit has little interest, for example, in slowing the
flux of images down. It promotes, rather, narratives that give a unilinear direction to the flux, ones that
are closed to their own contingency and temporality. These narratives are all the more stultifying and
possibly debilitating given the coincidence between the flux of the technical object (the image) and that
of our consciousness that is afforded by the temporalization of the former object. In this radically
specific context Stiegler considers it urgent to develop "a political will" that can counter this economic
hegemony in such a way that new forms of intelligibility springing from the teletechnologies can
flourish. For Stiegler, there is at the same time nothing new about this need to double up politically on
the technico-economic. Technical processes are constitutively always in advance upon political and
cultural processes: a straightforward Marxist thesis. What is new is the speed at which this advance is
taking place today given the historically specific congruence, since the gradual amalgamation of the
sciences, technics and the economy from the seventeenth century onwards, between technology and the
economic regime of capital. The stake today is to invent, therefore, at an international level, a politics of
memory, in response to the "economic" and "phenomenological" specificity of the contemporary
teletechnologies that allows for the future to take place in a manner that is more than less interesting,
itself more than less promoting of the future.
Given this, the question of the cultural exception in the 1993 GATT talks will necessarily carry for
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Stiegler more symbolic purchase than it would seem to have in Derrida s aporetic response to it: hence
Stiegler s recurrent recourse to it in the context of a politics of memory (see especially pp. 51-54 and pp.
80-93), a recourse that might otherwise seem exaggerated or unnecessary. For the question of the
cultural exception is an example of the kind of politics needed to slow these processes down (p. 97).
Thus, while always careful to demarcate himself from the protectionism and nationalism that could
easily be associated with a politics of cultural exceptionality, Stiegler opposes such a politics to the
criteria informing the economic selection of images that maintain the opposition between production and
consumption (on these terms, see "L image discrŁte," pp. 177-183).12 Such a slowing-down would be
one important condition of that intelligibility that these same technologies could bring about if they were
less subordinate to the ideology of short-term economic interest. Read from out of the particular context
of the GATT talks, a politics of exceptionality anticipates, then, a politics of idiomaticity which would
work toward, the mobilization of what is already potentially there in the teletechnologies but which is at
present reduced by economic domination (p. 163, and "L image discrŁte," pp. 182-3). Political
mobilization is, consequently, for Stiegler, one important condition of reflection and invention upon the
movement of diff�rance and spacing that constitute the teletechnologies in the first place, a movement of
which these same technologies, in alliance with the economic, are reducing rather than increasing
consciousness.
It is here that the tension between the two philosophers exists, although it is never articulated as such by
either one of them. I said at the beginning of this review that this tension actually provided the rhythm of
Echographies as a whole: one can now see retrospectively why. Derrida s emphasis throughout the
interview on the movement of diff�rance within the teletechnologies, his aporetic relation to the
political, and his location of the image within the spacing of time and space  all point to his inscription
of contemporary technology within arche-writing and to his articulation of the relation between
reflection and contemporary actuality within its terms. In this articulation, the question of the future is
the issue of contemporary reflection, but this question must necessarily be both political and other than
political. Stiegler s greater emphasis on the radical specificity of the contemporary teletechnologies, as
well as the particular terms in which he casts such specificity, make him stress the political instance
more. For he sees within that instance the very means to facilitate the release of an intelligibility
appropriate to the new forms of writing, one at present stymied by the historical confluence between the
technical and the economic. According to these two ways of stressing the relations between diff�rance
and technics and reflection and actuality, the tension can be couched in the following terms. Both
philosophers are concerned with the incalculability of the future, its continued "taking place" with regard
to processes of technicization. Each, however, think determination and calculation differently in relation
to it, and, thereby, situate the political and thinking (la pens�e) differently as well.
- For Stiegler, in distinction to Heidegger s understanding of the relation between thinking and technics,
calculation does not necessarily fill the future in. Here his argument on the technical constitution of
temporalization remains crucial for present concerns in continental philosophy regarding the "logics" of
invention. For Stiegler, then, calculation opens up the future, releases the contingent, as did technics
from the very beginnings of hominization. One form of calculation is thus set against another (the
political against the economic), or doubles up on the other (the political appropriates the technico-
economic) in order to enlarge the "horizon" of future time. This "horizon" is, precisely, one of
disappropriation  the fact that there is a future  and not one of appropriation or mastery. Without
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political calculation, the cultural  for Stiegler, the incalculable which is the very value of the cultural 
risks remaining subordinate to the economic hegemony that holds over technical processes: in this case,
there is, and would be "No future." A voluntarist gesture of "acculturation" (p. 56, p. 89, p. 98) testifies
in this sense  but only in this sense  to an "avant-gardist" political philosophy.13
- For Derrida, the "categorical imperative" (p. 19 and p. 20) of any decision is, as for Stiegler, to act in
such a way that the future is not barred. Letting this alterity come also means negotiating between
tendencies of acceleration and stasis in the constant awareness, however, that an invention that would
promote the incalculable is itself impossible to calculate. Thus, for Derrida, waiting to see what happens,
placing the focus of thinking on the active affirmation of leaving the opening to the future open,
constitutes an acknowledgment that the terms of negotiation cannot be fully anticipated, that they are
also already taking place and that, therefore, it is to be seen what philosophy can say or not say. Here,
Derrida distinguishes philosophy qua thinking from politics, arguing that the diff�rance of the technical,
together with the aporias it engenders, always already deliver the political over to an unknown future the
respect of which thinking guards.
- Thus, where Stiegler looks for political determination between diff�rance and the technical, for the
future to remain open, given that determination opens up the future as much as it may close it, with this
same horizon in mind, Derrida both looks to political determination and takes distance from the political
instance, leaving the future of the technical to be decided, given that, for him, anticipation always runs
the risk of filling the future in.
*
Derrida and Stiegler both have strong arguments and a powerful repertoire of discursive strategies to
enforce their points. Derrida is right to stress the irreducibility of diff�rance to technics, the political
prudence that must ensue and the undecidable relation between thinking and actuality that follows.
Stiegler s theory of tertiary memory represents a profound and pertinent intervention in the concerns of
contemporary philosophy, one that offers, from out of Derridean problematics, an original purchase
upon technical actuality. He is therefore right to place emphasis on a certain specificity to the new
teletechnologies, to stress the technical reduction of diff�rance, and to argue for the political
implications of this reduction with the industrialization of memory. It is nevertheless clear that the two
positions are from the first irreconcilable with regard to the relation between determination and the
future. Given the above difference, it is clear for example, that for Derrida Stiegler s call to the political
appropriation of the economic risks filling in the future at the very moment that he wishes to facilitate its
release. In this sense Stiegler s call for a politics always runs the risk of bringing the openness of the
political to an end. From Stiegler s recurrent insistence upon the need for a politics of memory, one can
equally surmise that, for Stiegler, the imperative of "letting the other be other" runs the risk, conversely,
of leaving actuality as it is, and that if calculation is needed for the future not to be anticipated, too great
a stress on the need to take a distance to the political (where Derrida is both political and other than
political) can itself end up condoning one particular politics, one particular actuality rather than another.
Here Stiegler s wish to stress the historical differentiations of arche-writing is at the same time, further
down the line, a wish to underscore the necessarily political dimension to the imperative of absolute
futurity. Since the difference between the two positions is one of stress, but since the stakes that this
stress carries are at the same time of considerable import, its lack of articulation can only leave the
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reader with a sense of missed opportunity. For what is most important within the interview is left unsaid.
The theses of the two separate pieces, "Artefactualit�s" and "L image discrŁte" do nothing from this
perspective but reinforce this sense of a missed opportunity. Echographies remains a disappointing text
as a result. Let me end this review with three examples of what I mean. The first two concern where
Derrida does not engage with Stiegler, the third where Stiegler does not engage with Derrida.
The first comes around the question of the rule (pp. 52-65, especially p. 60). Derrida maintains that the
question of the rule is that of the criteria of selection which inform the choice and disposition of images
that stand as "real time." In analyzing the rules of this selection, a critical relation to the image is
elaborated. From here Derrida goes on to argue forcefully that it is at the same time not the role of the
philosopher to pose a rule against the rule of the market, but to invite invention of other rules. In so
arguing, he clearly suspects that Stiegler s call to a "politics of memory" could precisely fall into such a
trap, all the time aware that Stiegler is as concerned as he is with the invitation to the invention of other
rules. As we have seen, Stiegler s call for a politics of memory is made in the belief that this invitation
needs indeed political work. Now, with this argument Stiegler is stressing the fact that the rule (of
selection) has already been given by technology itself qua the historical congruence between the new
rules of perception, emerging from the tele-image, and the markets of short-term profit. The rule for
Stiegler is, in other words, not one of one "criterion" of selection against another, as Derrida gives us to
understand. It is an actual state of matter, one with which we have to negotiate. Stiegler s description of
the political "doubling-up" of the technico-economic follows from this sense that history gives the rule.
Thus, what I called above a shift of stress between the participants is seen here to be actually articulating
a major difference of approach concerning the relation between reflection and matter and philosophy
and history. Echographies suffers from the fact that this difference is kept by the two participants in the
wings of the interview.
The other two examples of a missed opportunity emerge in an important chapter of the interview
"Phonographies: Meaning  from Heritage to Horizon."
After his comments concerning the general possibility of "no future" quoted above, Stiegler makes the
point that the greater the exactitude of inscription that comes with digitalization, the greater the
discreteness of the inscription, and, therefore, the greater the possibility of breaking down and analyzing
its rules of composition. The point is part of his argument for elaborating a forum within which new
forms of intelligibility particular to this exactitude are facilitated. Derrida, agreeing with Stiegler, makes
the following response,
Meaning and intelligibility can only open out  in relation to what you have called the
"discrete," the spacing of the discrete  by multiplying what forms the condition of this
very discretization, namely spacing, non-sense, the blank, the interval, everything which
borders in a sense the meaning of non-meaning, exceeds it or fissures it. The origin of
meaning has no meaning. This is not a negative or nihilist statement. What carries
intelligibility is not intelligible. From this point of view technics is not intelligible: which
is not to say that it is irrational or obscure. (p. 121)
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To which Stiegler interjects:
[Technics] constitutes meaning if it participates in its construction.
And Derrida continues:
Yes, but what constitutes meaning is deprived of meaning. The origin of reason and the
history of reason is not rational. When one says that one is quickly accused of
irrationalism which is stupid, ridiculous even. Whoever poses a question concerning the
origin of meaning, the origin of reason, the origin of the law, the origin of humanity, and
in view of posing the question, must go to the edge of what he is questioning: the
condition of the question does not belong to the field it questions. To accuse those who
pose questions concerning the subject of man, of reason, etc., of being inhuman or
irrational is a primitive reflex, a primitive instance of fright. (ibid.)
Derrida s comments are, to say the least, odd in response to Stiegler s concerns, both at a juncture of the
interview when the two men are acquainted with each other s preoccupations and, more importantly, at a
moment in cultural history when the terms of philosophical reflection upon the real are shifting. As we
have seen, Stiegler s interest lies, precisely, in the historical differentiation of this "other" of reason and
meaning together with the political implications of the articulation of this "other." To respond by
reiterating a series of propositions that are well-known from within and around the thought of
deconstruction and post-structuralism, but that do not engage as such with the explicit wish on Stiegler s
part to genealogize, after the last twenty years thinking, what lies prior to the opposition between reason
and unreason, meaning and unmeaning is intellectually and culturally dissatisfying. A clear occasion for
discussion of, and engagement with the relation between history, the quasi-transcendental structure of
spacing and the ethico-political purchase of the future in its relation to determination is, very simply,
missed.
Conversely, when Stiegler argues in the same chapter (especially p. 143) that orthographic writing
constitutes "deferred time," and as a result a greater sense of discontinuity, in comparison to the
pictographic or ideogrammatic, he is knowingly demarcating himself from the Derridean thesis of Of
Grammatology that alphabetic writing follows the linearity of the flux of speech and constitutes the
concept of the present with which the epoch of metaphysics is instituted. Since this demarcation makes
him consider the contemporary teletechnologies in terms of a "general crisis" (p. 180)  a term that, for
many, after the last twenty years of thought is too Marxist in its temporality  it would have been
interesting for the reader to see Stiegler debate this difference in the appreciation of writing with Derrida
more. The stakes are, to say the least, important, and yet discussion of the point is minimal.
It is these types of lacunae in the dialogue that make of Echographies a structurally uneven and
unfinished exchange  Derrida s responses to Stiegler's question concerning the specificity of today
point eloquently to the need for multiple strategies across the social spectrum, one that includes a more
positive appreciation of the markets than Stiegler seems willing to accept. They point in consequence to
the possible paradoxes of elaborating a politics of memory with regard to the stake of the future and to
the need, always, to think of a culture of the image "from below." That said, Derrida does not engage
with Stiegler around the thesis of tertiary memory nor, consequently, with the kinds of historico-
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technical determinations that Stiegler is looking for within, but also beyond the present deconstructions
of metaphysical logic. Stiegler points, on the other hand, with great precision and conviction to the
urgency of the questions that haunt technical actuality and, as the appended article "L image discrŁte"
signals better than his actual interventions within the interview, has a fine eye for the relations between
matter and consciousness, one intimating a relation between reflection and matter beyond the present
terms of deconstruction. On the other hand, pushing Derrida on the place of the technical and political
within deconstruction, he tends at the same time to equate the problematic of diff�rance with technical
supplementarity, risking, thereby, to think diff�rance in exclusively technical terms: a risk which
qualifies in part the intellectual originality of his thesis. Echographies is the record of this tension, rather
than its articulation. In this respect it both covers an enormous amount of ground concerning a critical
relation between reflection and the contemporary teletechnologies  for which many will be grateful 
and signals, in its very ellipses, where further work awaits.
Notes
1 The work of Paul Virilio has been especially important in this respect. See, for example, his recent
Cybermonde, la politique du pire, Paris: Les �ditions Textuel, 1996.
2 The radical structure of the promise is first developed by Derrida in relation to negative theology in
"Comment ne pas parler: d�n�gations" in Psych� (Paris: Galil�e, 1987, pp. 555-596), to the
Heideggerian problematics of debt and engagement in De l'esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris:
Galil�e, 1987, noe1: pp. 147-154), Eng. trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Of Spirit.
Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, note 2: pp. 129-136), and to
Paul de Man's reading of Rousseau's Social Contract in J. Derrida, M�moires for Paul de Man, trans.
Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eudardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
The distinction between the "messianic" and messianism in the context of the promise is first fully
developed in relation to Marxian thought and its modern and contemporary fates in J. Derrida, Spectres
de Marx (Paris: Galil�e, 1994: esp. p. 56, pp.111-2, 124-6 and 265-268); Eng. trans. by Peggy Kamuf,
Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 28; pp. 65-6, pp. 73-5 pp. 167-169). The relation between the promise,
the messianic, religion and technology with which Spectres de Marx closes has been since elaborated in
detail in Derrida's profound "Foi et savoir: les deux sources de la 'religion' aux limites de la simple
raison" in La religion, Ed. by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1996, pp. 9-86);
Eng. trans. by Samuel Weber, Stanford University Press: forthcoming.
3 See my Derrida and the political (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) for an elaboration of this
thesis.
4 See B. Stiegler, La technique et le temps. Tome 1: Le faute d'Epim�th�e, Paris: Galil�e, 1994 (Eng.
trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Technics and Time: Vol. 1. The Fault of Epimetheus,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, Spring 1998) and B. Stiegler, La technique et le temps. Tome II La
d�sorientation, Paris: Galil�e, 1996 (Eng. trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford
University Press, forthcoming).
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5 In J. Derrida, La diss�mination. Seuil, 1972: pp. 69-198 (Eng. trans. Barbara Johnson, Dissemination,
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981, pp. 61-172) and J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit,
1967: pp. 203-378 (Eng. trans. Gayatri Spivak, Of Grammatology, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1976, pp. 141-268).
6 See particularly his "Fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prostheses of faith," Eng. trans.
Richard Beardsworth, in a collective volume on Jacques Derrida, ed. Tom Cohen, Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming. Stiegler's equation between diff�rance and technical supplementarity in this latter
text, Echographies and the two volumes of La technique et le temps is nevertheless highly problematic.
That said, I wish to stress here, as elsewhere, the equation's positive aspects in the desire to elaborate
further, with others, the terms of present philosophical culture. It seems to me important in this respect,
and at this point, to see where Stiegler is going than to criticize him in terms of what he has until now
partly underestimated.
7 See especially Chapters 2 and 3 of Part II of La technique et le temps. Tome I: la faute d'Epim�th�e
(pp. 211-278) and Chapter 4 of La technique et le temps. Tome II. La d�sorientation. See also B.
Steigler, "Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus," trans. R. Beardsworth, in Tekhnema, Issue 3, pp. 69-112,
esp. pp. 83-76 and, again, his "Fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prostheses of faith," ibid.
8 See B. Stiegier, "Persephone, Oedipus, Epimetheus," Tekhnema, Issue 3, p. 84.
9 The argument is best made in "L'image discrŁte," pp. 165-183. See, also, Stiegler's article in this issue
of Tekhnema, "The Time of Cinema," trans. George Collins, pp. 62-110, esp. p.
66.
10 J. Derrida, La voix et le ph�nomŁne: introduction au problŁme du signe dans
la ph�nom�nologie de Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Eng. trans. David B.
Allison, Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
11 That the passage could be criticized for its "apocalyptic" tone (especially from a Derridean
perspective) would, I think in this context, be to miss the interest of Stiegler's argument.
12 That said, the simple ease with which French examples appear in Stiegler's interventions in
Echographies, together with the ease with which he can generalize remarks concerning the United
States, suggests, at a deep level perhaps, a resistance to a non-exemplary logic.
13 In this sense, Stiegler remains faithful to the political imperative of determination emerging out of
Hegelian Marxism while elaborating theses on technical constitutivity that re-organize and transform the
Hegelian and Marxian corpuses (most importantly Hegel's understandings of reflection and spirit and
Marx's understanding of the relation between matter and consciousness).
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