Prometheus or the Abduction of History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

notes

1 As Arthur Bradley points out:

Stiegler gives a very original re-reading of the myth of Prometheus in the first volume of La Technique et le temps – entitled La Faut d’Épiméthée (1994) – which serves as the organizing emblem for his entire philosophy of technics. He focuses on the entirely forgotten role played by Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus, in the famous myth of the Titan who steals fire from the Gods. According to Plato's Protagoras, Prometheus and his brother are ordered by the Gods to equip each mortal species with different powers or abilities (dynameis) at the moment of their creation. Yet Epimetheus rashly persuades Prometheus to let him do the job himself and begins to distribute appropriate and complementary powers such as speed or strength to each species. Because Epimetheus stupidly gives all the powers he has at his disposal to animals, he realizes – far too late – that he has forgotten to allocate anything at all to man. The error of Epimetheus leads Prometheus to recognize that man has no means of his own to sustain himself and this is why he steals from Hephaestus and Athena the gift of skill in the arts together with the gift of fire (without which it would be impossible to use the former skill) and bestows them on man. This so-called Epimethean “fault” of forgetting mankind – together with the Promethean “fault” of theft in order to cover up that forgetting – provides the mythological backdrop for Stiegler's argument. (Bradley 191; see also Stiegler 193)

2 For Nancy, indeed, it is rather a matter of the plural of the singular, and vice versa, where the genitive functions here to bring into play a whole network of expropriations and attributions.

3 See Laclau. In either case, property – in its particularity and in its aspiration to universal category – is here revealed in the reified, object form of a generalised plagiarism.

4 See Nancy 101ff. See also Plato's important analogy between technē and justice in the Protagoras, and the relation between justice and the possibility of an acquired political wisdom: Prometheus’ crime extends only to the arts of survival – which would include education and the acquisition of knowledge – but not to political wisdom (Dialogues 321d).

5 On the relation between education, justice and political “virtue,” see Plato, Protagoras (in Dialogues) 325c. Again we find the emergence of something like a system (one of entrapment and promised future emancipation) by which the principle of “plagiarism” in its broadest sense exercises a general, if unacknowledged, fascination or allure.

6 Just as it may be said to do with regard to logos itself, as Plato explains at length in the Phaedrus.

7 This is mirrored, to a certain degree, in the history of the struggle against property, which has always been a struggle to exercise control over the rights of property (whether by agrarian reform or by abolition or simply by usurpation), from the Gracchi to the Bolivarian Revolution.

8 Thus “emancipation” remains linked, as Marx identifies in The German Ideology, to the abstraction of social difference, which, instead of being abolished by such notions as equality before the law, comes to operate as the underwriting mechanism of all political relations. In such a way is the political sphere rendered, on a certain level, fictive in so far as it is bound to an ideological movement of expropriation (i.e., of the “real” conditions of the political). The further point would be that this expropriative function affects the political, as though it itself were the unconscious agent of a transcendence of history. That is to say, as the mythical actor who – by way of the abstraction and sublimation of the idea of property – serves to inaugurate the history of Being as technē politikē (i.e., as the very instrument of its own overcoming).

9 “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (Heidegger, “Question” 320).