The Desire Called Neganthropology

The Desire Called Neganthropology

This paper offers a preliminary investigation of Bernard Stiegler as a utopian thinker in the context of a diminished presence of utopian thinking in the twenty-first century. It proposes a reading of Stiegler’s philosophy aimed at contributing to its revival by tracing the aporetic interplay between impossibility, contingency, and necessity in his conceptual framework. The first section situates Stiegler as a utopian thinker, exploring the implications of his thesis of originary technicity. The second section explains how the aporia of utopian critique is deployed by Stiegler in an enabling way through his reconceptualization of prescriptive politics within the frameworks of pharmacology and general organology. The third section considers how the two most pressing challenges of the twenty-first century—the technological and ecological crises—are exacerbated by capitalism’s drive-based economy, and how, in Stiegler’s view, the only way to overcome the deadlock of this conjoined crisis is by rekindling the desire called neganthropology. The con-clusion offers a brief assessment of Stiegler’s pharmacological figuration of utopia, evaluating how his insistence on imagining a different capitalist political economy holds up in practical terms against the challenge of the ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene.