Glimpse

Volume 22, Issue 1, 2021

Thermodynamics of the Technosphere. Rethinking Temporality and Technicity in the Age of Planetary Emergency with Heidegger and Stiegler

This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.