Technics and Time, 1 - Part I: The Invention of The Human - Technology and Anthropology - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau inherits this problematic. The problem will always be that of distinguishing the origin from the fall (into technicity). The task is to think this distinction as something other than an opposition. Such a thought of origin takes us to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, but Nietzsche did not only ask "Who is man?" but "Who overcomes man?" In so doing, Nietzsche took aim at Rousseau, at the presumptiveness that takes the evidence of man from whom he has been for the last four millennia, as though this were an eternity. Nietzsche demands instead an historical philosophising, that is, a thinking of becoming.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality wishes to ask about the origin of the human, about the "nature" of humanity prior to artifice. But he asks this question by "suspending" the historical facts, by constructing the fiction of an origin prior to the facts, which he nevertheless bases on a kind of evidence, a transcendental evidence. Pure nature: man prior to creation.

Stiegler then presents his critique of Rousseau, amounting to the fact that Rousseau is unable to achieve his wish to think the human prior to prostheticity, to think the fall as exteriorisation. Rousseau tries to think a double origin, but the second origin ends up being both the actual origin and the absence of origin, a merely accidental originality. But Rousseau does make clear that everything we think of as originarily human is so in the mode of default, as supplementarity. The question becomes to think the relation of being and time as a technological relation, since this relation only develops within the originary horizon of technics, even if this is equally an absence of origin.