Technics, Forgetting, and Recollection

Heidegger, Lyotard, and Stiegler

Abstract

This article addresses the persistent challenge of rearticulating the question concerning Heidegger’s notion of technology in light of his National socialism. Contra Bernard Stiegler, it firstly argues that Heidegger did not simply forget about Epimetheus in his critique of technology as the promethean realisation of metaphysics. Following from this first claim, this article secondly proposes contra Stiegler’s project of ‘remembering technics’ that technics was never apprehended by the system of forces called philosophy to begin with and thus cannot be remembered in the usual sense neither. To explore this claim, this article engages Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis in Heidegger and 'the Jews'(1988), in which Lyotard problematises Heidegger’s project of remembering that a forgetting (of Being) takes place in all thought and representation of the world through his singular Kantian reading of the Freudian distinction between primary and secondary repression.

By juxtaposing Lyotard's critique with Stiegler’s discourse, the article develops a new understanding of philosophy's repression of technics. It ultimately proposes that both the western philosophical tradition and contemporary German memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) must confront this repression—not as a forgotten memory, but as something that was never fully grasped to begin with. The question of recollecting and remembering what was never inscribed finally leads us back to ask the more encompassing question of the relation between anamnetic recollection and technical inscription in general. Finally, then, asking the question concerning technology in light of primary repression, this article proposes that the question of technology has always already been the question of how justice can be done in the face of the unforgotten, a question which becomes ever more urgent in times of new technological development.