Politics and Aesthetics, or, Transformations of Aristotle in Bernard Stiegler

Abstract

Bernard Stiegler argues for the necessity of pursuing the question of the relation between politics and aesthetics, because today aesthetics has become a vehicle for calculating and controlling desire, including both economic and political desire. The problem is that this attempt to calculate and control encounters a limit, becoming destructive of desire itself. Establishing a future for individual and collective becoming requires understanding the reason for this limit. In psychoanalytic terms this might be understood as the susceptibility of desire to regress to drive-based states. Stiegler’s understanding of this susceptibility, however, also relies on Aristotle’s account of three kinds of soul. By grasping the relation between the vegetative, sensitive and noetic souls compositionally rather than oppositionally, Stiegler is able to explain the limits of control in terms of the intermittence of the noetic soul’s noeticity. The sensitivity of the noetic soul is perpetually capable of being lured by the sensational, which when it is pursued systematically tends to reduce the temporality of desire to the instantaneous (dis-)satisfactions of the drives. Only if this question of the individual and collective loss of savoir faire and savoir vivre, which together Stiegler calls general proletarianisation, is addressed, could our political and industrial model be transformed such that it fosters new desire, rather than continuing to contribute to its exhaustion.