The Function of Unreason. Technology, Ecology, and Economic Process

Abstract

This essay reinterprets Bernard Stiegler’s late «neganthropological» project through Alfred North Whitehead’s often neglected concept of reason. I argue that Stiegler’s reading of The Function of Reason, mediated by the economist and mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s bio-physio-economics, is decisive for his third and final conversion. After reconstructing Stiegler’s earlier account of technics as exosomatic, pharmacological memory and his critique of proletarianization, the essay tracks his shift from questions of individuation to the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. The contribution is twofold: a genealogical explanation of Stiegler’s Whiteheadian turn via Georgescu- Roegen, and a theoretical proposal that links technology, ecology, and economy through a concept of reason capable of steering novelty toward «living better» rather than merely prolonging survival. Conceived this way, reason is not novelty itself but the organ of emphasis upon novelty that selects and orients anarchic appetitions against mere automatic repetition and fatigue. As such, I argue that Stiegler activates Whitehead’s notion of reason against the thermodynamic ideology, i.e. the conviction that human collectives must endlessly optimize efficiency in a losing struggle against entropy. On this basis, I read Stiegler’s Neganthropocene as a program for sociotherapy: reorganizing bodily, technical, and institutional organs to cultivate negentropic capacities, disautomatize automatisms, and deliberately produce the conditions of novelty.