Bernard Stiegler on Transgenerational Memory and the Dual Origin of the Human

Epiphylogenesis, or, the Pursuit of Life by Other Means

The terms in which Stiegler sets out his project to account for the passage to the human builds on the work of his mentor Jacques Derrida, in particular a crucial section of the Grammatology where Derrida appeals to the work of the palaeontologist and palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan. Derrida’s interest in Leroi-Gourhan is, first, that his account of prehistoric writing practices, contemporaneous with the first appearance of the species Homo sapiens, permits a generalization of writing that precludes the ethnocentric distinction between societies with and without writing. More than this, however, Leroi-Gourhan’s appeal to the notion of programme, borrowed from cybernetics, to describe the functioning of the human nervous system suspends the traditional categories that ‘habitually serve to distinguish man from other living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.)’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). This concept of ‘programme’, meaning the coded series of instructions guiding how a system responds to new information, describes the general organization and evolution of life at its most basic level, encompassing everything from photosynthesis to the instinctual behaviour of the so-called ‘higher mammals’, up to hydraulic pumps and computer processors. This allows Derrida to expand the thematic of writing and the trace (or the grammē) to the movement of life itself, and thereby to situate the human within a history that vastly exceeds it: the history of the unfolding of the trace as the ‘unity of a double movement of protention and retention’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). Man is accordingly presented as a particular, and by no means unified, configuration of the grammē, or as a ‘stage or an articulation in the history of life – of what I have called différance – as the history of the grammē’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). Human exceptionality is thus radically reduced and with this the basis on which the human can be opposed to the animal, or to nature more generally, is swept away.

However, while accepting Derrida’s analysis, Stiegler remains unconvinced that the particular ‘stage or articulation’ that constitutes the arrival of the human has been sufficiently theorized. The initial philosophical move accomplished by the work of grammatology is accepted as a crucial and irreversible one, but without defining the particular set of conditions under which the being that the human is emerges and doing justice to its singular modality we risk flattening out difference altogether. All we are left with in Derrida’s account, so Stiegler argues, is a hint: the emergence of man is said to be ‘an emergence that makes the grammē appear as such (that is to say according to a new structure of nonpresence)’ (Derrida, 1997: 84). Stiegler (1998: 138) equates this appearance of the grammē as such with consciousness (a move that is not unproblematic as the full passage that Stiegler cites makes clear), ² and the task remains to determine ‘what the conditions of such an emergence of the “grammē as such” are, and the consequences as to the general history of life and/or of the grammē’ (Stiegler,1998: 137).

The passage that marks this arrival is, according to Stiegler, a decisive rupture with/in ³ the logic and history of life, for which he borrows the term ‘exteriorization’ from Leroi-Gourhan. This names the stage when an entirely new form of memory is constituted that departs from the natural course of events. What Stiegler names ‘epiphylogenetic’ memory stands in addition to the two forms of memory existing in nature, namely, the genetic (species memory) and the epigenetic (individual memory). Epigenetic memory consists of the changes that an individual undergoes throughout its lifespan which are inevitably lost to future generations upon the death of that organism. Genetic memory, on the other hand, is heritable but is not able to be (directly) influenced by experience. So, as Stiegler presents it, these two systems of memory are incapable of communicating with one another or exchanging their functions.

Epiphylogenesis, however, forms a third type of memory, consisting of material artefacts such as tools or written inscriptions that enable the conservation and transmission of acquired (individual) memory so that an experience or lesson learned does not die along with the organism but can be inherited by future generations. As such, this allows for the continual resumption of a (scientific, philosophical, literary) project and the institution of a tradition. Intergenerational epigenetic memory, as technical memory, is therefore the defining mark of the human tool-user. Through such material traces I am granted access to ‘a past that is mine but that I have nevertheless not lived’ (Stiegler, 1998: 159). To be human is thus to inherit this ‘already-there’ (Stiegler, 1998: 159) that preceded my arrival, the conditions of access to which are subject to radical upheaval and transformation due to changes in the technological apparatuses through which it is registered.

So epiphylogenesis, for Stiegler, amounts to nothing less than a:

break with the ‘law of life’ in that, considering the hermetic separation between somatic and germinal, the epigenetic experience of the animal is lost to the species when the animal dies, while in a life proceeding by means other than life, the being’s experience, registered in the tool (in the object), becomes transmissible and cumulative. (Stiegler, 2009b: 4)

In his famous account of the ‘arche-fossil’, ⁴ the problem such phenomena are alleged to pose to ‘correlationist’ philosophy ⁵ is that it enjoins us to think phenomenological givenness not as the irreducible condition of there being a world but rather as an ‘intra-worldly occurrence’ (Meillassoux, 2008: 14). What is impossible for the correlationist to think, so Meillassoux argues, is the coming into being of the correlation itself. For if the correlation is taken to precede all positive knowledge, how can such a philosophy account for its emergence out of a time that pre-existed it?

Accordingly, says Meillassoux, ‘[to] think science is to think the status of a becoming which cannot be correlational because the correlate is in it, rather than it being in the correlate’ (Meillassoux, 2008: 22). As opposed to coming first, as the transcendental condition which necessarily precedes scientific knowledge about the prehistoric past, givenness is instead argued to be a phenomenon comprehended by science. Thus weighty philosophical questions about the emergence of the transcendental are given a deflationary answer designed to forestall any future fetishizing of the conditions of access to the real over the real itself. Finitude is presented as, in effect, merely a natural occurrence that emerged along with the evolution of an organism possessing a sufficiently advanced central nervous system. The origin of finitude, manifestation, the transcendental, consciousness, call it what you will, is henceforth not a philosophical problem but a scientific one. Stiegler shares with Meillassoux an emphasis on the empirical conditions which precede and constitute the transcendental (and the Derridean quasi-transcendental in Stiegler’s case [see Stiegler, 2001]), although while Meillassoux delegates the analysis of these conditions to science, Stiegler insists on its philosophical status. ⁶

With the concept of epiphylogenesis established, Stiegler goes on to offer a highly original reading of Heidegger’s analyses of the historicity of Dasein, through which he is able to show how all relation to time (and hence all relation to oneself) is conditioned and made possible by technology. This explains the undecidability of the double genitive in the title given to part one of volume one of Technics and Time: ‘the invention of the human’. The human invents the tool while being invented by it in turn, in what he will call, borrowing a phrase from Gilbert Simondon, a ‘transductive relation’ (a relation in which each of the related terms is co-constitutive of the other) (Stiegler, 2009b: 2). The concept of epiphylogenesis is foundational for Stiegler’s subsequent work as it allows him to develop a concrete ‘history of the supplement’ (Stiegler, 2001: 248) and formalize the precise relation between technological advances and the concomitant cultural shifts that they bring about. In doing so he builds on, while breaking with, the ‘quasi-formalism’ (Beardsworth, 2013: 210) of the Derridean ‘logic of the supplement’ (Stiegler, 2001: 248).

The particular articulation of life that man represents is thus a break with life as such: ‘the pursuit of life by means other than life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 17, emphasis added). From this point on the living enters into a relationship with the non-living and thereby inaugurates the possibility of cultural inheritance and history. Picking up on the passage quoted (p. 3), where Derrida appears to suggest that différance is the history of life, ⁷ Stiegler argues that Derrida fails to take account of the fact that the emergence of technical memory (as the pursuit of life by other means) marks a ‘rupture in différance’ (Stiegler, 1998: 138). Stiegler thus finds in différance an equivocation between offering an account of life in general (‘pure phusis’) (Stiegler, 1998: 139) and life in relation to the non-living or the technical, dating from ‘after the rupture’ that marks the emergence of transgenerational (epiphylogenetic) memory.

It is Stiegler’s concern to taxonomize this distinction and carry out what Derrida apparently failed to do. So if différance is the history of ‘life in general’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139), what takes place with epiphylogenesis, when life begins to further itself by other (non-living) means, is a veritable doubling of différance, or a ‘différance of différance’ (Stiegler, 1998: 141). For, once again, in the course of life prior to exteriorization ‘all summation of epigenetic events is lost for specific memory with the loss of the individual who was their support’ (Stiegler, 1998: 177), while after the rupture acquired knowledge can be inherited by subsequent generations and built upon in a movement of exponential accumulation. Thus the emergence of the human, for Stiegler, cannot be contained within the existing formulation of différance, as the pursuit of life by other means differs and defers the différantial movement of life itself.

It is not difficult to imagine Derrida’s response here, which would be to refuse the distinction; there is no ‘indecision’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139) or equivocation between a first and a second order of différance (before and after the rupture) because différance already describes the inextricability and inseparability (de facto and de jure) of life and death. So the notion of a rupture brought about by ‘pure phusis’ entering into relation with the non-living is based on a mistake. ‘Pure life’ (a term that appears only once in The Fault of Epimetheus [Stiegler, 1998], on page 140 to describe the period preceding the advent of epiphylogenesis, but whose usage I aim to show is far from an aberration) ⁸ amounts for Derrida to the same thing as ‘pure death’. They are ideal limits, ‘which is as much as to say fictions’, generated and undermined by the play of différance, which is the ‘necessarily impure’ root of each (Derrida, 1987: 284). This, as we can see, renders problematic Stiegler’s simple equating of différance with life. Indeed, to say that life unfolds according to the play of différance (as, for example, Martin Hägglund [2008] and Francesco Vitale [2014] have argued, and for which there is ample textual support in Derrida’s work) is quite different from the claim that ‘différance is nothing else than the history of life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 136, italics added), or that they are coterminous. ⁹ As we will see further on, it is precisely this conflation that leads to Stiegler’s contention that the emergence of technical memory bears directly on the structural logic of différance itself, rather than being accounted for by it.

As Tracy Colony (2011: 86) puts it, an understanding of life as différance undermines the ‘self-coincidence of life by means of life’, placing ‘default and exposure to what is other than life’ (death) at the heart of the very movement of life itself, before the appearance of technological mediation. Derrida’s two most famous engagements with Freud, ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ (in Derrida, 2001) and ‘To speculate – On “Freud”’ (in Derrida, 1987), from 1966 and 1980 respectively, offer perhaps the clearest exposition of this crucial point. In the earlier text we read, in effect, that a wholly self-sufficient life (here the perfect spontaneity of memory) could never establish a relationship with death (the ‘dead’ material memory aid) since each would exclude the other. Rather, the very fact of this relation undermines their opposition and bears witness to the irreducible trace of death within life, both in its concept and in its actual course. Indeed, in the 1980 text, Derrida writes, articulating a key motif of his later work, ‘[if] death is not opposable [to life] it is, already, life death’ (in Derrida, 1987: 285). ¹⁰ So for Derrida the ‘question of technics’ is ‘opened up’ by the relation of life with death, not the other way around, as is the case for Stiegler (Derrida, 2001: 287). In Stiegler’s reading, life is only an ‘economy of death’ after the event of exteriorization, but for Derrida such an event is only possible because life is nothing other than an economy of death. Epiphylogenesis can occur only because ‘pure life’ does not, and never did, exist.

Stiegler, a student and close associate of Derrida’s, cannot have been unaware of this point, ¹¹ but his conviction that the emergence of the tertiary form of memory identified above, and the concomitant ‘passage to the human’, demands a different conceptual vocabulary than that which describes life in general leads him to this strategy of distinguishing two orders or stages of différance, regardless of how it may break with Derridean orthodoxy. ¹² However, we will be questioning the originality of this third form of memory in the light of recent scientific developments as well as asking whether Stiegler has not, in forcing this distinction, repeated the gesture that he ascribes to both Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective (and very different) accounts of the origin of the human.

The Dual Origin of the Human

To demonstrate the pitfalls of metaphysical narratives of the birth of the human, which project man as he is now into his prehistoric past, Stiegler turns to Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of Inequality is held to be an exemplary case of ‘transcendental anthropology’ (Stiegler, 1998: 105). Rousseau envisages an originary man with the upright stance and mental capacity of modern man but shorn of language, artifice and cultural acquisitions. This first man, Rousseau (1987: 34) freely admits, is a normative ideal that ‘perhaps never existed’, but it presents a model of what, de jure if not de facto, should have constituted the origin of the human: a fiction that is truer than the empirical origin. Stiegler’s reading of Rousseau, classically deconstructive in approach, focuses on the values of proximity and the proper, which are shown to be progressively corrupted and usurped by distanciation and artifice in what Stiegler calls the ‘second origin’, or fall, of man. This amounts to ‘an exterior accident which does not come from the nature of man: it happens to him and denaturalises him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 117–18). All such transcendental accounts, says Stiegler, must appeal to this logic of the dual origin.

In taking modern man as having come into being fully formed, Rousseau sets himself the task of isolating his universal essence, which will constitute his primordial state. In doing so he must necessarily exclude anything which owes its existence to man, so the first man cannot have manipulated tools or used language or lived in a society of laws, all of which man invents. Before the fall into technics man had no need of such devices as nature provided everything within reach. So once stripped of all his mechanical prostheses and cultural acquisitions the man that Rousseau envisages is one who is ‘practically immobile’ (Stiegler, 1998: 113). As a result of this proximity and near-instantaneity of satisfaction he develops no passions or desires. One can only desire what one has not and since this first man lacks nothing he ‘does not have to submit [his] desire for pleasure to the detour and mediacy of the principle of reality that Rousseau knew about’ (Stiegler, 1998: 114).

This implicit reference to Freud recalls to us the latter’s account – also presented as a useful fiction whose truth rests not on its empirical verifiability – of the origin of the human psychic apparatus. This depicts a simple reflex mechanism whose only aim and function is to minimize excitation, which it manages to do immediately, without delay, by the hallucinatory satisfaction of vital impulses. As soon as a need arises it is satisfied, albeit only phantasmatically (Freud, 1958: 565–6). Thus the first man for Rousseau, or equally Freud’s primitive progenitor to the human psychic apparatus, ‘depends on no outside’ (Stiegler, 1998: 116). They are autopoietic machines that make no distinction between interior and exterior because everything is contained within. The negotiation with the reality principle – or externality – comes about only subsequently, with the second origin or fall into technology. Technics introduces a detour between the original need and the satisfaction and thus ‘leads us down the road to decay in depriving us of our originary power’ (Stiegler, 1998: 115).

The flaw in such a narrative is immediately evident, for, as Stiegler notes, ‘[the] man of pure nature had no reason to deviate from the origin’ (Stiegler, 1998: 119). Nothing could happen to the perfectly self-regulating first man or primitive psychic organism to lead him to adopt artificial prostheses and so how are we to account for the destabilization of the system and the consequent recourse to the detour of technics? In other words, if man exists in such a perfect homeostatic relationship with his environment that it is not experienced as an outside, what brings about the upsetting of the equilibrium?

Rousseau here has recourse to fuzzy approximations: the first clothes or dwellings that were ever adopted were, while not wholly redundant, ‘hardly necessary’ as man had up until that point coped perfectly well without them (Rousseau, 1987: 44). If they were entirely useless, indeed entirely alien to man’s nature, then their possibility would never have surfaced. The possibility does arise, Rousseau says, because man has the power to deviate from his natural state, even if it is not in his best interests to do so. This is his free will and it is what distinguishes him from the animals, which are mere natural mechanisms. So, in accounting for the second origin, Rousseau inevitably undermines the purity of the first origin. The latter holds in reserve the former, which is its realization and its ruination. If man already had the potential to depart from nature then his ‘original state’ was always to deviate from his original state. As Stiegler puts it, while the originary man may have had no reason to depart from his natural origin, ‘he nevertheless had the possibility: if this had not been the case, the providential accident would have had no effect on him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 119). Thus the origin is an impossible one not only empirically speaking but even in its very concept.

In contrast to Rousseau’s transcendentalism, André Leroi-Gourhan (1993) offers an empirical account grounded in archaeological and paleontological evidence and the known facts of the evolutionary series. Rather than imagining the present-day human form as invariable, Leroi-Gourhan traces the emergence of the human species out of that which preceded it and in doing so critiques ‘cerebralist’ theories which assign a determining role to the brain.

For Leroi-Gourhan, the beginnings of the human lie in the adoption of the upright stance, not in a sudden advance in brain size and capability that gives rise to self-consciousness. This move from the quadrupedal to the bipedal at one and the same time frees the hand for the manipulation of tools and frees the face for verbal communication. It is through this simultaneous opening of the possibility of language and technology, made possible (but not inevitable) by skeletal changes, that the human’s intellectual capacities increase. Thus cortical development is effect rather than cause, placed within a network of practical evolutionary solutions to environmental conditions instead of governing the whole scene.

So, unlike Rousseau’s self-sufficient human who precedes artificial prostheses such as tools, language, society, and invents them through an act of sovereign free will, for Leroi-Gourhan technology and the human are synchronous. While the Rousseauian man ‘has no outside’, it is for Leroi-Gourhan the very capacity to exteriorize – thoughts, memories, intentions and so on – that distinguishes the human.

Stiegler’s project is significantly indebted to Leroi-Gourhan’s, in particular the concept of exteriorization, which, as we saw above, becomes epiphylogenesis, and of the ‘technical tendency’, which ascribes an evolutionary dynamic to technology all of its own that develops independently of human agency. However, in this account of the evolution of the human, despite its rigour and its scientificity, Stiegler sees the same logic of the dual origin at work that was identified previously in Rousseau.

The problem arises when Leroi-Gourhan is motivated to draw a distinction between two stages of humanization: Homo faber and Homo sapiens. This is a transformation from a proto-human, whose intelligence is merely technical and oriented solely to vital impulses, to the human proper, who possesses ‘reflective, individual, spiritual, essentially non-technical intelligence’ (Stiegler, 1998: 157). This, as Stiegler points out, undermines Leroi-Gourhan’s earlier insistence on the non-primacy of cortical development, for if tool- and language-use were already in place, but the progenitor species was not yet fully human, the shift that signals the arrival of the human proper can only be a cognitive one – a spiritual intelligence that develops independently of technology. This evidences a residual metaphysical tenor in Leroi-Gourhan’s procedure, in that it opposes the instinctual intelligence (nature) of Homo faber to the creative intelligence (culture) of Homo sapiens and, in doing so, brings technics back under the anticipatory power of the human. Leroi-Gourhan thus evades the truly aporetic structure of the origin of the human, namely, as we saw above, that the human is invented by the tool which s/he invents. The creative, anticipatory intelligence that allows the human operator to put the tool to use in its projects derives, in turn, from the tool itself (through epiphylogenesis). Leroi-Gourhan, while almost reaching this conclusion, ultimately draws back from it, according to Stiegler. ¹³

As a result, Leroi-Gourhan, like Rousseau, relies on the postulate of a second origin, although to the opposite effect of Rousseau. While Rousseau considers the human prior to the second origin (the fall) to be the exemplary man, Leroi-Gourhan considers the human after the second origin (Homo sapiens) to be the first fully recognizable human species. And while for Rousseau technology is an external addition to the fully formed human, in Leroi-Gourhan symbolic intelligence is added to an already existing technological capacity. Both, in the final analysis, assume a succession where there should be contemporaneity, however, neither can in all rigour keep apart the two origins that they establish. ¹⁴

So for Stiegler, it is only by doing justice to – without trying to resolve – the aporia at the origin of the human that it can be accounted for without the recurrence of metaphysical motifs. Neither man nor tool comes ‘first’; rather it is a movement, conceived as an exteriorization with no preceding interior. The exteriorizing process (technics as material memory support) constitutes the interior that is exteriorized, which once again comes back to epiphylogenesis. The question, which we raised earlier, is whether in his formulation of the rupture with pre-technical life that epiphylogenesis performs, which announces the emergence of the human species, Stiegler does not end up repeating at the level of life itself the gesture that he so acutely pinpoints in Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan.

Transgenerational Memory and Stiegler’s Second Origin

The basis on which this rupture of technical exteriorization is established is that, as we saw above, ‘[in] nonartificial life, nontechnical, nonarticulated by the différance of différance, all summation of epigenetic events is lost for specific memory with the loss of the individual who was their support’ (Stiegler, 1998: 177). Technical exteriorization, by contrast, for the first time allows for the conservation and intergenerational transmission of epigenetic events which otherwise would die along with the organism. The two forms of zoological memory are ‘the somatic memory of the epigenetic and the germinal memory of the genetic’ and these processes ‘in principle do not communicate with each other’ (Stiegler, 2009b: 4). This is the ‘law of life’ with which epiphylogenesis breaks (Stiegler, 2009b: 4).

Evidently there could be no place within Stiegler’s schema for Jungian archetypes, or the Freudian primal fantasy, at least in the terms in which they are formulated by their authors. Both Freud and Jung, in their different ways, believed that experiences and behavioural patterns repeated over generations have passed into a cumulative phylogenetic inheritance that makes its appearance in dreams, fantasies and pathological behaviour. For Jung, this explains the persistence of religious tropes, myths, fairytales and superstitions in strikingly similar forms across geographical and generational divides (see Jung, 1969). ¹⁵ For Freud, likewise, this accounts for the recurrence of familiar fantasies and traumatic experiences in analysis that the analysands themselves has not experienced first-hand: castration, the murder of a parent, the seduction of children, etc. Here ‘the individual reaches beyond his own experience into primeval experience’ (Freud, 1963: 371). Such a process, as we have seen, is unthinkable for Stiegler other than through epiphylogenesis and Freud’s adherence to this principle is accordingly deemed ‘astonishing’, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘incredible’ (Stiegler, 2012: 179). ¹⁶

However, the scientific orthodoxy that grounds the ontological significance of the rupture of epiphylogenesis, and on which Freud and Jung’s claims can be so easily dismissed, has begun to be questioned in recent years by research in the life sciences. Increasingly there has been an emphasis on the possibility of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’ (see Grossniklaus et al., 2013). That is, precisely, a third form of memory that is already present within ‘natural’ life; a process of ‘epiphylogenetic’ transmission existing before the apparent rupture that does not necessitate the detour of technics. Indeed, ‘there is now ample evidence that the erasure of epigenetic marks is not complete at some loci, and that epigenetic changes that are acquired during the lifespan of an organism can be transferred to subsequent generations as transgenerational inheritance’ (Tollefsbol, 2014: 1–2). This is a challenge to the received wisdom that Stiegler draws upon, which holds that epigenetic marks are ‘reset at each generation’ (Meloni, 2014: 3).

While the role of epigenetic mutation in the evolution of plant and insect life has been established for over a decade (Agrawal et al., 1999; Cubas et al., 1999), the possibility of such inheritance in mammals remains controversial and subject to much debate. However, a number of recent studies have begun to suggest that neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, and behavioural tendencies such as depression, can be brought about by prenatal maternal stress, or stress in early life, and passed on between generations (Franklin et al., 2010; Morgan and Bale, 2011), thus constituting a heritable epigenetic trait. Such inheritance, as we will see, complicates the distinction between individual and collective memory before the advent of technical exteriorization.

Further compelling confirmation was presented in a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in January 2014. In the experiment a set of mice were conditioned to react fearfully to the smell of the organic compound acetophenone, for which the neural correlates are well established. Subsequently an enhanced smell-detection ability for, as well as behavioural sensitivity towards this particular odour was observed in the two succeeding ‘odour naïve’ generations. So what we are faced with here is that a particular learned experience of the parent – the trauma associated with a certain smell – has been inherited by the offspring. As the authors of the study point out, there are only two mechanisms that can account for this transmission: inheritance via socialization (the young mouse models its behaviour on the parent and develops sensitivity to the smell through conditioning) or inheritance via the gametes. Several foolproof safeguards were put in place to preclude the possibility of social conditioning through maternal influence and the mice were conceived only after the odour exposure had taken place, which rules out such influence in utero. Thus the only available explanation for the transmission is that the traumatic experience is registered as an epigenetic signature in the DNA and inherited through the germ line. This points to an ‘under-appreciated influence on adult behaviour – ancestral experience before conception’ (Dias and Ressler, 2014: 95).

These highly significant results, supporting an emerging body of previous work (surveyed in Lim and Brunet, 2013), seem to suggest a possible rehabilitation of the long-discredited Lamarckian notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, on which Freud based his theory of primal fantasy, to Stiegler’s astonishment. Often cited as a precursor to Darwin, Lamarck has since been inextricably associated with this one outmoded thesis, which has led in large part to his reputation suffering in comparison with Darwin’s. ¹⁷ The notion of such a form of inheritance became particularly contentious in the 1880s, when the great evolutionary biologist August Weismann offered an apparently incontrovertible refutation. According to Weismann, inheritance only takes place via the germ cells and, since there is no known process by means of which acquired characteristics could affect the germ plasm, Lamarckian inheritance was deemed impossible. This in fact remains an unexplained aspect of the above research, for, as molecular biologist Moshe Szyf writes in the editorial in the same issue of Nature Neuroscience, there is a differentiated series of stages for the epigenetic information to travel between sperm and olfactory receptor neurons and the question of how it is preserved across these steps to influence the appropriate neurons, rather than other cells, poses difficult questions. Moreover, it is not only a heightened ability to detect this particular odour that is transmitted but the accompanying fear associations as well, which clearly activates a more complex neural circuitry than scent alone. The task remains to determine ‘the epigenetic marks in the sperm that are transmitted to the particular neurons involved in this linking of fearful response to an ancestral odour experience’ (Szyf, 2014: 3). Such difficulties demonstrate that ‘the Weismann barrier’ still presents problems, but the crucial difference is that there is now clear motivation to seek out the modes of transmission given that it seems highly likely that it occurs.

The implication is that strong behavioural sensitivity to the environment such as stress, fear, habit, phobias, superstition or anxiety can indeed be inherited through the germ line and not exclusively through socialization or technological transmission. While caution needs to be exercised when envisaging the nature and extent of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans, since the case is largely built on evidence from mice (Morgan and Whitelaw, 2008), such an influence at one stroke weakens the principle that makes technical exteriorization a ‘break with pure life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 140) or a ‘break with the “law of life”’ (Stiegler, 2009b: 4). After all, the mice in the above experiment also experience a past that they have not lived but that is nevertheless their own, a phenomenon Stiegler restricts to the human and which in fact defines its emergence. Thus if ‘pure phusis’ already contains within itself the means to transmit acquired experiences from generation to generation, the distinction between before and after the rupture begins to dissolve, and along with it the argument as to the specificity of the human within the broader unfolding of life loses some of its force. Transgenerational, transindividual epigenetic memory is therefore neither inherently technical nor does it set apart the human tool-user from the regular course of life.

So what we have shown here implies that collective memory and individual memory are already co-implicated prior to the adoption of technical memory supports. Thus the distinction between our cultural inheritance and our genetic inheritance is less assured. This means that the Jungian (and Freudian) hypothesis of an ‘immediate’ psychical inheritance of a sedimented store of experiences and traumas practised and repeated over generations can no longer simply be ruled out on the grounds of irrationality. To be absolutely clear, we are not claiming that the results pointed to above ‘demonstrate’ the existence of Jungian archetypes (or the Freudian primal phantasy), but they do attenuate the biological grounds for its disqualification (the absolute separation of epigenetic and genetic memory). One of the key themes of Stiegler’s later work, which draws heavily on Gilbert Simondon, is the notion of individuation as a process, taking place against the background of a pre-individual, collective milieu (see Stiegler, 2014). This process of individuation is central also to Jung’s analytical psychology (see Jung, 1968, 1969), whose own influence on Simondon is well documented. ¹⁸ This, as we can see, opens the space for a productive synthesis of Jung, Stiegler and Simondon on the theme of collective memory and the process of individuation, which would require separate treatment.

To return to Stiegler’s dismissal of Freud’s explanation for the transgenerational repetition of familiar phantasmatic forms (and Jung’s by extension), it cannot simply be a question of saying that Freud was right all along and that Stiegler has now been proved wrong. ¹⁹ One could still say without contradiction that Freud was wrong to espouse a form of Lamarckism at a time when this flew in the face of rational, scientific thought. Likewise, Stiegler was certainly not overhasty or naïve to predicate his position on a near universally accepted scientific tenet. Nevertheless, the concept of the break with the law of life that occurs with technical exteriorization is built upon a particular organization of natural facts: namely, that there are only two kinds of zoological memory, one of which can be transmitted to future generations (genetic), one of which cannot (epigenetic). So, while one’s genes will be inherited by one’s offspring, one’s acquired experiences will not, other than through socialization. This is the premise on which technical exteriorization amounts to a singular event in the history of life and it is neither necessary nor logical, it is entirely contingent and factual. So if the set of empirical facts on which the concept of epiphylogenesis is established now seem to have altered in line with new knowledge, this cannot fail to have implications for the project set out in Technics and Time. This is especially so given the importance Stiegler places on empiricity, which for him always precedes and conditions the quasi-transcendental logic that seems to encompass it (see Stiegler, 2001).

However, if the empirical grounds on which epiphylogenesis amounts to a break with life now appear less secure, there remains a second basis, which is apparently undisturbed by this objection: namely, that this is the first time that such memories are transmitted outside the organism. So although the rupture has been empirically undermined at the level of intergenerational memory per se, it remains at the logico-transcendental level characterized as life continued by other (technical) means or the doubling of différance. However, here the distinction between before and after again fails to stand up to scrutiny and this is where our earlier discussion of the logic of the dual origin comes back into consideration. For how is the relation between ‘pure phusis’ and life as the ‘economy of death’ (Stiegler, 1998: 139) to be envisaged other than as a second origin identical in structure to those analysed above? Here, pure life is in the position of the man of pure nature and technics comes, as it did in Rousseau, from without to effect a disturbance. Stiegler says, with regard to Rousseau’s transcendental anthropology, that technics amounts to ‘an exterior accident, which does not come from the nature of man: it happens to him and denaturalises him’ (Stiegler, 1998: 117–18). However, in spite of Stiegler’s insistence on the originarity of technicity, the whole narrative of the rupture that guides the account of epiphylogenesis follows the same logic. While technicity (which is ‘other than life’) is originary for the human, accounting for the transductive relation of man and machine, it must be expelled from life before the emergence of the human. This is a necessary corollary of the effort to distinguish the two stages of différance or life. Indeed, as Ben Roberts has argued, it is only because Stiegler assumes a ‘rigorous distinction between phusis and tekhne that he is able to convince himself that it is only after the “rupture” of the technical that death is the economy of life’ (Roberts, 2005: §9). ²⁰ This is in spite of Stiegler’s insistence elsewhere on the need to exercise ‘the greatest vigilance with respect to oppositions’ (Stiegler, 1998: 163).

We further saw above that the successive states of natural man, shorn of artifice, followed by technical man cannot be reconciled unless the second origin is already present within the first, which cancels out the distinction. If this were not the case, nothing could ever have happened to disturb the perfect equilibrium. In Stiegler’s account the situation is the same. For, as Derrida demonstrates, the living can only enter into a rapport with the dead if death (here technicity, which is not the same as technology) was already intrinsic to life. Pure life, uncontaminated by death, would foreclose any possibility of its movement being rerouted through the detour of the technical apparatus. Indeed, there would be no movement for it to deviate. So death does not, and could not, ‘surprise life’ from outside (Derrida, 2001: 287). Either death is already internal to life and the logic of différance, as articulated by Derrida, already equips us with the means to account for the emergence of technical exteriorization, or we have two successive, irreconcilable states that unavoidably conceive of technicity as external to life, which runs counter to Stiegler’s whole enterprise. But if the rupture is already prepared for and comprehended by life in its relation to death (as effects of différance), the basis for Stiegler’s critique of Derrida, and the argument as to the ontological break that the arrival of the human constitutes, collapses. So, while the emergence of technical exteriorization does indeed amount to an original ‘articulation’ and Stiegler is right to insist on its specificity (and the political and philosophical consequences he goes on to draw are of the highest significance), the analysis is undermined by its emphasis on the radical ontological rupture that this constitutes. As with Rousseau, the distinction is untenable empirically speaking as well as in its very concept.

Now, Stiegler does, elsewhere in The Fault of Epimetheus, insist that exteriorization ‘must not be understood as a rupture with nature but rather as a new organisation of life’ and, further down the same page, as ‘a rupture in life in general qua différance, but not with life’, which seems to anticipate such concerns as we have outlined here (Stiegler, 1998: 163). Ian James, taking Stiegler at his word, critiques those who have discovered the reappearance of oppositional structures in Technics and Time by arguing that the ‘logic of technicity precedes the human, and only on the basis of this precedence does it then come to constitute the human’ (James, 2010: 214). However, as we have just seen, such an argument ends up vitiating the grounds for Stiegler’s dissatisfaction with the grammatological project as set out by Derrida, as well as the singular import of epiphylogenesis. If, in Stiegler’s usage, life is synonymous with différance then the doubling, or différance, of différance must affect life at a structural level if it is to amount to a genuine rupture.

So if there is ‘indecision around différance’ we can see that it is Stiegler’s, not Derrida’s. It revolves around whether life is to be understood as différance or différance is to be understood as life. The critique only has currency on the assumption that the latter is the case, but this is an illegitimate conflation. For while différance may be the ‘genetico-structural condition of the life of the living’ (Vitale, 2014: 101), it is not, for that very reason, simply commensurate with or equal to that which it conditions. However, as the ‘genetico-structural condition’ of life, ‘[the] possibility of the “appearing as such” of the grammē [see p. 4] is built into [it] quite independently of the factual history of the emergence of mankind or any other species’ (Bennington, 1996: 189–90). If Stiegler, in trying to avoid the problems outlined above, insists on epiphylogenesis being a stage in rather than a rupture with the unfolding of life (as différance), then he cannot but subscribe to this statement and as a result disavow his critique and the whole logic of life continuing by means other than life, which signals the genesis of the human. ²¹

So, in setting out to think the specificity of the human, which is considered at risk of becoming obscured in the general history of the grammē, Stiegler deems it necessary to establish a conceptual distinction between life before and after the technical exteriorization of memory. He elsewhere insists on the crucial difference between distinction and opposition, arguing that only the latter is the truly metaphysical move, which is something that Derrida failed to see (Stiegler, 2011: 227 n9, 2012: 165, 2013: 54). Therefore, without opposing the human to the animal, or culture to nature, Stiegler nevertheless wants to distinguish that which makes the human what it is. ²²

However, as we have seen, this distinction is empirically predicated on a rejection of Lamarckian epigenetic inheritance that now seems far from self-evident in the light of the discoveries outlined above. Furthermore, it has been shown to repeat the logic of the ‘second origin’ that inadvertently portrays technicity as an external accident, coming from outside the essence of life to transform its course.

Stiegler exercises the greatest rigour in establishing that the human is not the simple causal agent behind technological development but is equally brought into being by the very technical objects that s/he apparently invents. Thus the who and the what (the human operator and the technical tool) can be distinguished but cannot be opposed, as they are in Rousseau and even in Leroi-Gourhan. However, the same care is not shown in the account of the coming into being of this transductive relation itself, or the birth of epiphylogenesis.

Just as Stiegler showed how Leroi-Gourhan undermines his own account when he attempts to differentiate between two distinct stages of the human, which rests on the opposition ‘faber/sapiens, or technics/spirituality’ (Stiegler, 1998: 161), we have seen that Stiegler does the same thing at the level of life, where the distinction between life pursued by its own means and life continued by means other than life brings with it the whole series of oppositions that are elsewhere deconstructed. There are, as we saw, two ways to approach this demarcation: from the side of the empirical or from the side of the logico-(quasi-)transcendental. We have correspondingly made a two-pronged critique of this argument. Neither strand necessarily implies the other but, taken together, they pose clear problems for the project announced in Technics and Time.

On the empirical level, if an individual’s acquired (epigenetic) memory is able to be preserved beyond the lifespan of the organism prior to the advent of technical exteriorization, then transpersonal, intergenerational memory can no longer be considered to be technical in its essence, and therefore not the exclusive preserve of the human tool-user. Acquired individual memory and inherited collective memory are thus brought into relation without the technological intermediary and this takes place right across the spectrum of life. This is, of course, not to deny that finite memory is originally prosthetic, or exteriorizing, but we have seen that the very appearance of material memory supports is conditioned and made possible by that which it is supposed to inaugurate: life as an economy of death. For if life is to be understood as différance, this means that it is constitutively contaminated by alterity, and only as such is it able to enter into relation with its other. ²³ For, as Derrida puts it, ‘there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance’ (Derrida, 2001: 254), and this holds for the purported ‘doubling’ of différance as well. Thus, from whichever level we approach it, life already anticipates the technical rupture that is supposed to happen to it with the passage to the human.