Aesthetics and Dreams in the Absence of Epoch. Bernard Stiegler’s Bifurcation of the Anthropocene

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the concept of Anthropocene in Bernard Stiegler's work through the cross-reading of the possibility of aesthetic experience and of what Stiegler calls a war against this experience and the function of dreams. The aesthetic experience as the experience of the exosomatisation is addressed in the books concerning The Symbolic Misery; the function of dreams is addressed in the book The Age of Disruption, in which the Anthropocene appears to be “an absence of epoch”. For Stiegler, this concept implies the consideration of a catastrophe that is not only ecological but also psychic and collective, that is, the impossibility of thinking of an alternative present to the one imposed by the capitalist economy. At the center of Stiegler's analysis is the intertwining of aesthetics and technics as what allows individuation and the political-philosophical reflection on technics as what is necessary for human life but that also consists in a risk, the one of losing the possibility of cultivating reason as what allows to live a life worth living, to cultivate the singularity and the unexpected as the ability to bifurcate the paths of the possible.