Bernard Stiegler
Bernard Stiegler (1952 – 2020) was a French philosopher and a head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also a co-founder of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis (2005), and philosophy school pharmakon.fr at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel (2010). Stiegler was a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he taught philosophy. Before taking up the post at the Pompidou Center, he was program director at the International College of Philosophy, Deputy Director General of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, then Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM, 2002-2005).
Stiegler published numerous books and articles on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, consumer culture, etc. Among his writings, his three volumes of La technique et le temps (in English as Technics and Time), two volumes of De la misère symbolique, three volumes of Mécréance et discrédit and two volumes Constituer l'Europe are particularly well known. Stiegler had a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism. He led several research programmes in the domain of digital technologies applied to text, image, and sound, and he conceived and organised the Mémoires du Futur exhibition presented at the Centre Pompidou in 1987.