Abstract:
Literary Theory’s latest embrace of the Hard Sciences by way of forgetting
the ‘‘orthotheses of memory’’, broadly understood as mnemotechnics, it is argued,
erases one of the most important aspects of the literary craft, namely its capacity to
render and preserve a past that we did not live. Stiegler’s conceptualization of writing
as historically mediated technics of orthographic practice emphasizes questions of
time and idiomatic subjectivity, precisely those notions usually obscured or absent in
the Human Sciences’ ‘other’: the natural sciences, particularly under the condition of
today’s ‘‘numerical, industrial moment’’. Instead of being merely seduced by economic
rationality to produce accelerated innovation in science and technology in order
to secure a competitive edge in the global market, both Kulturwissenschaften (cultural
sciences) in place of the old Human Sciences—and Naturwissenschaften (natural
sciences) need to remember that human life is both zoon (politicon) and idios bios.
