On the praxis of writing time : Bernard Stiegler's concept of the orthographic moment as necessary complement to numerical atemporality

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.