The Re-Enchantment of the World Quotes

“What is the library? If one believes Mallarmé’s antithesis, then the library would first of all be the place of instrumental spirituality. As a consequence, it would be a place of “production,” because the instrument exercises (instruire) a material, which it trans-forms. It would be the place of the life of spirit, of its genesis—but of its material genesis. In short, the library is a place of writing. It is at once the place of the conservation and elaboration of forms of knowledge—of their memory. But this memory is dead: supported by inorganic, yet organized objects, those which Husserl names “spirit-invested objects.” On the other hand, the library is trans-formed as a network, which is to say that it is digitized—and so it requires “new spiritual instruments.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“prevailing event today is the loss of individuation qua pauperization (cognitive impoverishment) and the growth of information to the detriment of knowledge. It is what has been analyzed, for example, as “cognitive overflow syndrome,” which, rather than facilitating decision-making (the synthesis that must follow from the analytic acquisition of knowledge), paralyzes it: information is not transformed into knowledge or savoir-faire but into an accumulation of hard data.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“Which is to say, the thought. In what, then, does this antithesis consist? In that the spirit would overflow the instrumentality and the instrumentalizable, the instrument being on the side of the material, that is, of the contingent and corruptible, which precisely disappears in the corruptible, whereas, on the contrary, the spiritual is what returns, resists, consists: re-appearing, not disappearing.”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

“however, with this the risk of entropy would mean not only that the instance of individuation displaces and reorganizes itself, but that it subsides, that is, that individuation, as negentropy, is weakened by the fact of a conflict between the psychic, the collective, and the machinic, which does not arrive at a resolution, and which is induced by a blockage resulting from the caducity of the dissociating industrial model imposed by global financier capitalism on a society that has come undone—and this, in order to maintain the exorbitant and ruinous perpetual returns of the situation, where it is capitalism itself that is in the process of destroying itself. The question of the reorganization of appropriation through the adjustment of society and of digital equipment, that is, of psychosocial individuation and techno-logical individuation, where the new informational instrumentality of forms of knowledge takes shape—these are the stakes of a new industrial model: it is only as such—as new forms of industrial society—that we will be able”
― Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism