Abstract

The opening contribution to this special edition on “The Truth of Stiegler” tests the claim that the more Bernard Stiegler develops his analysis of the catastrophic collapse of society, the further he risks departure from the philosophical rigor of his earliest ideas on the technical constitution of “intermittently not-inhuman” (“noetic”) life. His diagnoses of the collapse of trust revolve around a critique of misplaced faith () in computational capitalism’s pursuit of certainty, but are arguably themselves undermined by Stiegler’s dogmatic certainty in his own arguments. We can make more sense of the apparent inconsistency by extending Stiegler’s ideas on exhaustion and the disintegration of the public sphere to show how a surfeit of certainty gives rise to a defensive posture that complicates his insistence on the therapeutic value of truth and openness.