Books in the Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series

Opening a major new front in discussions of the Anthropocene, The Neganthropocene is a collection of recent lectures by the leading French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler. In this volume, Stiegler engages substantially with Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Sloterdijk, Karl Marx, Benjamin Bratton, and others in his renewed thought of the concepts of entropy and negentropy. Stiegler's life-long encounter with the work of Martin Heidegger reappears here in pursuit of the question not of what is called "thinking" (penser) but, in a twist on old French, of what is called "caring" (panser) as the possibility of a new therapeutic theory and practice capable of responding to the massive psychological, social and ecological toxicity associated with what, for Stiegler, is the disruptive age of the Entropocene.

The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today's destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic - accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model - a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative.