The Re-Enchantment of the World The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism

Bernard Stiegler's work on the intimate relations between the human and the technical have made him one of the most important voices to have emerged in French philosophy in the last decade. At the same time both an accessible summation of that work and a continuation of it, The Re-Enchantment of the Worldadvances a critique of consumer capitalism that draws on Freud and Marx to construct an utterly contemporary analysis of our time. The book explores the cognitive, affective, social and economic effects of the 'proletarianization' of the consumer in late capitalism and the resulting destruction of the consumer's savoir-vivre.Reflecting the collective work of his activist organisation, Ars Industrialis, Stiegler here sets forth an alternative path to that of 'industrial populism', one that appeals to the force of the human spirit. The Re-Enchantment of the Worldalso includes the manifesto of Ars Industrialisand an account of the organisation's 2005 summit in Tunis.

Trevor Arthur is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.

Introduction: What is to be done? \ Manifesto of ... Ars Industrialis \ Part I: Refounding Society \ 1. The Industrial Age as Service Capitalism \ 2. The Consumer Discharged of his Existence \ 3. Hyperindustrial Service Societies as the Destruction of Individuation by Controlling Adoption Procedures \ 4. Re-Enchanting the World in the Face of the Unhappy Destiny of Consumption \ 5. 'R' Technologies and the New Apparatuses of Spirit \ 6. Overcoming the Capitalism of Drives and Fighting Against its Becoming-Barbaric \ 7. Startled, We Begin Again Differently (!) / The Sudden Surge: a Nw Beginning \ 8. Grammatization and Individuation - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow \ 9. The Revolution of Capitalism \ 10. A European Way of Life \ 11. The Plan that Enchants Me \ Part II: Investing in the Augmentation of the Value of the 'Human Spirit' Against the Reign of Ignorance \ 12. From the Informatization of Society to "Information Society" \ 13. From the "Information Society" to the "Society of Knowledge" - or, On the Possibility of the Re-Enchantment of the World \ 14. Companies, Public Power, and Industrial Populism \ 15. Changing the Industrial Paradigm \ 16. Information Society, Disenchantment, De-Motivation and Control of Knowledge \ 17. The Re-Instrumentation of Knowledge, the Future of Hyperindustrial Society \ 18. Knowledge and Information \ 19. Knowledge and Memory, or Reign of Ignorance? \ 20. The Risk of Disindividuation as the Growth of Ignorance Rather Than Knowledge \ 21. Cognitive Saturation and Knowledge Management \ 22. Instruments of Knowledge and the Criteria of Selection That They Produce \ 23. Being and Becoming in Technoscience \ 24. The Crisis of Education \ 25. Practical Consequences \ Motion adopted by Ars Industrial on the eve of the Tunis summit \ Bibliography \ Index.