Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler begins Technics and Time with a rereading of the Greek myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Epimetheus, tasked with distributing qualities to the animals, gave all the gifts away before reaching the human, leaving humanity without natural endowment — without claws, fur, or instinct adequate to survival. Prometheus stole fire and technics to compensate for this 'default of origin'. Stiegler treats this myth not as allegory but as philosophical truth: the human being is the animal that constitutively lacks a fixed nature and must supplement itself with technical objects. Technology does not arise from a prior human essence; human essence arises through the technical supplement. The relationship is one of originary co-constitution, not tool-use by a pre-existing subject.

Stiegler's key technical concept is 'epiphylogenesis': the inheritance of acquired characteristics through technical objects, a kind of memory that is neither genetic nor individual but stored in the artifact — the flint, the book, the database. Each generation inherits not only biological traits but the accumulated technical memory of previous generations in crystallized, transmissible form. This transforms the evolutionary framework entirely: the human lineage evolves not through genetic mutation alone but through the growing archive of exteriorized memory. Stiegler, following Leroi-Gourhan's lead, argues that this means the technical object is not a tool in the service of a human who precedes it; the human emerges together with the technical object, and both are transformed by every new artifact that enters the archive. The origin of technology is thus the origin of memory, of time-consciousness, and of what Stiegler calls the 'who' — the human self.