Abstract

In Symbolic Misery, published in 2004 and 2005 and recently translated into Italian (2021 and 2022), Bernard Stiegler defines the hyper-industrial epoch as an absence of epoch. This diagnosis, first posed in relation to the disruptive effects of audio-visual mass media and later defined in The Age of Disruption (2016), shows an even greater urgency in the second decade of the century with the rise of the digital and «algorithmic governmentality». This article aims to focus on the definition of this problem by analyzing its beginnings and assumptions in Stieglerian thought from Technics and Time to the two tomes on symbolic misery, where Stiegler emphasizes the centrality of the aesthetic dimension in what he believes to be a «War of Time», and at the same time defends the need for another temporal relationship with technology, conceived as the possibility of taking time and producing singularity in the encounter with it, as art does.