I have been looking at the reception of some of Bernard Stiegler’s more activist-oriented work, while considering the themes of care and the economy of contribution, and thought it would be worth quickly posting links to some of the reviews of Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. The book, Taking Care, is the locus of Stiegler’s attempt to tackle the subject of attention and pedagogy, and formed the impetus for the conference ‘Paying Attention‘ organised by my colleagues Patrick Crogan and Jonathan Dovey, which I helped coordinate.
First, it is worth noting that the essay/lecture on Stiegler by Alexander Galloway in his excellent French Theory Today (available as a PDF) draws significantly from Taking Care and is worth reading.
The two ‘published’ reviews that I have seen are by Galloway in the journal Radical Philosophy (PDF) and by Richard Iveson in the journal Parallax (an earlier draft is available online at New Cross Review of Books). Iveson’s review is fairly substantial and focuses on what he calls Stiegler’s ‘re-schooling’ of Foucault. Galloway’s shorter, and perhaps pithier, piece addresses what he sees as Stiegler’s formulation of a moral philosophy.
In the ‘electronic journal’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Peter Gratton provides an interesting, quite early, review of the English translation of Taking Care. He raises issues with the way Stiegler considers (or perhaps doesn’t) representative democracy and what he considers to be Stiegler’s Euro-centric appeal towards rehabilitation of a bourgeois sensibility for culture.
Amongst the several online reviews you can find with Google, I would highlight the write-up by Brian Rajski on his blog Voice Imitator.