ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Stiegler's account of spirit as a temporal reserve, a chance for reflective inheritance, which is sustained within the system of global information exchange that has become the hegemonic form of capitalism. It describes the evolution of the international economy through the development of three related factors: immaterial forms of commodification; new systems of virtual-aesthetic representation; and the global expansion of techno scientific production. The chapter examines Stiegler's response to the politics of spirit that is being played out through what Derrida has called the 'return of religion'. It explains the pharmacological economy that Stiegler conceives as being implicit in the systems of global-technological capital. The chapter describes the way in which the de-territorializing systems of the arche-programme give rise to events of 'acting out' that both challenge conventional ontologies of culture and form the basis of a new cosmopolitanism.
