ABSTRACT
Daily implements, tools, artefacts and technology in general constitute a mode of letting things be (Seinlassen) and letting them come near. However, contrary to language or poetic image, technology, according to Heidegger, brings about a kind of nearness that homogenises things and our relations to them. Tools are for everyone and thus turn everyone into anyone. For this reason, Heidegger considers the time that is mediated by tools as inauthentic, whereas he deems time formed by the finality of death as authentic. In contrast, Derrida and Stiegler point out that the technological substratum to which an individual is always already situated, conditions any kind of temporality. They, thus, assert that there cannot be any firm distinction between authentic and inauthentic time. Indeed, the technological exterior support contains, according to Stiegler, the memories of the past that become Dasein’s selection criteria for the formation of its future and the experience of its present. In this respect, Stiegler sees in language and technology a common element of programmability. This move, on the one hand, opens up the possibility of seeing language and technology as the two aspects of the same apparatus. On the other hand, the identification between language, technology, and ultimately memory, that Stiegler proposes, tends to conceal the rules by which these systems abide, namely, the way they schematise memories allowing for specific types of time and nearness to emerge. The notion of metaphor, as sketched in this book, can permit such examination.
