The Immense Regression

Did we truly understand Nietzsche when, in 1879, he insisted that philosophy should begin not with astonishment, but with dread? Did we grasp what Félix Guattari foresaw in The Three Ecologies when, in 1989, he warned that a "barbaric implosion" was entirely possible-while also flagging the dangers of a certain businessman named Donald Trump? And have we fully reckoned with what Gilles Deleuze described, just three years before the birth of the World Wide Web, as the arrival of control societies? Today, as we are engulfed by the so-called Anthropocene event-whose outlines Heidegger once named Gestell-and swept into the despair of post-truth and planetary crisis, it often feels as though thought itself has been rendered powerless. It is too late, we tell ourselves. This time, the delay may be fatal: not only for humanity, but for life in all its forms. But it is never too late to begin healing. If thought seems helpless, perhaps it is because it has forgotten how to care-for the world, for others, for itself. What does it mean to think as an act of care? What does it mean to bandage, to tend, to hold open the possibility of recovery? In The Immense Regression, the first volume of his two-part philosophical opus What Is Called Caring?, Bernard Stiegler returns to the existential question of care as the most urgent task of thinking in the Anthropocene. Masterfully translated by his longtime friend and collaborator Daniel Ross, this is Stiegler at his most provocative, timely, and necessary.