The Immense Regression

Did we really understand Friedrich Nietzsche when, in 1879, he stated that his philosophy should “begin not with astonishment, but with dread”? Did we comprehend Félix Guattari when, in 1989, he predicted in The Three Ecologies that “barbaric implosion is by no means out of the question” (pointing out in the same work the dangerousness of a businessman named Donald Trump)? Have we grasped the implications of what Gilles Deleuze theorized three years before the launch of the World Wide Web as the advent of control societies?

Now that the “Anthropocene event“ (whose contours Heidegger had apprehended under the name of Gestell), the post-truth ordeal, the despair it arouses and everything that constitutes the immense regression underway are overwhelming everyone, it seems that thought in all its forms is absolutely helpless. It's too late. And this time, the delay would be fatal to humanity—and, beyond that, to all forms of life. But it is never too late to heal. And if thought is helpless, it’s because it has ceased to think of itself as care: as bandaging. But what is caring?

In the first of his two-volume magnum opus What Is Called Caring?, Bernard Stiegler takes up the existential question care as a central mode of thought in the Anthropocene; masterfully rendered by his long-time friend and translator Daniel Ross, The Immense Regression is Stiegler’s most urgent and timely philosophical provocation.

The second volume of What Is Called Caring?, entitled The Lesson of Greta Thunberg, is forthcoming in 2025. Both works are part of Pensées soignées, K. Verlag's new series of works-in-translation dedicated to relaying how intellectuals and activists in the non-Anglophone world are thinking about care and caring about thought. By proliferating new concepts, models, and tools, the series aims to address the tragedies of our diminished and imperiled historical moment.

Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) was a philosopher, founder of the Ars Industrialis group and the online school pharmakon.fr, and director of the Institute for Research and Innovation, which he created within the Centre Pompidou. His research focused on social, political, economic, epistemological, and psychological changes caused by technological and scientific development linked to the “digital revolution.” He was the author of numerous works and considered one of the most influential European philosophers of the twenty-first century.

Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University. He is the author of Violent Democracy (2004) and Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis (2021), and has translated many books by Bernard Stiegler into English. He is also the co-director of the prize-winning film The Ister (2004).