Exosomatization

= concept from Bernard Stiegler

Context

Bernard Suriano:

"I will extrapolate from Marx a normative account of technology as a created organ of the distinctively human body and thus a humanizing matter of bodily formation with a substantive telos for its realization. While Marx has often been consigned to the above reifications that came in his wake, he nevertheless provides a framework that points beyond such. As Bernard Stiegler recently highlighted, “Marx in the Manuscripts, and later Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, pose the question of a general organology capable of thinking exosomatization, which they are the first to describe, and where they describe it definitively in terms of the production of psychosocial individuation, and as a continuation of evolution, which will be reaffirmed when Book 1 of Capital asserts the need for a theory of technical evolution.” Stiegler here echoes a few other French thinkers who called attention to Marx’s view of technology as organ extension of the biological body that challenges both mechanistic and voluntarist reductions without falling into a static biologism. Beyond these initial calls, however, there has been little substantive elaboration of a general organology from Marx. Moreover, within this line, Raymond Ruyer has received less attention, yet his “finalist” or teleological framework of biology provides an insightful lens for outlining a normative historical materialist theory of organ extension."

Source: Draft essay: Technology as the Analogical Extension and Resurrection of the Body.