Go to: https://pharmakon.epokhe.world/seminaire-hypertexte/
Between 2018 and 2019, Épokhè association member Michel Blanchut has “taken advantage of a period of immobility at home” to transcribe the Pharmakon seminars of Bernard Stiegler, which span from 2012 to 2020 and were recorded between 2014 and 2020. Seeing the efforts by the association in valorizing and preserving the Pharmakon recordings on an academic Peertube instance, Michel proposed in early 2025 to share his transcriptions to the larger community of “amateurs” and “students” of Stiegler’s philosophy, through Épokhè and with my help.
How to make accessible and valorize this huge corpora of hundred of hours of transcriptions online? I wanted to create a “compass” or “hypertextual map” out of them, to help navigate the sprawling philosophy of Stiegler through an appropriate Web edition – rather than simply give access to a drive with separate .docx documents of each seminar session. As part of my PhD activities within the Research Laboratory on Digital Textualities in Montréal with Marcello Vitali-Rosati, we work on the enriched Web book generator “Le Pressoir”, which I saw fit for the mission (despite being made, initially, for more traditional academic books and collections).
With Le Pressoir, we can navigate and articulate these transcriptions using a search bar and annotate them “socially” via Hypothesis (see also this longform I wrote when I was at the INC, concerning this Web annotation tool and our practices). I also automatically indexed, with scripts, the key authors as well as the texts’ titles cited by Stiegler, and embedded within each session page the video recordings on Peertube, that we can listen to while reading and annotating the text, looking at recommended “vocabularies” as to Stiegler’s concepts, …
The aim of it all is to provide to Stiegler’s amateurs and people who study his thought a way to explore and investigate the history of his philosophy in the making, between 2014 and 2020 – his seminars being closely tied to the books he was writing and his different projects. It comes also as a final project of Marcello’s class on Digital Culture, of which the slides were also made with Le Pressoir. What struck me in editing these transcriptions is the extent to which Bernard Stiegler philosophized by re-reading: he articulates and reinterprets different texts he read in the light of current events and the “organological” theory of political economy that he is trying to consolidate through, among other things, his Pharmakon “school”.
I hope that this Web edition will encourage and serve as a support for the listening of the seminars, that is, as a complementary publication to the recordings. The latter keep a “therapeutic” and experiential value, it has been reported by many Épokhè members ; of course, the emotional complexity communicated by the tone, voice, pace of speech, physical gestures of Stiegler are lost in the written words of this Web edition. However, having it as hypertext can allow us to explore them in a more non-linear way, depending on what we search for (the mention of a certain text, author, concept, event, etc.). This makes the Pharmakon school even more a material for research, whether it is undertaken by scholars or by amateurs – if we agree, with Stiegler, that activity of research and even more, of philosophy, is something to be shared much beyond academia and its margins.
We are glad to share this edition with an international community through the INC. In the not-so-far future, we hope that an English version of these transcriptions will be published there as well!