Bipedality, Premature Birth and Desire

Charlie’s starting point is how the work of Jacques Derrida and those he influenced allow us to consider the relation between the human and the technical. One of the most important ideas emerging out of Derrida’s development of grammatology is Bernard Stiegler’s ‘originary technicity’, which was also greatly influenced by palaeoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas about the relation between human bipedality and technicity. Following Leroi-Gourhan Stiegler proposed that technics invents the human rather than the other way round, or that the human and the technical co-evolve. Stiegler never properly engaged with psychoanalysis, other than a late engagement with Winnicott and the Transitional Object. The work of Jacques Lacan is largely missing from Stiegler’s thought, a lacuna Charlie wishes to address by way of a consideration of the relation between bipedality and the necessity for premature birth in humans. For Lacan the latter is crucial in the emergence of the symbolic order. As Lorenzo Chiesa puts it ‘Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic arise immanently’. He suggests that, for Lacan, ‘the human being is born with foetalised traits, that is to say deriving from premature birth’. Henry Sullivan invokes Lacan to ask whether ‘the most elementary stone tools to be regarded as indications of human desire’. Here there might seem to be a possible connection between the work of Lacan and that of Stiegler, and a single sentence in the first volume of his magnum opus Technics and Time offers a potential Lacanian slant to Stiegler’s thought. He writes that ‘Flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror’. Thus, following Lacan and Sullivan, perhaps the earliest flint tools and all our tools since, up to the Metaverse, are objets petit a, and that the specific human relation to technicity is one of lack and desire.

Charlie Gere is professor of media theory and history at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, and the author of a number of books, most recently Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (2022).

Host or Publisher Southern Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy