Bernard Stiegler, the president of the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation du Centre Pompidou, passed away on Wednesday August 5th, 2020. As a philosopher, he has devoted a large part of his work to the relationship between technology and society, questioning the urgency that challenges us all today. He has never ceased to work to link theory to practice through experimentation, in an inseparable bond between intellectual and scientific rigor and a passion for collective work. This is how he created the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI, https://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/) within the Center Pompidou in 2006 and, shortly before, in 2005, the Ars Industrialis association (http://arsindustrialis.org/), which this year was transformed into Association of Friends of the Thunberg Generation (Association des amis de la génération Thunberg) in order to promote a dialogue between academics and the young generation fighting against the ecological crisis.

 

In this context, students from Youth for Climate and Extinction Rebellion joined the association and – altogether with the Internation Collective (https://internation.world) formed by Bernard Stiegler with internationally renowned researchers – recently worked together on an analysis of the current and future possible crises. This process has marked its first milestone with the publication of the collective book Bifurquer, published in May 2020 under his direction. The offers in this sense a theoretical framework allowing for a proper understanding of contemporary challenges and opens the way for working around territorial laboratories, such as the Contributive Learning Territory (recherchecontributive.org) that Bernard Stiegler launched 4 years ago in Plaine Commune, in the north of Paris. In these territories is or will be experimented the contributory economy, a form of economy that is developed locally and within the framework of a new method of research associating all the territorial actors (inhabitants, companies, associations, public administrations and researchers, etc.) and allowing them to draw pathways of transition that are at the same time sustainable, solvent and desirable.

 

The members of the Association of Friends of the Thunberg Generation-Ars Industrialis, the collective of the Internation Collective and the Pharmakon seminar participants and the team he has formed at IRI share the pain of his family and are determined to prolong his works through international research programs and local experiments to work on the essential bifurcations in order to take care of both the biosphere and the technosphere, thus opening up a future for human societies.