This book is the first monograph that takes a comprehensive approach to Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of technology. It refines and complements his mainstream image as a philosopher of language and deconstructionist of classical literary and philosophical texts. This volume outlines the key features of Derrida's alternative philosophy of technology, a philosophy which Sjöstrand argues, avoids the problems associated with, on the one hand, a Heideggerian orientation, which completely separates thinking and technology and, on the other, an empirically oriented "post-phenomenology" that can be said to be hegemonic within the field today. Based on a sustained interpretation of Derrida, and a robust, coherent philosophy of technology, a phenomenology of technology is developed that, in a radical way, extends the concept of technology to cover the entire field of phenomenology. This places the technological not in opposition to humanity, but rather always already in close proximity to man and, consequently, to life, ethics, politics, democracy and religion. Strikingly, this important aspect of Derrida's thinking is only rarely analyzed or discussed by his many exegetes. This text appeals to graduates and researchers working on Derrida, phenomenology, and the philosophy of technology. 

How should we understand the relations between human beings and technology? Where does technology end and where does the human being begin? How should we understand the relation between thinking and technology? These and related questions have been increasingly salient during the last decades. The aim of this study is to provide an outline of a philosophy of technology in the work of a major contemporary philosopher: Jacques Derrida.   

The study is divided into seven chapters, each dealing thematically with a part of Derrida’s philosophy of technology. The opening chapter begins with an exposé of the way the question of technology has evolved historically. It argues that Derrida’s deconstructive thinking avoids many of the problems associated with earlier as well as contemporary approaches. The next chapter sketches the basic features of a coherent philosophy of technology, a deconstructive phenomenology of technology that enlarges the concept of technology to include the entire phenomenological field: technology is here not opposed to the psychical, it is rather a close relation between the psychical and the non-psychical, between life and death.

Life is always already contaminated with technology. Chapter three explores in some detail Derrida’s thesis that contemporary life is contaminated by what he calls a “gigantic tele-technological machine” including the media, the Internet, mobile systems, digital archives, etc. As is discussed in the following chapter, this contamination also has consequences for our experience of time. More than ever before, time is today produced artificially by the tele-technological machine that transforms our temporal experience. Chapter five suggests that also the ethical dimension in Derrida’s thinking is closely linked to technology. The main part of the chapter is devoted to three technological events of historic proportions: the electronic revolution, the hypothesis of a total nuclear war, and global terrorism, all of which require an urgent ethical response beyond current politics.

This ethico-political response is further elaborated in the subsequent chapter, dealing especially with Derrida’s radical thesis that the tele-technological machine will transform the concept of the political as we know it. According to this thesis, the ability of the new technologies to facilitate extremely rapid circulation of ideas, voices and images around the world will eventually erase the borders between nation states, a fact that will force us to think the political beyond politics. The final chapter on religion argues that Derrida’s provocative thoughts about the close link between religion and science, religion and technology, and religion and the media provide keys to a more comprehensive understanding of his thinking about the technical, if not of his thinking as a whole.