Constitutive Incompleteness

The myth of Epimetheus tells of a titan charged with distributing gifts to the animals: speed to the deer, strength to the bear, camouflage to the chameleon. When he reached the human, the gifts were exhausted. Humanity was sent into the world without the biological endowments that give other animals their behavioral repertoires—constitutively incomplete, naked, without claws or instinct or fixed response patterns adequate to survival. It was Prometheus who corrected the oversight by stealing fire and craft from the gods, giving the human the technical means to construct what biology had withheld. Stiegler read this myth, through the paleoanthropological work of André Leroi-Gourhan, as the most precise available description of the human condition: the human is the being that constitutes itself through and as technical objects, such that there is no human essence prior to its technical externalizations. The hand and the flint tool co-evolved; the capacity for