Philosophy and the Machine: Slavery in French Philosophy of Technology 1897–1948

This essay reconstructs a now largely obscure fifty year debate within French philosophy of technology from Alfred Espinas to Alexandre Kojève about slavery in the ancient world. To summarize, I argue that early twentieth century French philosophy of technology’s hypothesis that Greek and Roman slavery caused a blocage – a block, delay or stagnation – in the development of technology in antiquity may well seem little more than a historical curiosity today, but that its hypothesis of a constitutive relation between slave labour and technological innovation has recently re-emerged in biopolitical form in such texts as Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies (2015). In the confrontation between what Alexandre Koyré famously calls the ‘philosophers’ and the ‘machine’, I argue that we not only enter a largely forgotten conceptual archive for modern French philosophy of technology (Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gouhran, Bernard Stiegler) but for contemporary biopolitical theory (Giorgio Agamben).