One can easily affirm that Bernard Stiegler has always criticized both the concept of immaterial – starting from the sense and the theoretical meaning of the exhibition Les immatériaux organized by Lyotard in 1985 – and the same signifier, stating on several occasions that what we refer with this term actually calls always a material dimension. The immaterial would therefore always be hyper-material, that is to say the expression of an organized mat-ter as an active support for any type of memory, cognitive, symbolic etc. On the other hand, his attitude towards the Stoic-Deleuzian concept of incorporeal – with the conceptual chain that accompanies it in The Logic of Sense: event, quasi-cause, counter-effectuation – is certainly different, given that Stiegler, at least starting from the mature phase in its pharmaco-logical perspective, seems to have adopted it as a tool for analysing the current political economy and the hyper-industrial context (therefore not at all post-industrial) of platform capitalism. Adopting the incorporeal then means transforming it, in the sense of its radical technologization. Thus, from the Stieglerian point of view, the incorporeal becomes the hyper-material expression of exosomatization, that is the technical externalization of memory and bodily gesture that accompanies humanity since its prehistory, while the Deleuzian control societies become society of hyper-control, that is, of the control that hyper-material exerts on us. The aim of the paper is then to show originality, intuitions and limits of Stiegler’s conceptual adoption, examining its effects in relation to both the reactivation of the Deleuzi-an concept of incorporeal and the same process of composition of the Stieglerian perspective.
