Acting Out / Edition 1

The second book, , is a powerful distillation of Stiegler's analysis of the contemporary world. He maintains that a growing loss of a sense of individual and collective existence leads to a decreased ability to love oneself, and, by extension, others. This predicament is viewed through a tragic event: in 2002, in Nanterre, France, Richard Durn, a local activist, stormed the city's town hall, shooting and killing eight people. Durn committed suicide the following day. The later publication of Durn's his journal revealed a man struggling with the feeling that he did not exist, for which he tried to compensate by committing an atrocity. For Stiegler, this exemplifies how love of self becomes pathological: a "me" assassinates an "us" with which it cannot identify.