En este trabajo realizo un examen crítico del reciente libro de Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo sobre la crítica de Aristóteles a la teoría platónica de las Ideas. El libro de Di Camillo es un trabajo muy serio cuya lectura recomiendo ampliamente. Sin embargo, considero que cuatro de las principales tesis que la autora defiende tienen varias dificultades y mi objetivo aquí es presentar argumentos detallados en contra de ellas: la interpretación de la distinción entre argumentos más y menos rigurosos del (...) tratado Sobre las Ideas; la tesis de que la separación es el blanco esencial de las críticas aristotélicas a las Ideas; la interpretación de las opciones que Platón tiene para responder al argumento del tercer hombre, y la tesis de que la separación de las Ideas debe entenderse como homonimia. In this paper I examine Silvana Gabriela Di Camillo's recent book on Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's theory of Ideas. Di Camillo's book is a very serious work that I highly recommend. Nevertheless, I consider that four of the main theses that the author defends face several difficulties and my aim here is to offer detailed arguments against them: the interpretation of the distinction between more and less accurate arguments of the treatise On Ideas; the thesis that separation is the essential target of Aristotle's criticisms against Plato's Ideas; the interpretation of the options available to Plato to reply to the third man argument; and the thesis that the separation of Ideas should be understood as homonymy. (shrink)

An accessible yet rigorous introduction to the influential French philosopher Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation. Gilbert Simondon, one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, published only three works: L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique and L'individuation psychique et collective, both drawn from his doctoral thesis, and Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. It is this last work that brought Simondon into the public eye; as a consequence, he has been considered a “thinker of technics” and cited often in pedagogical reports (...) on teaching technology. Yet Simondon was a philosopher whose ambitions lay in an in-depth renewal of ontology as a process of individuation—that is, how individuals come into being, persist, and transform. In this accessible yet rigorous introduction to Simondon's work, Muriel Combes helps to bridge the gap between Simondon's account of technics and his philosophy of individuation. Some thinkers have found inspiration in Simondon's philosophy of individuation, notably Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Combes's account, first published in French in 1999, is one of the only studies of Simondon to appear in English. Combes breaks new ground, exploring an ethics and politics adequate to Simondon's hypothesis of preindividual being, considering through the lens of transindividual philosophy what form a nonservile relation to technology might take today. Her book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Simondon's work. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that affect is collective. By emphasizing that affect does not rest in the individual, a theory of affect is foregrounded that is in conversation with Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation, and, more specifically, the concept of the preindividual. The preindividual, in Simondon, is aligned with what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘a life’ — the force of living beyond life itself. This force of life, I suggest, is the resonant field of life’s outside, the more-than (...) of human life where the body is but one verging surface on the field of experience, where the body is always more than One. The more-than-Oneness of the body is always already collective, cutting as it does between life-welling and life-living. It is here, at this virtual-actual juncture, that the force of affect resides, activating the body-becoming. (shrink)

It should now be recognized that codes are central to life and to understanding its more complex forms, including human culture. Recognizing the ‘conventional’ nature of codes provides solid grounds for rejecting efforts to reduce life to biochemistry and justifies according a place to semantics in life. The question I want to consider is whether this is enough. Focussing on Eigen’s paradox of how a complex code could originate, I will argue that along with Barbieri’s efforts to account for the (...) origins of life based on the ribosome and then to account for the refined codes through a process of ambiguity reduction, something more is required. Barbieri has not provided an adequate account of emergence, or the basis for providing such an account. I will argue that Stanley Salthe has clarified to some extent the nature of emergence by conceptualizing it as the interpolation of new enabling constraints. Clearly, codes can be seen as enabling constraints. How this actually happens, though, is still not explained. Stuart Kauffman has grappled with this issue and shown that it radically challenges the assumptions of mainstream science going back to Newton. He has attempted to reintroduce real possibilities or potentialities into his ontology, and argued that radically new developments in nature are associated with realizing adjacent possibles. This is still not adequate. What is also involved, I will suggest, utilizing concepts developed by the French natural philosopher Gilbert Simondon, is ‘transduction’ as part of ‘ontogenesis’ of individuals in a process of ‘individuation’, that is, the emergence of ‘individuals’ from preindividual fields or milieux. (shrink)

This paper proposes Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of individuation as an overarching framework for multilevel semiosis. What renders this theory suitable for this role is the fact that it shares a significant part of its heritage with biosemiotics, which provides compatibility between them. Unlike many philosophers who have worked on individuation, Simondon envisages a general process of individuation that starts with a metastable preindividual. This process ultimately constitutes an axiomatisation of ontogenesis and manifests itself in three basic modes: physical, (...) vital and psycho-collective. In any of these modes a transductive operation is at work resolving the disparities of the preindividual whereby new structures emerge. Depending on the mode of individuation, the emerging structures can create new disparities that ask for further individuation. Simondon refers to such conversion of structure to operation and vice versa as allagmatics. He also extends his theory to scientific methodology establishing a healthy balance between reductionism and holism. His theory can be used to amend Peircean metaphysics to improve its compatibility with contemporary scientific discourse. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a Simondonian interpretation of quantum mechanics taking as a standpoint his “preindividual hypothesis” in order to consider the problem of contextuality. We will examine whether the epistemological obstacle produced by the notion of entity can be bypassed by specifying, according to Simondon and the Kochen-Specker Theorem, the mode of existence of quantum potentialities.

The article explores the proximity between Simondon’s philosophical project and phenomenology through his relation to Merleau-Ponty. Three concepts that link the two philosophers are examined: genesis, relation, and Simondon’s preindividual, which are shown to constitute an attempt to answer questions Merleau-Ponty was addressing in his later work. The article shows how Simondon’s argument for ontogenesis rather than ontology is related to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project, which in turn originates in the latter’s reading of Husserl, particularly the interest in genetic phenomenology (...) expressed as early as the Phenomenology of Perception. It then shows that the radical notion of relation employed by Simondon responds to problems Merleau-Ponty had encountered in thinking the corps propre and the chiasm. The paper then discusses the link between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the flesh and Simondon’s concept of preindividual. By confronting these two bodies of work, the article suggests that phenomenology is an important starting point for Simondon. (shrink)

Gilbert Simondon, one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, published only three works: L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique and L'individuation psychique et collective, both drawn from his doctoral thesis, and _Du mode d'existence des objets techniques_. It is this last work that brought Simondon into the public eye; as a consequence, he has been considered a "thinker of technics" and cited often in pedagogical reports on teaching technology. Yet Simondon was a philosopher whose ambitions lay in an in-depth renewal (...) of ontology as a process of individuation--that is, how individuals come into being, persist, and transform. In this accessible yet rigorous introduction to Simondon's work, Muriel Combes helps to bridge the gap between Simondon's account of technics and his philosophy of individuation. Some thinkers have found inspiration in Simondon's philosophy of individuation, notably Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Combes's account, first published in French in 1999, is one of the only studies of Simondon to appear in English. Combes breaks new ground, exploring an ethics and politics adequate to Simondon's hypothesis of preindividual being, considering through the lens of transindividual philosophy what form a nonservile relation to technology might take today. Her book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Simondon's work. (shrink)

Hasta ahora, las discusiones sobre el multiculturalismo se han presentado como una revisión progresista de los límites del liberalismo en cuanto a políticas de inclusión y reconocimiento. Este artículo plantea que la recepción del multiculturalismo en Latinoamérica, si no quiere ser puramente procedimental, puede plantearse como una deconstrucción de los conceptos de Sujeto y Estado. Para ello hemos adoptado el punto de vista de comunidades étnicamente diferenciadas (que Deleuze y Guattari han categorizado como máquinas territoriales), de modo que sus relaciones (...) de poder y sus procesos de subjetivación puedan ser vistos como expresión de lo intraestatal y lo preindividual, respectivamente. Aunque esta diferencia de perspectiva se plantea, básicamente, como un diferendo entre teorías, al final se sugieren criterios para un debate más amplio sobre las relaciones entre Estado y capitalismo alrededor de las condiciones de existencia de las sociedades premodernas. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if (...) it is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)

Simondon and Deleuze are the philosophers of intensity: thinking the intensity of being rather than its formal a priori is for them the path to the “true transcendental.” The true transcendental, according to these two post-Kantian philosophers, would be the conditions of real experience, which are not dictated by a reason anticipating the relation to phenomena, but by individuation. This reversal priviledges the process of openness to difference as a production of the unexpected for knowledge. To be individuated, for Simondon (...) as for Deleuze, is to learn to overcome a certain logic of representation, based on the principle of identity, by giving precedence to singularities: the individual is not only a thinking substance cutting up the world according to its categories, but also an active nature facing the unknown. But one might ask how the individual can be identified and develop if it is constituted, at its expense, from intensive relations and experiences that it cannot synthesize in the understanding. Does individuation ultimately make sense? Simondon and Deleuze agree that consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification: this possibility for consciousness of unifi ng the diversity of experience, of maintaining a unity in plurality, refers to the preindividual, which defines in Simondon a field of ontological freedom, that is, of multiple individuations enriching the Self. For Deleuze, in his careful reading of Simondon, it is the place of the emission of singularities in the process of intensive individuation. In both cases, it is a question of defining a new form of subjectivity, closer to the realities of experience, of what we might call the transductive forms of sensibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to elucidate a philosophical foundation of a post-labor paradigm through the transindividual technical-psychic-collective culture based on Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. Simondon predicts that the problem of the alienation of labor due to mechanical industrialization can be overcome through the spread of post-industrial technical culture based on both technical mentality and information technology. In contrast, Stiegler claims that, along with information networks, hyper-industrialization rather than post-industrialization has arrived and that, in order to recover human values in (...) a machine empire devoid of caring, the strengthening of the ability for non-automation based on automaticity is necessary. However, Simondon’s technical culture beyond labor implies a posthumanistic vision in that it assumes the capacity of technology to mediate between the preindividual and the transindividual beyond technical instrumentalism, which is anthropocentric, and opens up transductive relationships among humans and non-humans. I will argue that Stiegler’s urgent proposal that seeks to save human life from the control of a techno-capital system, such as the reinvention of work transcending employment, must be concretized within the Simondonian posthumanistic project. RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é elucidar a base filosófica do paradigma pós-laboral por meio da cultura técnica-psiquica-coletiva transindividual de Gilbert Simondon e Bernard Stiegler. Simondon prediz que o problema da alienação laboral surgido da industrialização mecânica pode ser vencido mediante a expansão da cultura técnica pós-industrial baseada tanto na mentalidade técnica quanto na tecnologia da informação. Em contraste, Stiegler afirma que, além das redes de informação, a hiper-industrialização se estabeleceu para além da pós-industrialização e que, para recuperar valores humanos em um império das máquinas sem carinho, é necessário o fortalecimento da capacidade de não automação baseada em automatismo. Entretanto, a cultura técnica além do trabalho de Simondon implica uma visão pós-humanista em que se presume a capacidade da tecnologia em mediar entre o pré-individual e o transindividual, que é antropocêntrico, e inaugura relações transdutivas entre humanos e não humanos. Defendo que a proposta urgente de Stiegler busca salvar a vida humana do controle de um sistema de tecno-capital, como a reinvenção do trabalho transcendendo o emprego deve ser concretizada dentro do projeto pós-humanista simondoniano. (shrink)

In his analysis of memory, Henri Bergson introduces the key concept of ‘virtuality’, understood as a non- actual reality, an unpredictable and pre-human élan vital. Several years later, the virtual will play a key role in the way that Gilles Deleuze tries to conceive the notion of a ‘plane of immanence’, that is, a whole that guides an inexhaustible process of actualisation. Deleuze, however, refers not only to Bergson but to Gilbert Simondon and to his concept of ‘preindividual field’, (...) which corresponds to a metastable state, full of potential energy, from which a structured process can arise. This article undertakes an analysis of the different theoretical pathways leading to the concept of the virtual in Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. It will investigate the transformations of this concept by focusing on the memory of the present individuated by Bergson, then applied to the cinema of the time- image by Deleuze, and on the figure of the crystal as an emblematic materialisation of the virtual, deeply present in the philosophy of both Deleuze and Simondon. The intention is to show – apart from the inevitable differences ‒ the significant continuity between these three authors, who share a common attempt to build an affirmative ontology of life. Combined Bergsonian and Simondonian influences lead in Deleuze to a metaphysics of becoming, where virtuality is always on the point of actualising itself in percepts, affects and concepts. (shrink)

This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains (...) and re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines Aby Warburg’s enterprise as an anamnesis, as a question of memory in exosomatisation in relation to the pharmakon. Here the pharmakon is considered as a ‘support’ in relation to questions of ‘care’ and as a therapeutics, prescribing the way by which such a pharmakon can become or remain curative, rather than toxic. The discussion looks at how the pharmakon makes possible the transmission of the condition of knowledge, that is: as a preindividual milieu that contains, retains (...) and re-activates traumatypes, providing opportunities for bifurcations in the future. Warburg’s employment of photographic montage is considered as an exploration of pharmacological possibilities inherent to tertiary retentions and providing the condition for revenance. Such revenance is proposed as the return of the serpent in absentia: as a new form of tertiary retention that today appears as digital tertiary retention. At stake is the libido’s economisation, interactivity and algorithmic governmentality all of which effect the faculties for dreaming, imagination and knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if (...) it is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)

Hasta ahora, las discusiones sobre el multiculturalismo se han presentado como una revisión progresista de los límites del liberalismo en cuanto a políticas de inclusión y reconocimiento. Este artículo plantea que la recepción del multiculturalismo en Latinoamérica, si no quiere ser puramente procedimental, puede plantearse como una deconstrucción de los conceptos de Sujeto y Estado. Para ello hemos adoptado el punto de vista de comunidades étnicamente diferenciadas (que Deleuze y Guattari han categorizado como máquinas territoriales), de modo que sus relaciones (...) de poder y sus procesos de subjetivación puedan ser vistos como expresión de lo intraestatal y lo preindividual, respectivamente. Aunque esta diferencia de perspectiva se plantea, básicamente, como un diferendo entre teorías, al final se sugieren criterios para un debate más amplio sobre las relaciones entre Estado y capitalismo alrededor de las condiciones de existencia de las sociedades premodernas. (shrink)

Rastreamos un concepto de “percepción etológica” en Gilbert Simondon asociado a una “etología metaestable” que podría desarticular la diferenciación entre los regímenes de individuación físico y viviente establecida claramente por el filósofo francés en La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma e información. Nos situamos en el curso El hombre y el objeto (1974-1975), donde aparece una idea de “objeto-organismo” que desencadena dicha problemática. En un segundo momento, indagamos sobre el fundamento preplatónico de lo “preindividual” en (...) La individuación y el énfasis en la noción de apeiron (lo “ilimitado”), pues ello le permite a Simondon plantear una “carga de naturaleza” que se mantiene en las entidades individuadas como resto potencial, lo cual proponemos como clave para interpretar la dimensión “etológica” mencionada en relación con la percepción. Concluimos con algunas proyecciones que profundizan en esta posibilidad a propósito de Protágoras y del “materialismo especulativo” de Quentin Meillassoux. (shrink)

Si la notion de « préindividuel » fait figure de nouveauté lexicale par rapport au vocabulaire de la métaphysique traditionnelle, et se présente ainsi comme une idée « neuve » à partir de laquelle Gilbert Simondon prétend rompre avec toute une tradition de pensée de l’individuation, celui-ci se réfère pourtant à plusieurs reprises pour en expliciter le sens aux notions d’apeiron et de phusis présocratiques. Cependant, c’est en s’appuyant également sur la notion de « métastabilité », qu’il emprunte à la (...) thermodynamique des états loin de l’équilibre, que Simondon confère à l’idée de « préindividuel » une signification originale. Il s’agira d’abord de comprendre comment s’inscrit dans la construction de l’hypothèse simondonienne ce retour à la pensée présocratique, avant de nous interroger sur les fondements de la méthode qui consiste à « actualiser » l’idée d’un état de l’être antérieur à toute forme individuée en empruntant des notions et des paradigmes aux sciences positives qui cherchent à théoriser les processus de transformation et de changement d’état de systèmes. Le but de cet examen est de questionner la légitimité d’une démarche analogique qui prétend faire bénéficier la réflexion métaphysique du développement des sciences, et de montrer dans quelle mesure la méthode « transductive » de construction de l’idée de préindividuel échappe au double écueil qui consisterait soit à s’en tenir à un usage métaphorique des schèmes de pensée scientifiques, soit à verser dans une forme de positivisme réductionniste. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analiza la relación problemática que el filósofo francés Gilbert Simondon establece entre la materia inerte y la materia viviente en el marco de su teoría de la individuación. Se intenta evidenciar que, pese a los esfuerzos teóricos de Simondon por fundar la naturaleza de la vida en el orden de los fenómenos inorgánicos o físico-químicos, los procesos de individuación vital dan lugar a modos de funcionamiento, estructuras y dinamismos que no tienen precedentes en la materia (...) inanimada, hecho que autoriza una definición de la vida como pura diferencia respecto de sí. (shrink)