A Vindication of Simondon’s Political Anthropology

Abstract

This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements (the ‘three orders of consideration’) for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon’s way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’.

KEYWORDS:

• Simondon
• Balibar
• transindividual
• materialism
• philosophical anthropology

Notes

1 We would like to thank Juan Manuel Heredia (University of Buenos Aires) for his help with these notes on the transindividual.

2 In fact, after appearing both in Individuation [1958a] and in the conclusion of Du mode [1958b], the term ‘transindividual’ disappears in Simondon’s subsequent writings.

3 This field is relational and not species-specific: ‘it is not a matter of a nature, an essence, serving to found an anthropology: it is just a threshold which is crossed. Animals are better endowed for living than for thinking, human beings better for thinking than for living. Both of them live and think, normally or exceptionally’ [Simondon 1958a: 165].

4 Simondon originally published only the first part of his Individuation with the title L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique [Simondon 1964].

5 According to Simondon culture stabilises the system by ‘MANIPULATING in some way the symbols representing such a technical gesture or such a biological drive’ [1958a: 504].

6 The only exception to this general rule is perhaps the small text Note complémentaire (ca 1958), in Simondon [1958a: 503–27].