A vindication of Simondon’s political anthropology

Our 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’

Quantum fluctuations in atomic Josephson junctions: the role of dimensionality

We investigate the role of quantum fluctuations in the dynamics of a bosonic Josephson junction in $D$ spatial dimensions, by using beyond mean-field Gaussian corrections. We derive some key dynamical properties in a systematic way for $D=3, 2, 1$. In particular, we compute the Josephson frequency in the regime of low population imbalance. We also obtain the critical strength of the macroscopic quantum self-trapping. Our results show that quantum corrections increase the Josephson frequency in spatial dimensions $D=2$ and $D=3$, but they decrease it in the $D=1$ case. The critical strength of macroscopic quantum self-trapping is instead reduced by quantum fluctuations in $D=2$ and $D=3$ cases, while it is enhanced in the $D=1$ configuration.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Sobre a tecnicidade da filosofia: a obra de Simondon à luz da Note complémentaire

Este artigo busca problematizar a existência -- não explícita -- de uma unidade no pensamento quanto ao aspecto político da filosofia para Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989). Esta possibilidade reside, principalmente, no texto Note Complémentaire, que foi escrito entre as hoje consideradas duas grandes obras do filósofo francês: Du mode d'existence des objets techniques e L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information, e que opera como uma espécie de fio condutor ou conector desses dois livros. Através do conceito de cultura implicado na obra simondoniana, nota-se de que modo a cultura se constitui como processos de individuação transindividual, aparato regulador do sistema social, composto tanto por fatores biológicos quanto técnicos. Finalmente, observa-se como o autor da Note Complémentaire reflete sobre a posição da filosofia como tradição e potência, necessariamente política, de invenção

Sur la technicité de la philosophie : l’oeuvre de Simondon à la lumière de la note complémentaire

This paper takes the understanding of philosophy as political techne to be at the core of Gilbert Simondon’s thought. This is shown against the background of the Note Complémentaire, a short text written at the same time as his two main works Du mode d’existence des objets techniques and L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. An analysis of the specific function played by technics within culture in Simondon’s thought helps draw a line that connects the two books. Culture is conceived as a regulatory apparatus of social systems, made of structures and processes of transindividual individuation recurrently made metastable by both biological and technical factors. In my conclusions, I deal with Simondon’s understanding of philosophy as a pedagogical tradition, that is a subset of culture carrying and spreading the schemas of political invention it has developed from technics since its pre-Socratic origins

Simondon contra new materialism: Political anthropology reloaded

This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epistemologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation

Liberty and representation in Hobbes: A materialist theory of conatus

The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes’s political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philosophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and explains them against the background of Hobbes’s elaboration of a deterministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on ideas of individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance. The second section explains why the concept of representation that Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be interpreted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes’s materialist theory of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination

From life to matter: Simondon’s political epistemology

Simondon’s philosophy of individuation attacks the opposition between liberty and necessity, a key institution of the supposed ontological ‘difference’ between the human being and nature in most of modern political thought. Distinguishing between ontological and epistemological determinism, I will show the political significance of Simondon’s refusal to either reduce human beings to natural determinism or save their alleged metaphysical nature. Simondon inherits part of his critical programme and a good deal of the tools he uses to construct it from Georges Canguilhem. My reading starts from an enigma concerning quantum mechanics the former jotted down on paper while involved in the Second World War antifascist struggle. I will suggest that Simondon’s philosophy exposes the two equally anthropomorphic understandings of nature shared by fascism and technocracy. This will allow me to explain the ideological function voluntarism and human engineering can jointly perform by reinforcing and exploiting the apparent opposition between liberty and necessity, on the basis of their complementary teleological justification for political action

Mechanicism as science and ideology: Hobbe's epistemological revolution in civil science

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonIn the seventeenth century a new science of motion emerged that later developed into what we call today classical mechanics. The epistemology of early modern mechanics was split between technical experimentation and mathematical formalisation. ‘Mechanicism’, Cartesianism in primis, was a philosophical project to both preserve the theoretical and technical efficacy of this science and integrate it into a new world picture. In this historical context mechanical philosophy therefore played a double role. On the one hand it was part of a revolutionary event opening new frontiers for materialist thought. On the other hand, as a world picture, it originated a new ideological framework for metaphysical dualism. This thesis uses this historical and philosophical background to radically reconsider the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. During the 1640s Hobbes’s scientia civilis progressively incorporated the dualistic epistemology of Descartes’s mechanicism into materialist philosophy by privileging one of the two structural features of modern science: the tendency towards ‘deduction’ rather than experimentation. This philosophical gesture, simultaneously epistemological and ideological, had considerable political consequences. For this reason Hobbes’s political theory will be read as an ideological response to the non-geometrical and non-mechanical functioning of ‘matter’, including ‘human matter’, evidenced by the threatening experimental practices carried on during the first half of the seventeenth century in both the Galilean science of nature and the English Civil War. My wider hypothesis is that this profoundly idealistic agenda still informs our understanding of nature and of the body politic. It reduces the open method of science to the outdated metaphysical picture of it provided by Descartes, and suffocates politics itself by neutralising the emergence of political conflict and experimentation, labelling them as not only inessential but also dangerous to the body politic. On the contrary, philosophical materialism invites us to understand the self-organising tendency of matter as an undeniable risk implicit in the functioning of all systems, the social system included

Del hombre a la materia : Simondon a la luz de Marx y Althusser

Una tentativa de aproximación conjunta de Simondon, Marx y Althusser se ve enfrentada con tres pensadores cuya distancia es puesta en evidencia por los pesos respectivos de sus historiografías filosóficas: puede ser que un día, cuando podamos comprender el pensamiento de Simondon a partir de sus efectos, podamos hablar de él en plural, así como hoy debemos elegir entre varios Marx y varios Althusser. Entonces hablaremos del Marx al que Simondon se refiere de manera polémica, en particular a través de su crítica del paradigma del trabajo, al cual le opone su nuevo paradigma, anti-sustancialista y anti-determinista. Este paradigma, que estaba lejos de las visiones oficiales de los partidos comunistas, era en medida compartido por Marx y Althusser. A los fines de aclarar esto, nos referiremos brevemente a diferentes aspectos de la filosofía de Althusser que, aunque fueron elaborados en otras matrices teóricas y políticas, suenan familiares a los de Simondon. Luego discutiremos –desde un punto de vista marxiano– los límites de la aproximación política simondoniana, para finalmente indicar, dentro de su epistemología, la fuente de una posible filosofía política materialista. Una crítica de la antropología de la libertad y la determinación, con la que Althusser trata nivel histórico, parece abrir un camino común. Este no es un camino que Simondon habría aceptado calificar como “materialista”, pero nos permite comprender aquello que su filosofía nos autoriza a pensar: de hecho, el propósito de nuestra intervención es sugerir que la “epistemología política” de Simondon nos lleva a responder a los presupuestos teóricos sobre los que se ha desarrollado el patrón dominante de la ciencia política moderna