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  • IntroductionCatching Up With Simondon
  • Mark Hayward (bio) and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (bio)

As a young philosopher Gilbert Simondon identified technology as a site of obsession, anxiety, and misunderstanding within contemporary culture. “Culture,” he wrote, “has become a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics” (Mode of Existence, 1). According to Simondon, technique and technology ubiquitously structured thought and practice, especially in the contemporary world, yet philosophical tradition relegated the technical to an obscure zone of conceptual neglect. Simondon took the intimacy and obscurity that surrounded our relation to the technical as a clarion call to philosophy. Over the course of thirty-odd years of philosophizing, he examined the relation of the technical to the cultural and elaborated a quasi-technicist account of ontology itself. Yet while he made definite progress toward re-acquainting the world of culture with the world of technics, his own philosophy found a less fortunate fate; even as his theses were quietly disseminated throughout structuralist and poststructuralist thought, and were covertly conveyed into Anglophone thought, his name and his work remained largely unknown and misunderstood.

At the time of his death in 1989 it appeared that his philosophy and its association with technics would become a victim of that same stigma-tization he spent his entire career challenging. After Simondon’s death, a trickle and then a flood of works deluged whatever defense system had been constructed to protect (French) philosophy from his peculiar and often subversive work. Re-publications of old texts, first printings of unpublished texts, and waves of secondary tributes and interpretations spread across the French philosophical scene.1 Italian, German, and Spanish translations followed. His role as an influence upon Gilles Deleuze and as a predecessor of actor-network theory was acknowledged, while his promise for new materialisms and process philosophy became an object of debate.2 Yet even today his work remains largely unknown, and the long-promised translations of his major texts continue to languish in prominent university publishing houses. For these reasons, we look upon this collection of essays not so much as an introduction, but as an [End Page 3] attempt to catch up with a thinker we regard as both central and obscure in contemporary theory debates.

This essay will outline the two major areas of Simondon’s thought, which loosely correspond to his account of the technical object in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques and his reconceptualization of ontology as onto-genesis, developed in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. We show that Simondon’s continuing relevance is grounded in his simultaneous engagement with both technique and individuation. We do this by exploring Simondon’s relationship with cybernetics, here interpreted as the seminal moment for the understanding of technique and ontology present across his work. The essays that follow expand on the intersection between his process-oriented ontology of individuation and the philosophy of technology in surprising and, at moments, contradictory ways. By contrasting the approach taken in this issue to the philosophy of technics found in the work of Bernard Stiegler (the primary interlocutor for the majority of contributors in their engagement with Simondon), we advocate for a more open approach to Simondon’s philosophy that is adequate to the task of philosophy in the contemporary moment. In drawing the reader closer to the complexity and ambiguity of Simondon’s thought, we hope this collection will also initiate a new round of debate among Anglophone readers.

1. Simondon in the Context of Post-War France

Simondon belonged to an eminent generation of French thinkers who came of age during World War II and its aftermath. Much ink has been devoted to the significance of the German occupation and German philosophy on “French theory” and poststructuralism.3 These debates forestalled investigation into another set of influences, arguably more decisive: namely, the postwar reconstruction of the French economy according to industrial, technological, and economic models associated with American enterprise. Kristin Ross writes of this transformation:

The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things modernization...

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