SubStance

1. The “double fundamental problem” in Stiegler’s relation to Simondon

In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stiegler’s work, this Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental philosophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major problems we’ve inherited from the continental philosophical tradition.

The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stiegler’s debate with Simondon is the following:

A) On the one hand, how are we to interpret Simondon’s most fundamental thought, namely his thesis that knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge? This thesis is the properly Simondonian way of “overcoming” [dépassement] the opposition between subject and object. This overcoming is, of course, something that has been sought after by all the great continental thinkers from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stiegler’s Technics and Time.¹ This follows a trajectory that also passes through Fichte, Husserl, and then Heidegger/Derrida, but also through Schelling, Bergson and Simondon/Deleuze.² Stiegler’s most fundamental thought develops the encounter between Heidegger and Simondon. The opposition between subject and object, whose overcoming is sought by continental philosophy (which is always in search of itself in its difference from science) is the definitive ground of all the classical oppositions we need to subvert, oppositions initially combated by Kant: between empiricism and innateness, idealism and realism, dogmatism and skepticism. In posing his fundamental thesis about knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge, Simondon has proposed a new way of overcoming the subject/object opposition whose interpretation will turn out to be problematic. [End Page 60]

B) On the other hand—and this is the second fundamental problem raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondon—what is the status of the reality that Simondon calls “pre-individual”? What is the status of this reality from which all individuation proceeds, and whose existence Simondon hypothesizes in order to make sense of the genesis of each individual—physical, vital or psycho-social? I will show that there is an intimate connection between this second fundamental philosophical problem and the first, and that this is why Stiegler is in debate with Simondon on two aspects of what, in the end, will turn out to be what I call “the double fundamental philosophical problem.”

But before we get to that, the first part of this essay will recall some of the general trends in Simondon’s thought that seem in need of defense and development.

2. Overview of Simondon’s main propositions

In Simondon, the absolutely central notion of individuation does not refer to a differentiating individualization—as is the case with Jung, in whose theoretical work individuation is a central notion as well—but rather to a physical, vital, or psycho-social genesis. One should also remember that this latter “regime of individuation,” to borrow Simondon’s phrase, is also called the “transindividual” when it is a question of foregrounding the fact that the “collective” is “taken as axiomatic in resolving the psychic problem” (L’Individuation psychique, 22). The technical object is defined in Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques as “the support and the symbol of that relation that we would like to call ‘transindividual’. … Serving as intermediary, the technical object thus creates an inter-human relation that is the model of transindividuality” (247–248). We are therefore talking about a genetic ontology in Simondon—genetic in the sense of genesis—placed in the service of a new Encyclopedism³ that revolves around the two main propositions.

The first is that Simondon wants to unify the sciences in order to then refound the human sciences more specifically on the basis of the continuity between vital individuation and...