Before his death in 1989, Gilbert Simondon wrote two major books consisting of his principal and complementary theses, both defended in 1958. The complementary thesis on the mode of existence of technical objects was published in 1958, while it was only in 1964 that sections of his principal thesis on individuation were made available to the public (and even then only the chapters dedicated to the regimes of physical and vital individuation, excluding those dealing with psychic and collective individuation.) Over (...) the course of his career, Simondon produced other major texts, but only in the form of unpublished courses or conference presentations published in poorly distributed journals. Some of these texts have .. (shrink)

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 .. (shrink)

This article argues that the most widely disseminated reading of Lafitte’s writings, which aligns his proposals for ‘mechanology’ with cybernetics, overlooks the broader ethical and social project to which he hoped his ideas would contribute. It is shown that the purpose of mechanology articulated by Lafitte was the development of an ethical relation to machines, a theme he developed in his later publications. It is argued that Lafitte’s position resonates with positions taken by contemporary works focused on the renewal of (...) a critical approach to the philosophy of technology, particularly those that seek to transform the relationship between humans and the natural world. (shrink)

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 .. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler interviewed by Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert and Mark Hayward.