Content area
Full text
“To Axiomatise” the Human Sciences
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 Over the course of his career, Simondon produced other major texts, but only in the form of unpublished courses or conference presentations published in poorly distributed journals.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 been published recently, while others will certainly also be made available in the near future.1 Needless to say, as a result of this publication history, Simondon’s readers have only had access to a limited portion of his work.
This situation explains the way that Simondon has been read by philosophers: first, as a thinker who proposed an original albeit perplexing approach to thinking about technique; later on, he was read as a thinker who proposed a critique of metaphysics and a new concept of the individual. Simondon is usually read as both a thinker of technique and the author of an ontology of the individual. Some have dedicated themselves to the problem of unifying these two theses, to the question of understanding why Simondon dedicated himself in the 1950s to researching the technical object and, more specifically, industrial machinery, while at the same time developing a metaphysics of the individual. Although at first glance these two areas seem quite distinct, should we understand the redefinition of the individual as a necessary stage that must be passed through in order to speak accurately of machines? Or should we read the philosophy of technique as a simple illustration of his general philosophy of the individual? Or, should we refuse to privilege either of these themes over the other? Whatever the approach to this question, it is quite rare to find those who have tried to interpret the entirety of Simondon’s work from the point of view of a confrontation between philosophy and the human sciences.
Reflecting on the state...