The Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon

Edited by Andrea Bardin, Marco Ferrari, Anaïs Nony, Gregorio Tenti

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An exhaustive introduction to Gilbert Simondon’s oeuvre

  • Covers all the different areas of Gilbert Simondon’s work
  • Gathers many established researchers with different perspectives and expertise
  • A landmark text for students of Simondon’s philosophy

The Edinburgh Companion to Gilbert Simondon displays both the internal coherence of Simondon’s work and its innovative potential in a variety of research fields. The complexity of his philosophical enterprise is rigorously interpreted and made available to researchers that are keen to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore new appropriations of his research. Structured in four distinct sections, the volume hosts a collection of essays penned by scholars who have been working on and through Simondon for several years across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, politics, law, media, architecture, economy, and ecology. Topics covered range from individuation, technology, imagination and the transindividual to metastability and more.

Editors’ Introduction: Simondon for the Twenty-first Century
Andrea Bardin, Marco Ferrari, Anaïs Nony and Gregorio Tenti

Amplification in Information Processes (1962)
Gilbert Simondon, translated by Benoit Dillet and Anaïs Nony

Publications by Gilbert Simondon

Part I Individuations
1. Simondon and Physical Individuation
Gus Hewlett
2. Simondon and the Individuation of Living Beings
Giovanni Carrozzini
3. Simondon, Psychology and Psychic Individuation
Lina Marcela Gil-Congote and Germán Vargas Guillén
4. Simondon and Technical Individuation (What is Called AI?)
Vincent Bontems
5. Simondon and Transindividual Individuation: Technicity and Affectivity in
Digital Networks
Juan Manuel Heredia and Pablo Rodríguez
6. Individuating Simondon: The Cold War and the Politics of ‘Industrial Society’
Giovanni Menegalle

Part II Themes
7. Simondon’s Metaphysics: Back to Physis
Clémentine Lessard
8. Simondon and Physics
Jean-Hugues Barthélémy
9. Biological Individuation and its Dynamism in Simondon
Isabella Builes Roldán and Jorge William Montoya Santamaría
10. Simondon and Form: A Pluralism of Nature
Gregorio Tenti
11. Simondon and Information: A Qualitative Topological Concept
Cécile Malaspina
12. Transducting Cybernetics: What Place for Cybernetics in Simondon’s Philosophy?
Marco Ferrari

Part III Interpretations
13. Simondon’s Magic Unity: The Ecosocial Evolution of Humanness and Technicity
Mark Hansen
14. Simondon: Invention and Image
Daniela Voss
15. Simondon: Technics and Politics
Xavier Guchet
16. The Optative: Simondon on Technical and Ethical Invention
Simon Mills
17. Simondon’s Politics of Human Nature: Techno-Symbolic Mediums and
Transindividual Invention
Andrea Bardin
18. Simondon’s Philosophy and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Anaïs Nony

Part IV Beyond Simondon
19. From Individuation to the Transindividual: Simondon through Althusser
Vittorio Morfino
20. Simondon and the Operative Scheme of Money
Diego Viana
21. Techno-Judicial Culture from Hans Kelsen to Bob Dylan: For a Simondonian
Jurisprudence
Gonzalo S. Aguirre
22. Architects Harnessing Artificial Intelligence: A Simondonian Perspective
Sébastien Bourbonnais and Maurane Paradis
23. Ecology, Technology and Culture after Simondon
Ludovic Duhem

Postface: The Life and Works of Gilbert Simondon
Nathalie Simondon

Notes on contributors
Index

Gilbert Simondon may be the most important philosopher to help our age turn towards more sustainable directions. His philosophy of technics and individuation provides the deepest antidote to the current fracking of our planet, societies and mind. This volume is the best possible introduction and guide through his complex and fascinating mode of thinking. It includes a translation of a brief original text that expresses the core of his approach in a nutshell. It digs deep into very diverse aspects of his inquiries, while synthetically surveying their broadest scope. It articulates a very original ecotechnological perspective that paves the way towards a reconciliation between technical developments, care for the environment, and enhancement of our common goods.
Yves Citton, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis
Andrea Bardin is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua. He works on the relationship between science and political thought, and political anthropology from early modernity to the present. He has written extensively on Gilbert Simondon and Thomas Hobbes, and is the author of Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Springer, 2015) and Hobbes’s Materialist Agenda: The Politics of Early Modern Science (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

Marco Ferrari is Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology at the University of Padua. His research focuses on the history of human, social, and political sciences, examined from a historical-epistemological perspective. He has written extensively on psychoanalysis and cybernetics and has translated works by notable authors such as Jean-Claude Milner, Philip Mirowski, and Gilbert Simondon into Italian. Additionally, he has edited the Italian editions of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Orthotes, forthcoming) and Alain Badiou’s works, L’être et l’événement and Logiques des mondes (Mimesis, 2018 and 2019) with Pierpaolo Cesaroni and Giovanni Minozzi. His most recent publications include Cibernetica e filosofia politica. Storia e critica di un ostacolo epistemologico (Orthotes, 2024), Filosofia, psicoanalisi, politica. Un laboratorio (Padova University Press, 2024) with Pierpaolo Cesaroni and Lorenzo Rustighi, and Leggere...o peggio. Il Seminario XIX di Jacques Lacan (Galaad, 2023).

Anaïs Nony is Senior Researcher at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study where she leads the 'AI & Life Matters' research stream and Associate Researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation in Paris. She studied theatre at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle and philosophy at the University of Minnesota, where she wrote her doctoral thesis under the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. Her book Performative Images: A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France (Amsterdam University Press, 2023) shows how digital media technologies are dramatically shaping our aesthetic, political and epistemological landscapes. Her essays have appeared in the journals Philosophy Today, Cultural Critique, Parallax, The Moving Image, La Deleuziana, Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts and Trópos: Journal of Hermeneutics and Philosophical Criticism, as well as in numerous edited collections. Since 2014, she is an editorial board member of the journal La Deleuziana.

Gregorio Tenti is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. His research interests include environmental aesthetics, philosophy of nature, and the history of modern German philosophy. His current project investigates how the eco-politics of extinction intertwines with language and writing. He is the author of Estetica e morfologia in Gilbert Simondon (Mimesis, 2020) and L’estetica di Friedrich Schleiermacher (ETS, 2023).

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