Abstract
Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists, despite the fact that he is renowned as a philosopher of technics – author of Of the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects – who also elaborated a general theory of complex systems in Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. A group of scholars has developed Gilles Deleuze’s early suggestion that Simondon’s social ontology might offer the basis for a re-theorisation of radical democracy. Others, following Herbert Marcuse, have instead focused on Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between technology and society. However, only a joint study of Simondon’s two major works can reveal their implicit political stakes. As I will argue, Simondon’s anti-Aristotelianism and his anti-Heideggerian understanding of the Greek origins of philosophy, allow us to conceive philosophical thought as a ‘tradition of invention’, that is, a pedagogical technē endowed with the political task of maintaining the openness of the social system and allowing normative invention to emerge from within.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this work were presented in 2015 and 2016 at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I would like to thank all the convenors and the audience members, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their questions, suggestions and corrections. I am greatly indebted to colleagues from the University of Padua, Brunel University and the Centre international des études simondoniennes for the stimulating exchanges during these years, and I am especially grateful to Giovanni Menegalle for his extensive comments on and careful criticisms of the present article.
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Bardin, A. Philosophy as political technē: The tradition of invention in Simondon’s political thought. Contemp Polit Theory 17, 417–436 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-018-0210-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-018-0210-y