Bryan Norton

German Romanticism plays a central role in Gilbert Simondon's writings. In _Mode of Existence_, Simondon draws on Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann to illustrate the tragic consequences of failing to attend to the individuated relationship between landscape and tool. While Novalis is only mentioned in passing, his work presents the most radical form of what might be called Romantic mechanology. With the stated aim of achieving the ideal of perpetual motion, Novalis's poetics highlight the central role literary experimentation plays in technological thinking, revealing how Simondon may shed new light on several key aspects of romantic poetry and philosophy.

This interview with Yuk Hui explores the philosopher’s examination of the relationship between technology, culture, and politics in his recent Post-Europe and Machine Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking. While discussing these two books at length in the context of Hui’s larger philosophical project, the interview also examines Hui’s analysis of the unfolding relations between technology and political form over the course of modernity. This process, for Hui, must now yield a thinking that is planetary if political philosophy is to meet the challenges of today.