Giovanni Menegalle

This chapter highlights Simondon’s relation to the intellectual politics of the Cold War. Focusing on the notion of ‘industrial society’ or ‘civilization’, and associated conceptions of the end of ideology and technological alienation, it situates him within a broader discursive matrix that emerged in the 1950s on both sides of the Atlantic as a macro-sociological alternative to Marxism, but that also had its roots in the ‘non-conformist’ thinking of the French interwar. It outlines two key currents of this discourse: a technocratic or ‘productivist’ strand, aligned with the political consensus of the Cold War and promoted in France by Raymond Aron, and a more ‘radical-popular’ strand critical of this technocratic consensus, represented by figures like the industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann and Catholic intellectuals around the journal Esprit such as Jean Lacroix and the economist François Perroux. While embracing the general framework of ‘industrial society’, Simondon eschews Aron’s politics of productivity, and instead – closer to the Catholic humanism of his teacher Lacroix – puts forward a post-ideological vision beyond both capitalism and communism in which production and culture would be oriented by the universal values of technicity.

This article presents Simondon’s psycho-biological thinking as a type of heterodox naturalism centring on the self-organizing activity of vital forms. Despite his critique of classic notions of form, notably Aristotelian hylomorphism, Simondon revises this concept through a critical expansion and synthesis of information theory and Gestalt psychology. In his lecture series Imagination and Invention (1965–6) in particular, he develops an account of psycho-biological activity as governed by what he calls ‘images’: relatively autonomous informational sub-systems that serve to regulate the relationship between organism and environment and that constitute the condition for creative action or invention. Focusing on his analysis of the individualization of perceptual objects, the article goes on to show that ‘forms’ for Simondon feature as emergent properties of quantum thresholds of ‘information’ within these systems. It also argues that such a conception offers a more promising alternative to both idealist philosophies of perception and materialist interpretations of deconstruction.

The chapter examines the phenomenological underpinnings of Politics of Friendship. By reconstructing some of the key arguments in Derrida’s early reading of Husserl, it shows how his later thinking of politics and friendship flows from the specific critique of presence developed in these formative works. This critique had been aimed against what Derrida had taken to be phenomenology’s metaphysical foundations, but it remained faithful to many of Husserl’s own positions, notably on the experiences of time and the other. The chapter thus offers an assessment of Derrida’s continuing ‘fidelity’ to Husserl in his later political thought.

This article explores the links between the philosophies of Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon. It highlights their shared emphasis on the difficult character of human life, framing this difficulty in terms of an existential encounter with problems and their resolutions. It shows how the notion of ‘problem’ which grounds both of their thinking presupposes a neo-vitalist conception of life as purposive behaviour, extended to forms of collective, technical and symbolic activity. The consequences of this conception for Canguilhem's and Simondon's engagement with questions of pedagogy, and the role of philosophical education in particular, are then examined. The article concludes by considering the ambiguous place of anxiety in their work and its significance for thinking about the conditions of knowledge and action. Following Canguilhem and Simondon, I argue for the importance of helping the human organism develop relatively autonomous interior and exterior milieus to cope with life's fundamental difficulty.

This article explains how Derrida’s notion of an originary or generalised metaphoricity can be understood in terms of the analyses presented in Voice and Phenomenon (1967) in response to Eugen Fink’s question of a ‘transcendental logos’ and of the paradoxical ontological status of phenomenological language. Tracing Fink’s impact on Derrida, as well as the key differences between them, the article shows that underlying Derrida’s reappropriation of the phenomenological concept of ‘life’ is an expansion of indicative relations—which in Husserl typify the function of signs within intersubjective communication and modes of judgement characterised by the non-presence of the intended object—to a general feature of the ‘living present’. While for Fink the indicative or metaphorical nature of the transcendental concept of ‘life’ does not threaten the founding unity it serves to name, for Derrida it is this very unity which is undermined by the proliferation of indication at the core of temporal experience.

This article offers a reconstruction of Derrida’s critique of Leibniz. It suggests that in attempting to fit Leibniz into his conception of the history of metaphysics and the all-embracing notion of logocentrism that underwrites it, Derrida presupposes two regimes of logocentrism: one subjective, the other theological. Subsumed into this second mode, Derrida casts Leibniz as a progenitor of structuralism and the new sciences and technologies of information in order to expose their logocentric foundations. However, in doing so, he ends up sidelining the aspect of Leibniz’s ideas that anticipates the specificity of the new epoch of writing he claims to historicise. The article goes on to argue that to grasp this specificity one must look beyond the “expressivist” schema of exterior representation, which Derrida draws from Husserl’s theory of meaning, and instead look to Leibniz’s own formal-combinatorial concept of expression, which exceeds Derrida’s critical framework.