“Un avènement analogue”. Philosophy and “Its” Objects

Philosophy, for Gilbert Simondon, involves and requires an “exceptional treatment of objects” constitutive of its definition and practice. This contribution, based in part on early texts, focuses on the role and status of objects in Simondon’s philosophy and vice-versa, on the role and status of philosophy regarding the objects. For Simondon, indeed, goes even as far as defining philosophical reflection as a moment of the becoming of the object, an “analogous advent” by which the object becomes “more itself that it was before.” Objects would need philosophical reflexivity and, conversely, philosophy would need objects in order to be “truly reflexive.” But what is meant by “objects” here? Whereas Simondon is generally regarded as a thinker of the technical object, early texts highlight that the centrality of objects goes far beyond the paradigmatic case of technics (and of philosophy of technology). Objects, for Simondon, may as well be philosophy’s own concepts, systems, and lineages, so that thinking the relationship of philosophy to “its” objects reveal inseparable from thinking the nature of philosophy itself as well as that of the history of philosophy. If, indeed, philosophy is to be defined as the individuation of thought, then history of philosophy corresponds to the transindividuation of reflexive systems. The practice of the history of philosophy is therefore not that of an infinite commentary, but a research to establish commensurability between different schemes of thinking. Surprisingly so, reappraising the centrality of objects in Simondon’s lead to reconsider his contribution to the history of philosophy and the originality of his practice of the latter. It is therefore in the light of objects that one can answer the question “what is philosophy” for Simondon, and understand the nature of his philosophical commitment by way of three refusals and three correlative affirmations: 1) the refusal of “philosophy for its own sake” and the affirmation of a reflexive philosophy versus a speculative one; 2) the refusal of any “philosophy for” and the affirmation of philosophy as a direct and free research versus an activist philosophy already committed to a predetermined cause; 3) the refusal of any “philosophy of” or applied philosophy in favor of a participatory or implied philosophy that participates in the individuation of objects, and beyond, in the transindividuation of culture.