Bernard vivo. Dall’ominizzazione permanente ai perdividui

There is no technique but techniques, and philosophical discourses operate as applications of the most relevant of them: writing. After the twelfth-century scribal revolution and the fifteenth-century reinvention of the printing press, the current digital transformation of writing is bestowing on us again that which Bernard called a (technical) prosthesis. Building upon Leroy-Gourhan’s construction of the co-evolution of human bodies and tools, Bernard underlined the paradox of emerging human techniques as an exteriorization with no prior interiority. While writing implic-itly preceded and inspired the Platonic invention of a unified and hierarchical psykhē, Plato ex-plicitly construed it as an improper by-product of the activity of the psykhē itself. Yet writing was not just added as a prosthesis but it rather acted as an enthesis, that is, a grafting intervention. It was incorporated within the human sphere of action, just like any other human and nonhuman participant to subjectivation processes. Drawing on Simondon, Bernard called these processes transindividuation. I propose instead the term perdividuation, as a reminder that we all are, as it were, an interiority which is always already traversed by exteriority. Only the technique of writing and its fundamental side effects, namely, time and space, produced the alleged closure of indi-vidual identity. On the contrary, by constructing ourselves as always already permeated perdivid-uals we may attempt at reorienting the ongoing process of hominization by questioning our sep-aration from nonhumans and other humans.