American Book Review

I have been reading and writing about Gilbert Simondon for more than two decades and have, no doubt like many others, more than occasionally wondered when translations of his two major works would finally appear. Over the years, I had heard tell of disputes among publishers, of a certain reticence on the part of Simondon's heirs to move forward, and other, related bits of unverified information, and still I wondered why such fundamentally important and original texts continued to be inaccessible to English readers and writers. With others, I watched and waited as English language discussions of Simondon, from Brian Massumi's engagements in several essays during the 1990s to translations of key secondary texts like Muriel Combes's Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2013, originally published in French in 1999) appeared in English; as conferences and journal issues were dedicated to Simondon; and as evidence continued to mount that this was, indeed, a major thinker with whom English language scholars were eager to engage.

That time of our collective wonder has now arrived. Supplementing the 2017 English version of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (from the boutique press Univocal), an excellent translation by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove, the publication of the English version of Simondon's philosophical masterpiece, Individuation in Light of the Notions of Form and Information, means that English speakers will finally have access to the entirety of Simondon's two theses, still by any standard the fundament of his philosophical contribution. One can only applaud the publisher's decision to issue Simondon's masterpiece in two volumes, with volume 2 dedicated to the important supplementary texts associated with the project over the years and including Simondon's revolutionary discussion of information ("Form, Information, and Potentials"). The translator, Taylor Adkins, should be thanked for taking on this massive project and rendering Simondon's sometimes cumbersome prose in readable and lively English. Now that total access has been assured, the key question will be what such access—at this point in time—will bring. How will English readers and writers engage Simondon now that they can do so with full knowledge of the vast scope of his philosophical interrogation of individuation?

Before speculating on this question, let me mention some incidental details of the longer publication history of Simondon's work which have already exercised a decisive impact on his reception in France and beyond, and which can help us understand, by example, how such details can be consequential, and also can help guide our own contemporary turn (or return) to Simondon. Two details stand out in particular. First, Simondon's study of technical objects (METO) was published in 1958 and caused quite a stir in French intellectual circles at the time. When, subsequently, the first half of his major thesis (the thesis on individuation) was published in 1964, its concerns (physical and vital individuation) seemed out of sync with METO's exhuberant call for a new social contract between humans and machines. Other than the occasion for a few weighty though piecemeal appropriations (largely in the form of footnotes) by Gilles Deleuze in his own theses from the late 1960s, Simondon's ontogenesis of individuation largely fell on deaf ears. This situation remained the case until 1989, when the second half of Simondon's major thesis, the portion devoted to social and collective individuation, was finally published. This second publication event set off a new wave of interest in Simondon's philosophy, including an international conference in 1992 and the inauguration of the critical effort to think together, and perhaps indeed to reconcile, the two theses and the two lines of thinking they each inaugurate: on the one hand, a thinking of ontogenesis as individuation across levels from the physical to the collective (and including the technical); on the other, a thinking of human-technical cooperation that, while acknowledging...