From Life to Signification

Abstract

Simondon does not intend to ground his project on any definition of what the living is, in order to classify a structure as organic or non-organic. He rather tries to find a criterion for classifying the different processes, consequently understanding them as possibly coexisting within the same individual conceived as a phase-shift system. Consequently, psychic processes cannot be understood in exclusively biological terms, since they take place during processes of psychic and simultaneously collective individuation. Simondon in fact shifts the focus from the individual to the organism-milieu relationship and, by criticising Kurt Goldstein and Jean Paul Sartre, he deduces from the study of the living being the model, the ‘schema’, of all processes exceeding the homeostatic regulation of a system. Hence I will show how he explains the emergence of specifically human social systems, thematising the peculiar role played by ‘affectivity’ and ‘signification’ in what he calls transindividual individuation.