9 - Gilles Deleuze, a Reader of Gilbert Simondon

Summary

Several years ago, at a conference on the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler announced that an English translation of Gilbert Simondon's L'Individuation psychique et collective (Psychic and Collective Individuation) was being undertaken and would be published with the University of Minnesota Press. According to Stiegler, the publishers were convinced of the viability of the project thanks to the following argument: ‘if we love Deleuze, then we need Simondon’. Indeed, not only does Gilles Deleuze's 1966 review of Simondon's work already mention several concepts which Deleuze would later develop in his own particular way – the concepts of ‘;singularity’ and ‘intensive magnitude’, for example – we also find Simondon cited in support of key arguments in works such as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus. These citations, however, contain very little explication of the precise way in which Deleuze understands and appropriates Simondon's work. It is thus clear that, in line with Stiegler's argument, a full appreciation of these Deleuzian texts will require some knowledge of Simondon, a knowledge which has so far been denied Deleuze's English-language readers.

It is nevertheless the case that Stiegler's argument would be better applied to the publication of a translation of Simondon's L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis), since this is the only Simondon text to which Deleuze explicitly refers.