Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Anne Fagot-Largeault
Thierry Bardini
Universite de Montreal
Abstract
In this interview, Anne Fagot-Largeault discusses with Thierry Bardini her recollec-
tions of the life and work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (19241989). The
discussion covers Simondons theory of individuation and considers its influences on
contemporary thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Francois Laruelle. Fagot-Largeault
situates Simondons thinking within the broader context of 20th-century biological
research and the development of life sciences. Informed by her personal association
and experiences working with Simondon, her reminiscences shed light on the unique
character of Simondon as a person and as a thinker.
Keywords
biology, Deleuze, individuation, Simondon
TB: I would like to do the interview in two parts, starting with a part
about your contributions to understanding Simondon, where I have
some very specic questions but where you can, if you wish, recall a
little of the context of these contributions, of what it was that led you
to write about Simondon and about individuation.1
Corresponding author:
Thierry Bardini, Universite de Montreal
Email: thierry.bardini@umontreal.ca
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org
142 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)
AFL: Oh yes, that one is quite old. It was a commemoration a few years
after his death . . . it was part of a colloquium2 in his memory. Yes, it is
quite old!
TB: That is not important, because it seems to me that in that work you
say several things that I havent read elsewhere and that are essential to
understanding his thoughts around the notion of vital individuation.
There was one excerpt that I found particularly interesting. You wrote:
To analogically grasp the nature of these transitions [between the levels
of individuation in fact, between the physical, the vital, the psychic and
the social] Simondon asserts the legitimacy of a transfer of paradigms
from one level to the other: from the physical (natural) world, to the
living world, from the machine to the organism. You then quote
Simondon: The machine is an allagmatic,3 that is to say transductive,
being, and you add: He holds with Aristotle that a technological
analogy is a legitimate way of understanding the living. In so far as the
machine is evidently at the heart of this analogy, can we call this a mech-
anistic analogy? Is this analogy a revival of the metaphor that you evoke
through these terms? Does this still remain a metaphor in our own time?
Because now, 15 years later, what could have passed for a metaphor
during that period would perhaps be a little less so today. In other
words, are we better placed, at this time, to make these transfers than
we were at the time that you were writing that, or at the time that
Simondon wrote?
AFL: Simondon was very rarely read. He is being read a little more these
days, and so it is dicult to know how he is being understood. Simondon
wasnt part of a school. He was quite solitary. I knew him well because
I was his assistant for a year. He was someone who was certainly very
sensitive, very emotional, but for whom communication was not some-
thing verbal. It was infra-verbal. I knew him before his episode of mental
problems and I spoke to him afterwards. I think there were certain elem-
ents of his illness that were already present in his normal behavior. He
was someone who had very strong intuitions, metaphysical intuitions
which he had diculty communicating.
AFL: I was his assistant during 19667 that was 40 years ago. It was
during his debut at the Sorbonne; he had just been elected professor, and
he was quite young for a typical Sorbonne professor. He came to this
post of a lecturer in psychology after the publication of his two theses,
because he was part of the generation that still had to write two theses.
One of these theses was on the mode of existence of technological objects
and the other on individuation. This thesis on individuation did not get a
Bardini 143
total, that is to say if complete order over the whole eld is established,
then that is death so to speak. But he underlines the fact that in a living
being, there always remains a certain part that is chaotic, that in the end
there remains a certain instability, some metastability, and hence some
resources for new crystallizations, as it were. That is the same idea in the
third part about psychic and collective individuation, which shows how
he arrives at crowds that crystallize with a common goal or a collective
enthusiasm for something. At the same time, there always remains an
element that is blurred, there always remains an element of metastability
and hence the possibility of moving towards other structurations even-
tually more complete, or towards an eventual destruction and a dierent
structuration. Simondons message therefore, is that there are no indi-
viduals, strictly speaking. Traditional philosophy has always sought out
the atoms that constitute the universe, the elements. For Simondon, on
the other hand, there are no individuals. There is a kind of chaotic envir-
onment . . . and there are processes of individuation. At best, a living being
can perhaps be understood as a process of individuation, in the same way
that a psychological itinerary is a process of individuation. And individu-
ation is a taking of form.
TB: I understand that that could have inspired the practitioners of pro-
cessual philosophy, Deleuze in particular. However, Deleuze is very eco-
nomical with his mentions of Simondon: he does not cite him very much.
TB: Can you talk a little more about this illness that you mentioned?
TB: That is strange, since Deleuze made the schizophrenic his model of
the superman.9
AFL: Yes, but that is not meant to be serious, because Simondon, when
he was really ill, he became . . . not at all a genius. It was really very sad.
Whether it was the fault of the illness or of the treatment I dont know,
but in any case without the treatment he was unable to function. He was
treated with the treatments available at the time, with neuroleptics.
Bardini 145
AFL: Yes, Laruelle was very important for that work . . . but I am not
sure if Laruelle knew Simondon personally. He was very interested in
Simondon; he could sense Simondons genius. I knew Laruelle because
I taught at Nanterre at the same time as him. Laruelle was also someone
who was a little strange, but in a dierent way from Simondon. Laruelle
is a very nice person, and an excellent teacher who can teach very normal
courses, in the history of philosophy for example. When Laruelle was
being Laruelle (because Laruelle could also be non-Laruelle, at which
point one could understand him very well indeed), but when he was being
Laruelle, he had a private language, where the words did not have the
same meanings they did in ordinary language. Now he has his followers
who have taught themselves this vocabulary, and who are capable of
listening to him and perhaps even speak to him.
TB: Seen from the outside, isnt that a somewhat Parisian thing to do?
This development of a language restricted to the school. . .
AFL: No, Laruelle was not a Parisian phenomenon. Laruelle was not a
fashionable phenomenon. Laruelle was a phenomenon of a revolt
against the humdrum philosophy taught at the university. He made
several attempts to shake the philosophical world and I sympathized
with these attempts, my husband too, at one time, because it is true
that the teaching of philosophy was too timid, too concentrated on the
history of philosophy, too little creative. When Laruelle launched the
rst of his little manifestoes, both of us subscribed immediately and we
were happy to receive them, because they were really shaking the tree!
But I think Laruelle enclosed himself in his linguistic ghetto which
nally did not allow him to shake the tree of philosophy, because he
had placed himself on the sidelines, on the margins of the philosophical
community.
aperiodic-crystal? Did you ever think that there was a resonance some-
where at that level?
AFL: Well, that is indeed a big question. How much did Simondon know
about the science at the time he was writing his work, about the discovery
of the molecular structure of DNA, since these two things were more or
less contemporary? I cannot answer with any certainty, but I believe that
his knowledge of contemporary biological research was somewhat lim-
ited. His knowledge of molecular biology, in any case . . . although he was
very interested in zoology, on the other hand, in living forms . . . he had in
his courses pictures of animals . . . but his knowledge of biology belonged
more to what we would call natural history (in the old style) than to the
new biology that was in the process of being constituted at the time. Even
about embryonic development, his knowledge was very, very far from
current, because there was already an experimental embryology in the
rst half of the 20th century. His knowledge of science was quite limited
in fact.
TB: His knowledge base was more that of an engineer, would you say?
TB: One could say it was mechanics, rather than genetics or even molecu-
lar biology, that constituted his frame of reference.
AFL: And not even what should have interested him: the theory of evo-
lution. He did not know much about it, and he was fundamentally a
Lamarckian, like all of French biology at the time, one must say. He had
never come to terms with Darwin, in fact he hadnt even tried. That in
itself is a problem, because it casts doubt on his metaphysical intuitions:
his metaphysical intuitions remained Lamarckian. His process of indi-
viduation is clearly an evolutionary process. But where it diers from
theories of evolution in biology is that it does not allow for a beginning, a
middle and an end. I mean evolution according to Simondon is not a
progressive evolution, or something that shows a general continuity. His
own metaphysical intuition is that there is a process of individuation in
the middle of a kind of primitive chaos, where one thing individuates at
one time, and another at another time, and then a third, and it is not a
case of a series of animals growing more and more complex.
TB: In the same text, you wrote something that really drew my attention.
You wrote: What Simondon called the problematic of individuation is
what in biology is commonly termed the problematic of evolution. So
what you are saying is that he wasnt an evolutionist in the Darwinian
sense, he never. . .
Bardini 147
AFL: [at the same time] No, he wasnt an evolutionist in the sense of the
theory of evolution which sees, in the evolution of species, beings that are
less complex becoming more complex, unicellular organisms becoming
multicellular, etc. This fact never drew his attention, I dont know why.
That is also another reason why I think his biological culture was quite
limited . . . let us say he had had his intuitions on the evolutionary pro-
cess, but it never occurred to him to support these intuitions by seeking
out the traces of fact around the origins of humanity . . . he wasnt
Teilhard de Chardin, you know.
TB: And they were contemporaries! They wrote more or less at the same
time. The Groupe zoologique humain [The Human Zoological Group], for
example, which dates from the year 1949. . .
TB: I want to return once more to the machine, to the mechanistic ana-
logy, because that is how I came to discover Simondon myself, through
his Mode of Existence of Technological Objects. At one moment, as you
note, still in the same text, The central paradigm of understanding the
individual living being is the automaton, always challenged as soon as it
is evoked. That seems very interesting to me. And you explain: Why is it
challenged as soon as it is evoked? Because it does not resolve all prob-
lems, or it only resolves them in a very minor way. An automaton is
capable of maintaining its individuation as much as its homeostasis, but
not capable of amplifying it. I may have changed your words a little, but
that is broadly what you say. And you specically refer to Ashbys
homeostat in this passage, which could, in some measure at least,
appear as the prehistory of the cybernetic machine, the ancestor of the
cybernetic machine. . .
TB: Then is this armation still valid today, in your opinion? Because
now we have cybernetic machines that are much more evolved, some of
which, we are being told, are certainly capable of resolving problems
more complex than their homeostasis. Cybernetic machines of a second
kind, as it were. My question in fact can be phrased as follows: is there an
eect that can date Simondons thought in relation to technology,
which I would say is a personal relation for him? Because it was as an
engineer that he wrote about these things.
AFL: From what I know about him, when he was a student at the Ecole
Normale Superieure, he was already trying to act as an engineer. I knew
him as a teacher in the Rue Serpente, in this annexe of the Sorbonne
located in the Institute of Psychology. There he had a laboratory for
general psychology. The rst room was empty, and in the back he
had a room where he would work alone I never went there, I dont
know anyone who did in which he kept his machines. He had a certain
empathy for the machines, he could understand the inner machine. He
was a friend of machines. So I used the words schizophrenic or bipolar,
but one could also say he was autistic. I did not know his medical details
at all. But I do know his troubles started after a phase of delirium.
He wasnt someone who had easy relations with other people. But he
was a very gentle person, not aggressive at all. I used to like him a lot.
I was with him only for a year, because I felt a little out of place, having
to teach philosophy to people who thought they were in the process of
constructing a scientic psychology. So I told him that I wanted to go
and study philosophy of science. At the time philosophy of science simply
meant scientic logic, and it wasnt taught at the Sorbonne. So I told him
I wanted to go to the United States to study logic. He told me: I dont
Bardini 149
AFL: Another age, but with him, it was not out of condescension. Not at
all. It was out of pure incomprehension. In the end, he wasnt completely
mistaken though, I did return to philosophy and to biology.
AFL: Yes.
TB: No?
TB: No, but isnt molecular biology close to it, especially in the age of
bioinformatics?
AFL: No, what I mean is that the discovery of the genetic code is not the
discovery of the mathematical structure of the living, it is the discovery of
something that is of the order of a language. But this is all aside from
Simondon, because I never talked to him about biology. I did not really
know much about it yet, although the year that I was Simondons assist-
ant was also the year I spent preparing for medicine. But by the end of
the year I had eectively left for the United States. I stayed there four
years. I did my PhD in the United States, and I returned and called
Simondon on the telephone and he said, Well, now come and put
down a subject for your thesis quickly, you will immediately pass. In
fact, it would have been natural for me to register with him, and the topic
of the thesis had been evoked. But when I returned from the United
States in 1971, he was already quite ill, and I thought it would not be
reasonable. Because the thesis of that time was still in the old style, the
doctorat dEtat. That could certainly not be done quickly, that would
take ten years. So it was not with him that I worked afterwards.
TB: His thought, for what it was worth, did it inspire you?
AFL: At the time that I was his assistant I knew very little of his thought.
Very little, because he didnt speak about it. It was only later, when I was
doing philosophy of science, that I rediscovered my interest in what he
had written. I was trying to summarize the interesting thinkers in the
philosophy of science, who wrote in French. There werent many of
them there was the tradition of the Institute of History of Science in
the Rue du Four . . .
AFL: Yes, Canguilhem, but his work wasnt very metaphysical, not in the
same order as Simondons work.
TB: Bachelard?
AFL: I did not know Bachelard personally. I had read him, but I did not
know him. . . . There used to be a big French school of the philosophy of
science at the beginning of the century, with Pierre Duhem, Henri
Poincare. . . . In terms of the philosophy of biology, there was a group
of doctors: Georges Canguilhem, Francois Dagognet, of which indeed
I was a follower. But in terms of biology proper, there werent many
people: no big philosopher of evolution in French since Bergson,
I suppose. . .
Bardini 151
TB: No, not so much, thats true. But at the same time, in his work, at
many places, there are references, to the controversy between Cuvier
and Georey Saint-Hilaire, for example. . . . At other times, there
are references to the work of Jacques Monod. Contrary to Simondon,
it seems, Deleuze had read Monod. But one could say he just stopped
there.
AFL: Yes, I think Deleuze took some pieces, which are interesting . . . but
in the end, he was not well-informed about science with any sort of
continuity.
TB: The chair that you occupy here now, how essential was it that you
were a doctor, for this chair specically?
AFL: For this chair? I would probably have studied biology rather than
medicine if I had started earlier. But one cannot do everything. I started
with philosophy. And I came to scientic culture through medicine,
simply because it was more easily accessible where I was at the time [in
Creteil]. I studied medicine while teaching philosophy. If I had been able
to truly choose a specialty I would probably have chosen neuroscience or
neurophysiology. Perhaps neuroendocrinology, because I was already
very interested, when I was in the United States, in the work of Roger
Guillemin and the people in New Orleans, Andrew Schally and his group
who I had gone to meet and who shared the Nobel Prize with him.14
Guillemin did not answer my letter, while the New Orleans researchers
did respond and received me graciously; we had a lot to discuss about the
way they had discovered the hormone on which they were working, and
about the question they were raising (if an organism produces x, then this
x must serve some purpose, but what?) . . . a question that they classied
as teleological.
TB: You know that provided the material for one of the rst books of the
anthropology of science, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgars Laboratory
Life?
152 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)
AFL: Yes, exactly. But Latour was little interested in the biological con-
tent of the discovery, while I, on the other hand, was interested in exactly
that! [Laughs] I was fascinated by the way in which we began to under-
stand the physiology of the organism. That is what I sought later in
medicine. I think, in terms of philosophy, medicine did bring me, in
some way, to a scientic culture, but also to a rootedness, a grounding
in life, which, for a philosopher, is very important, because a philosopher
who teaches has a tendency to move in the Platonic world of ideas, while
I found myself in the emergency room every Monday, and that was
crucial to shaping my work.
TB: That also shows, clearly, at this time, in terms of your views on stem
cells, cloning, etc. I mean, is it also from the point of view of a clinician
that you think of these things?
AFL: Not only that, I think . . . We discuss these things a lot at the
biomedical agency with whom I do a little work these days. The law
in France demands, for a research project on human embryonic stem
cells to be authorized, that its results be therapeutic. But that demand is
abusive, and not even reasonable, because before even beginning to
think about the therapeutic results that can be obtained perhaps one
day, we need an entire series of fundamental investigations which are
important if we want to achieve results that are clinically interesting
and which would not be dangerous for people. The researchers are
therefore obliged, when they write their proposals, to declare a thera-
peutic result to be achieved, in other words something like: We will
treat diabetics by producing stem cells which can secrete insulin and
which can be grafted, etc. Well, in reality we are very far from any
such result. And what we learn through the fundamental phases of the
research quite possibly will force us to change those initial therapeutic
goals.
AFL: The law has been written that way, in the eyes of the legisla-
tors who voted for it, so that it acts as a guarantee that some serious
goal is being served at the very least, that the ill will be treated,
and that it means we are not doing whatever we like any way we
like but it does not really understand the way that research actu-
ally works.
TB: Precisely, I would like to ask you to say more about the relationship
between the philosophy of biology and bioethics. Does one inuence the
other?
Bardini 153
TB: Right now there is a whole new front that is opening at that level,
with all the contributions of new technology.
AFL: It is just that, one way or other, the life sciences, and certainly
medicine in particular, have made us capable of operating on living
bodies. The life sciences have begun to get very creative, even engender-
ing their own form of engineering. Biologists do not deduce the facts
from systems of axioms, they do not only produce publications, they
create genetically modied mice. And that poses problems for applied
philosophy and for political philosophy. At rst glance, those people who
used to work in the old-style philosophy of science, that is to say in
theoretical philosophy, they are not at all interested in these practical
aspects. . . . When you raise these questions with philosophers of science,
some of them consider it a little shameful to even condescend to enter
into considerations of technology. You should also keep in mind that the
philosophy of technology, as it currently exists, is a philosophy of engin-
eering, which had never really shown much interest in biotechnology. It is
only now, very recently, that we have started to see a philosophy of
technology that is concerned with biotechnology. But it is still very hesi-
tant. And this philosophy of biotechnology has developed in the heart of
a philosophy of science that has become, by the force of things, theoret-
ical and practical at the same time. From the theoretical point of view,
which is the epistemology, you raise questions such as: what kinds of
proofs do we have in medicine, what is the strength of such proofs, etc.?
But at the same time, society asks certain questions which in turn raise
the question for us: why is it that genetically modied organisms are
154 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)
prohibited from our dining table, when they are not prohibited from our
hospitals? For treating illnesses, we do not hesitate to genetically
modify. . .
AFL: Indeed! If we can . . . the BBC has just announced and it appears
to be quite serious, for there is an article in Science the BBC has
announced with great fanfare that medical doctors have just cured two
people of a melanoma through gene therapy.15 Now that is something
huge! Melanoma is 100 percent fatal.
AFL: Of course, and that is why I claim that the philosophy of science, at
least the philosophy of life sciences, is indissociably theoretical and prac-
tical: it cannot avoid these questions; we can call them questions of
ethics, but they are also questions of political philosophy, of legislation
and of politics. We cannot avoid these questions because when we work
in the philosophy of science, we should take the trouble to understand a
little of what scientists are working on, and if we abstain from interven-
ing, we are depriving the community of a certain competence. From the
moment that we are capable of understanding what is happening, it
would be abnormal to ignore our responsibilities as citizens. And I
think the questions this raises are extremely interesting.
AFL: Let us look at what came out of this conference that I just
attended,16 and at what is being currently published in the eld of
stem-cell research. When the genetic code was discovered, and the
human genome and the genome of a number of animal species were
decoded, there was a tendency to say that the genome dened the
person. There was a tendency to identify people in terms of a genetic
program that would more or less decide what they were. And it was
assumed that since there were so many possible genetic combinations,
then it was not surprising that individuals were all so dierent from each
other. What is currently being emphasized, and which comes close to
Simondons work (of course, one cannot be too quick to draw
Bardini 155
connections because these are still the most recent scientic develop-
ments), is the fact that while the genetic data is certainly something
that is important for development, the accidents or events that occur
during the development of the individual are just as determinant as the
genetic elements in terms of dening what the individual will become. We
have just been speaking about it, and observing that in the case of med-
ically assisted procreation, for example, the embryos that are produced
through in vitro fertilization are conserved in a culture, and one has to be
very attentive to the quality of this environment, which can be consider-
ably important for its later development.
TB: I would like to return here to several other questions. First, the
coding part of DNA is unbelievably similar from one individual to the
other. The non-coding part varies greatly.
AFL: Of course. And [Jean Pierre] Changeux has shown very well that the
way in which the brain develops, in the human species at the end of the
gestation period and in the rst two years it shows that it is impossible
that this could be written in any program. The neuronal connections,
156 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)
associations which are made, etc., it is impossible that these are written in
some program. These are all improvised when the organism interacts with
its environment. And therefore, the process of individuation is not the
process of development of a thing which was there, like some imaginary
homunculus, but it is on the contrary a process of dialogue between a
being manifesting itself by consulting its program from time to time
[laughs], and external events to which it has to react, and to which all
the beings in development do not react in exactly the same manner.
TB: And singularity is not just the result of reading a particular program.
AFL: Well, its just that if you try to draw connections to Simondon, you
could say that the program is the result, because it is the taking of form.
There is no form, and then later a form appears. There was a tendency in
the early years of molecular biology to say that the genome present in the
egg, which is the same in all its cells, is broadly speaking the form. And
then later the developing organism just lls in the blanks, but the broad
strokes of the form are already there. However, it is more complicated
than that, because the plan of the embryo, that is to say the front, the
back, the top, the bottom, all this is formed very early. And it is not
certain if this is partly dependent on the cytoplasm of the ovocyte, and
therefore on the environment on the environment of the nucleus at
least. Everything is not in the nucleus. In fact, the Simondonian idea
of a taking of form that then propagates is probably also applicable to
the development of the nervous system.
AFL: Yes, but one can apply it especially to psychic individuation, and to
say that psychic individuation occurs only through the interaction
between individuals. And I believe that in this case, Simondons intuition
is great. Individuation does not mean that something develops by itself,
all alone in a corner. Individuation improves itself through interaction
with other individuals that shape ones own self.
AFL: Yes, we could . . . There are people who do that. But that is not
really Simondonian. In the end, I mean, we must not draw Simondon
towards meanings that he may not himself have known, eh?
AFL: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, and that is an intuition that has held up
well.
TB: Yes. And something which could perhaps help us today as well.
Because there is nonetheless a large part of Simondons work (because
he had not come to terms with Darwin or with Freud, etc.) which does
not seem obsolete, but can be said to have been overtaken. But on the
other hand, there are these intuitions that . . .
AFL: Indeed, I think that his knowledge was relatively obsolete, even for
his own time, but nonetheless, his intuitions are still powerful.
AFL: Yes, that is the lasting impression that I have of him. He was
someone who would not look at you as . . . who would listen to the
sound of your voice, rather than the words you were saying. But that
is another metaphor as well.
158 Theory, Culture & Society 31(4)
AFL: No, his metaphors were spatial, rather. For Simondon, it was
always machines.
TB: Well, I am not going to keep you any longer. Thank you very much.
AFL: I should thank you as well! This has been a very good discussion.
Notes
1. This interview was conducted on 8 September 2006 at the French Academie
des Sciences in Paris.
2. This was a colloquium organized by Gilles Chatelet for the College
International de Philosophie in April 1992 and published in 1994 by Albin
Michel with the title Gilbert Simondon: Une pensee de lindividuation et de la
technique. Anne Fagot-Largeaults essay is in the first part of the book,
devoted to the philosophy of individuation. The book also included contri-
butions by Rene Thom and Francois Laruelle, who are both mentioned in the
present interview, as well as a contribution by Bernard Stiegler.
3. From the Greek verb allatein, to change, which gives us allagma, signifying
changing. A supplement to the main thesis, entitled allagmatique, defined
it as a theory of operations . . . symmetric to the theory of structures
(Simondon, 2005: 559). It is, along with transduction, one of Gilbert
Simondons central concepts. He defined transduction as a process be it
physical, biological, mental or social in which an activity gradually sets
itself in motion, propagating within a given area, through a structuration
of the different zones of the area on which it operates. Each region of the
structure that is constituted in this way then serves to constitute the next one
to such an extent that at the very time this structuration is effected there is a
progressive modification taking place in tandem with it (Simondon, 1992:
313). I quote here from the English translation of the introduction to the
main thesis, the only translation of any work by Simondon in English so far.
Bardini 159
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