This essay takes from Gilbert Simondon's work some elements of political philosophy, developing the implications of a pathway where the problem of technique turns out to be essential. Through a constant comparison with the present debate, this dissertation takes into account the entire corpus of Simondon’s work and its sources, inherited mainly from the phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty) and epistemological tradition (Canguilhem). The first section analyzes the way Simondon tries to re-configure the conceptual apparatus of philosophy according to some instruments given by (...) the scientific and epistemological thought, especially the physics of quanta, thermodynamics and cybernetics. The second section shows in particular the impact of biological patterns into the theorization of social systems’ genesis and functioning, and analyzes its Bergsonian source. The third section eventually follows Simondon in his drawing up a theory of the political function, which implies a dynamic conception on what forms the social bond, and the problematisation of the idea of human nature. The programming of an intervention on technological infrastructures involving directly the constituent frames of the social system entails - beside a questioning of the ontological constitution of society - a meditation on the epistemological constitution and the predictive power of the sciences dealing with it; and, most of all, it brings up the issue of the actual efficacy of the cultural universe in which such sciences are formulated and the intervention is programmed. Precisely at this point the question about the political effectualness of philosophical thought arises. (shrink)

Grounded in newer French socio-political philosophy, this text deals with the paradoxical situation in which the interpretation of society as well as the relation between the individual and the social remains ambiguous even though autonomy and interrogation of the social emerges: Autonomy remains trapped between transcendence and immanence. Modernity is when society claims to know that it has to produce its own myths. Traditional societies did not relate to their myths as if they were their own products. Nevertheless, as soon (...) as the traditional religious points of reference are disclosed and disappear, the community gives itself new points of reference in order to put the social at a distance. Thus the social creates a distance to itself and a mirror for itself in order to perceive itself and work upon itself. The article explores the questions of why this is so and the difference between heteronomous and autonomous autotranscendence. (shrink)