Pre Individual

Unity, which is characteristic of the individuated being, and identity, which authorizes the usage of the principle of the excluded middle, do not apply to pre-individual being, which explains why the world cannot be recomposed after the fact with monads

This passage establishes the ontological distinctiveness of pre-individual being as exceeding the logical categories of unity and identity that govern individuated reality, making it irreducible to any monadological reconstruction.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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why would the individual, such as it appears, not conserve a dimension of pre-individuality in its dimension of being, which would be somewhat associated and irreducible to what can be thought in terms of the “individual”?

This passage poses the foundational question driving Simondon’s project: that the individual necessarily carries an irreducible pre-individual dimension, challenging Aristotelian primacy of the individual as the basic unit of being.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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the subject being can be conceived as a more or less perfectly coherent system of three successive phases of being: the pre-individual phase, the individuated phase, and the transindividual phase

This passage presents the full triadic schema in which the pre-individual phase is the originary condition from which individuated and transindividual phases successively emerge without entirely liquidating it.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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the pre-individual past survives parallel to the existence of the individuated being and remains a seed for new amplifying operations; individuation intervenes in the being as the correlative birth of the distinct phases

This passage argues that the pre-individual is not consumed by individuation but persists as a generative remainder that seeds further, amplifying individuations across successive phases of being.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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it in fact seems that the insufficiency consists in this overflowing of pre-individual reality with respect to the reality of the individual. The individual is only itself, but it exists as superior to itself, since it carries with it a more complete reality that individuation has not exhausted

This passage identifies the pre-individual as an irreducible excess within the individual — a persistent overflow of potential that ensures the individual is never self-enclosed or ontologically sufficient.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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concepts are adequate only to individuated reality and not to pre-individual reality — if this is taken into account, no positive physical certainty can give an objective solution to a philosophical problem

This passage establishes the epistemological limit implied by the pre-individual: our conceptual apparatus, formed for individuated reality, is structurally inadequate to grasp the pre-individual directly.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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transduction the processes of differentiations that are deployed starting from a metastable pre-individual system, wrought with tensions, of which the individual is one of the phases of deployment

This passage situates the pre-individual as a metastable tensional system from which individuals emerge through transduction, positioning individuation as one phase rather than the totality of being’s becoming.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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the pre-individual reality associated with individuated living organisms is not segmented like them and does not have limits comparable to those of separate living individuals; when this reality is grasped within a new individuation initiated by the living being, it conserves a relation of participation

This passage demonstrates that pre-individual reality is structurally transpersonal — unsegmented by individual limits — and that its mobilization in psychical individuation inaugurates the transindividual as a domain of genuine participation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis

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a psychosomatic immanence of pre-individual nature to the individuated being. Sexuality is a mixture of nature and of individuation; it is an individuation in suspense, arrested in the asymmetrical determination of the elementary collective

This passage treats sexuality as a concrete modality in which pre-individual nature remains immanent to the individuated being, constituting an arrested or suspended individuation that points toward but cannot constitute the collective.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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there is a correlation of the individual and the charge of pre-individual nature in emotion; but we can only grasp behaviors that do not have their own explanation

This passage reads emotion as the site where pre-individual nature presses against the individuated being, generating a dynamic that cannot be explained within purely individual terms.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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Information conserves the pre-individual within the individual. This is the condition of communication, which is found first at the moment of individuation and a second time when the individual amplifies itself into the collective.

This passage identifies information as the medium through which pre-individual reality is conserved and transmitted within the individual, enabling both intra-individual coherence and amplification into collective life.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the first pre-individual state of the being can continue to exist in association with the result of an initial individuation; in fact, it can be supposed that individuation takes place in a quantum manner through abrupt leaps, each plateau of individuation being capable of once again relating itself to the following as a pre-individual state

This passage proposes a quantum model of successive individuations in which each achieved phase can itself serve as a new pre-individual ground for the next leap of becoming.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the information borne out of transductive movements is no longer conceived as the transmission of an already coded and established message… but as form-taking: this is topological information, which, on the basis of a field wrought with the pre-individual tensions of the very movement in which the form

This passage redefines information as a topological event arising from pre-individual tensions, replacing communicative transmission models with an ontogenetic account grounded in the metastable pre-individual field.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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this nature is not veritably the nature of its individuality; it is the nature associated with its individuated being; it is the persistence of the initial and original phase of the being in the second phase, and this persistence implies a tendency toward a third phase, which is that of the collective

This passage traces how the persistence of pre-individual nature within the individuated being generates a directional pressure toward the collective as the third phase of being.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the group must also be tensed and partially undetermined, like pre-individual being

This passage extends the logic of pre-individual metastability to the collective level, arguing that the group’s generative capacity depends on its maintaining a tensed, undetermined quality analogous to pre-individual being.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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individuals are amplified in a vaster reality via the intermediary of something that is a pr[e-individual reality]

This passage indicates that the transindividual domain of presence and collective signification is mediated by pre-individual reality persisting within and between individuals.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the wild act is one that tends toward a total individuation and no longer admits anything as real except what is totally individuated

This passage diagnoses the ‘wild or crazed act’ as a pathological collapse of the pre-individual dimension — an act that forecloses the surplus potentiality necessary for continued becoming and collective participation.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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To seek the principle of individuation in a reality that precedes individuation itself is to consider individuation strictly as onto-genesis.

This passage establishes the methodological imperative of approaching individuation as ontogenesis — tracing it back to a pre-individual reality rather than beginning from the already-constituted individual.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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the living being is also a being that results from an initial individuation and amplifies this individuation… the living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system, and a system that is in the midst of undergoing the process of individuating

This passage characterizes living beings as ongoing individuating systems, implying that the pre-individual is not simply anterior but continuously operative within the dynamics of vital becoming.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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we also feel that we are not eternal, that we are fragile and transitory, that we will no longer exist when the sun will still be shining on the rocks next spring

This passage registers the experiential tension between the individual’s felt sense of eternity — linked by Simondon to the pre-individual charge — and its awareness of its own finitude and transience.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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