Dr Andrea Bardin

This article offers a philosophical-political commentary of Jason Ā. Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021). We welcome Josephson Storm’s integrated interdisciplinary distillation and ambitious ethico-political perspective, but we also point out the necessity to go further in the cross-disciplinary theoretical effort to rebuild a postpostmodernist academia. In particular, we identify the very modern/postmodern dialectic as problematic, and we contend that a materialist philosophy able to rethink politics and nonhuman agency through all the sciences would better serve the project. We also highlight how the metamodernist project might benefit from the adoption of a Simondonian approach insofar as the conceptualisation of both biology and technology is concerned. Finally, we end with a plea for an ongoing vigilance of the material conditions of possibility that support cutting-edge inter- and cross-disciplinary research, for they are fragile and need institutional and societal support.

In this article we analyse the idea of progress and show that, since its early-modern inception, it has relied on a twofold commitment. On the one hand, it rests on a project of mathematical modelisation of natural and social reality, deterministically conceived. On the other hand, it requires the production of a stable social order capable of implementing that model. This stance, we argue, is still dominant and defines the ‘(hyper-)modern condition’. Following Gilbert Simondon, we take the cybernetic notion of dynamic stability (‘homeostasis’) as paradigmatic of the hyper-modern condition. As we explain, this core notion has covered multiple epistemic domains, including the social sciences, and contributed to reformulate the modern idea of progress within the terms dictated by neoliberal governmentality. The connection we establish between cybernetics and neoliberalism will eventually allow us to use Simondon’s theory against both. In our view, Simondon’s concept of ‘metastability’ supports an alternative understanding of progress based on the ideas of social change and the government of normative invention, which includes the opening of social systems to a future beyond their own preservation.

Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarcely more than a common-sense assumption on its right wing. This article aims to expose the taboo and challenge the assumption. There is no way, we argue, to defeat conservative political theory without delving into political anthropology. With this purpose in mind, our paper analyses the writings of Marx and Engels, and Simondon’s concepts of the transindividual and technics. It shows that Simondon’s theory of technics allows new interpretations of many of the themes scattered in Marx and Engels’s works, and helps formulate a materialist political anthropology that entails a political project of liberating ‘human nature’ from labour.

The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes’s political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philosophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and explains them against the background of Hobbes’s elaboration of a deterministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on ideas of individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance. The second section explains why the concept of representation that Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be interpreted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes’s materialist theory of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination.

This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epis- temologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

Simondon’s philosophy of individuation attacks the opposition between liberty and necessity, a key institution of the supposed ontological ‘difference’ between the human being and nature in most of modern political thought. Distinguishing between ontological and epistemological determinism, I will show the political significance of Simondon’s refusal to either reduce human beings to natural determinism or save their alleged metaphysical nature. Simondon inherits part of his critical programme and a good deal of the tools he uses to construct it from Georges Canguilhem. My reading starts from an enigma concerning quantum mechanics the former jotted down on paper while involved in the Second World War antifascist struggle. I will suggest that Simondon’s philosophy exposes the two equally anthropomorphic understandings of nature shared by fascism and technocracy. This will allow me to explain the ideological function voluntarism and human engineering can jointly perform by reinforcing and exploiting the apparent opposition between liberty and necessity, on the basis of their complementary teleological justification for political action.

Our article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements (the ‘three orders of consideration’) for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon's way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’.

L’antropologia politica di Hobbes è fondata su un processo di elaborazione del concetto di libertà che dipende, a sua volta, dallo sviluppo del progetto di un sistema generale delle scienze volto a rendere compatibili ontologia materialista e fondazione epistemologica. Questo articolo analizza in particolare la problematizzazione del concetto di libertà dopo il De cive, fino al collasso delle sue componenti descrittiva e normativa nel Leviatano. In questa luce vanno rilette anche alcune innovazioni concettuali del capolavoro hobbesiano, attraverso cui le libertà naturali degli uomini sono integralmente assorbite nel funzionamento artificiale del corpo politico. = Hobbes’s political anthropology is grounded on a concept of liberty whose elaboration was influenced by the development of his project for a materialist philosophical system. Hobbes’s attempt to provide a definitive foundation for civil science led him to re-elaborate the concept of liberty after De cive, and eventually conflate its descriptive and normative components in Leviathan. Some of Leviathan’s conceptual innovations can thus be related to Hobbes’s attempt to absorb the natural liberties of individuals in the body politic’s artificial functioning.