Psychic Individuation Research Articles

On the Struggle for Epokhē and the Crisis of the Savoirs

Abstract Reflecting on the mental ecologies of digital life and the crisis of spirit in the contemporary era, this article principally addresses the question of the possibility of epokhē (ἐποχή), the crisis of formation or self-cultivation (Bildung) and the possibility of a “third world,” which can be opened up by the phenomenological practice of epokhē. This will be undertaken idiosyncratically through a comparison between the thoughts of the British novelist and professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University in London, Will Self, and the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020). Both thinkers, albeit in different ways and with different emphases—one literary, one more philosophical—address the psychical and traumatogenic consequences of epokhē. We can understand this as a suspension of disbelief in the present as we live through an “epoch without epoch,” a time witnessing the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technologies of the spirit. This is the time of the simulacrum of the real and the circulation of symbolic exchange and death. Both thinkers are interested in reinterpreting the concept of epokhē to consider psychic individuation or the psycho-pathological effects of technology upon the embodied human sensorium. I proffer some original thoughts drawn from the paradigm of critical postmedia philosophy and ecosophy on how to take the best elements from these thinkers to mount a sustained critique of technical life in the traumatized present that is without epoch.

Thinking the unconscious beyond the psychoanalytic subject: Simondon, Murakami, and the transductive forces of the transindividual

ABSTRACT The last decade has seen growing interest across human geography in the concept of the unconscious as a key terrain for thinking social life. At the same time, an increasing number of geographers are exploring theorisations of the unconscious that push beyond the subject-predicate tendencies of much psychoanalytic thinking, addressing material and non-representational forces that exceed the confines of a human-centred understanding. This paper extends this work through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, highlighting three key implications for geographical understandings of the unconscious. First, how it inverts the traditional emphasis on already-constituted psychic individuals to processes of psychic individuation that modulate the emergence and becoming of subjects. Second, how it shifts beyond the psychoanalytical fixation on negativity and repression through an understanding of the transductive potential of unconscious forces to create new forms of life. And third, how it opens a new way of articulating the relation of the psychic and collective as a relation of individuations that he terms the transindividual. Empirically, the paper turns to the subterranean landscape of dreams and desires in the novels of Haruki Murakami, exploring how literary encounters might open a space for thinking the transductive forces of the transindividual unconscious.

Tensed toward the collective: A Simondonian perspective on human experience in context

In this article, we use Gilbert Simondon’s work on psychic and collective individuation in order to develop a process theoretical framework for studying human experience in context. We argue that experience should be conceptually understood as coextensive with the processual becoming of an individual human being. We further develop this by taking into account two complementary trajectories of becoming: psychic individuation and collective individuation. We will show how this can help us to understand the situatedness and collectivity of human experience.

From Derrida's Deconstruction to Stiegler's Organology: Thinking after Postmodernity

The aim of this paper is to question the significance of Derrida's deconstruction of the concepts of subject and history. While ‘postmodernity’ tends to be characterized by philosophical critique as the ‘liquidation of the subject’ or the ‘end of history’, I attempt to show that Derrida's deconstruction of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘historicity’ is not an elimination or destruction of these concepts, but an attempt to transform them in order to free them from their metaphysical-teleological presuppositions. This paper argues that this transformation, which begins in Derrida's and continues in Stiegler's texts, leads to the notions of ‘psycho-social individuation’ and ‘doubly epokhal redoubling’. I maintain that such notions ‘supplement’ the metaphysical concepts of subject and history by forcing a reconsideration of the technical conditions of psychic individuation and the technological conditions of ‘epochality’.

The Psychology of Individuation as Epistemology

This article explores the indissoluble connection between the order of being and knowing in the allagmatic epistemology proposed by Gilbert Simondon based on the following thesis: the knowledge of psychic individuation is the condition for the possibility of knowing different modes of individuation. This statement requires the passage through logic, according to the author’s conception of ontogenesis, for describing the analogy and the subject that knows analogically and individuates itself as he knows. Thus, the psychology of individuation is established as a scientific field of work opened up by Simondon and its epistemological implications in the way of conceiving the subject-object relation.

Bases sociales de la individuación psíquica en la obra de G. H. Mead y G. Simondon

En este artículo se presenta la índole social de la individuación psíquica por medio del análisis de la teoría social de G. H. Mead y el proceso de individuación descrito por G. Simondon. En sus propuestas, ambos autores resaltan la necesidad de comprender la constitución del individuo psíquico como un proceso en constante devenir, mediación entre individuo y sociedad, entre lo interno y lo externo; una singularidad capaz de diferenciarse de otros seres y su entorno, pero en inquebrantable relación con ellos. Se propone una discusión centrada en la pregunta por la naturaleza social de la individuación, principalmente, detallando tres aspectos cruciales para el despliegue de ésta en su fase psíquica: (1) devenir, (2) vínculo individuo-medio y (3) despliegue de potenciales a través de la acción.

시몽동의 관계의 존재론에서 정신적, 집단적 개체화 : 미술교육에의 새로운 접근을 위한 시도

시몽동의 관계의 존재론에서 정신적, 집단적 개체화 : 미술교육에의 새로운 접근을 위한 시도

The Threatened End Of Digital Sharing: A Dissociated Milieu?

Edward Snowden has revealed the obscene presence in the lives of everyone for whom the free use of the internet is an essential part of daily life, of an NSA-led global network of extreme mass surveillance. The state, corporate, and self-censorship that such extreme surveillance of public and private communications imposes, constitutes an additional and direct threat to the positive functioning of the libidinal economy in an age in which the desire of individuals and groups is already threatened with commodification through subjection to the demands of the market by those who exploit for profit the technologies of telecommunications, the media, culture and program industries. Through the activities and publications of Ars Industrialis – the Paris-based association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l’esprit – Bernard Stiegler and his co-researchers have analysed the destruction of desire through consumerist exploitation and its negative impact on processes of psychic individuation and social adaption. They argue that to consign ‘technologies of the human spirit’ such as digital telecommunications to a control function ‘systematically forbids and impedes the development of new and original social practices’. This article examines the ways in which the attack on the open internet by the corporate, military-industrial state undermines the building of an economy of contribution (Stiegler et al.) and the formation of an associated milieu (G. Simondon) which enables a productive economy of desire.

Spellbound

This article maps out and conceptualizes the way cinema emerged as a novel type of technology of the self and psychic individuation. It analyzes how cinema, in its inception, implemented a binding sensory dynamic that affected the convergence of spatiotemporal patterns into a constantly modifying hybrid self. Technologically animated images started to produce transformational spaces where the individual became problematized and regulated, not only in narratives and rhetorical figures, but more importantly, in the spatial patterning of perception, in affect transmission and collective organization. The article approaches cinema’s bodily and psychic dynamics in topological terms and employs three basic concepts—continuity, nearness, and neighborhood—so as to problematize what has become of the question of the individual in the age of moving images.

DOING AND SAYING STUPID THINGS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: bêtise and animality in deleuze and derrida

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated.

Jung and the Soul Of Education (at the ‘Crunch’)

C. G. Jung offers education a unique perspective of the dilemma of collective social demands versus individual needs. Indeed, so radical and profound is his vision of the learning psyche as collectively embedded, that it addresses the current crisis over the demand for utilitarian higher education. Hence post‐Jungian educationalists can develop creative classroom strategies, for example in the United States, Canada and Brazil. The article revises two Jungian ideas in order to teach literature by promoting personal and social growth. By taking Jung's categories of literature as categories of reading and by using his notion of therapeutic ‘healing fiction’ to understand literary narrative, both social and psychic individuation and transformation are facilitated.

Seamus Heaney and the Alchemy of the Earth

Heaney's poetry can be seen as a search for an essence through a process of physical and spiritual metamorphosis. His poems frequently involve representations reminiscent of the alchemical opus transforming impure and disparate elements into purity and harmony. A number of poems, including "Churning Day" and "Gallarus Oratory", are analysed to show how these images represent the process of psychic individuation and the act of poetic creation. Erotic imagery is also shown to relate to the myth of Mother Earth and to Heaney's desire for a union of sexual opposites on a psychic and cultural plane. The "bog poems" are reviewed in the light of alchemy and the Earth Goddess myth and are shown to be attempts to heal the split consciousness of male and female awareness in a centre which, unlike Yeats's disintegrating vision, now "holds and spreads".