Vardoulakis explores what Balibar means by designating transindividuality as ‘quasi-transcendental.’ He does so by turning to Balibar’s readings of Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics, the Part that is central to Balibar’s understanding of the transindividual in Spinoza. Vardoulakis shows that the quasi-transcendental in Spinoza can only be a form of agonistic relations if his political theory in the Theological Political Treatise is to account for political change.

This response focuses on Balibar’s method of thinking transindividuality through multiple figures, in their similarities as well as their productive differences. His essay ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’ combines the three titular figures in order to better think the multifaceted idea of ‘classical’ transindividuality. Balibar’s method combines the three but nonetheless maintains their dissimilarities as real differences. This response attempts to test or apply that method in two ways. The first application links Balibar’s analysis of Freud’s hypnotic (...) leader with a theme Balibar does not here discuss: wonder’s connection to superstition in Spinoza. At the level of their effects, superstitious wonder and hypnosis are nearly identical transindividual processes which lead to affective mass formation. However, their causes are quite distinct. This response details the similar effects and different causes, then asks the question: does their difference render them irreconcilable or complementary? Given the prominent role Spinoza plays in Balibar’s work, and the strong overall equivalence of wonder and hypnosis, this first application of Balibar’s method of multiple combination likely presents a complementarity rather than a conflict. This response’s second application, attempting to integrate another figure into the transindividual multiple, presents greater difficulties: what role, if any, could Foucault play in Balibar’s transindividuality? With Foucault, the tensions or differences perhaps amount to fundamental and thoroughgoing incompatibilities. However, combining Foucault with ‘classical’ transindividuality potentially extends and deepens each. This response concludes with examples of these problematic tensions as well as possibly fruitful combinations. (shrink)

As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men” – to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople – and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of (...) Étienne Balibar – to make the guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today. (shrink)

En un brevísimo texto sin fecha, 'Optimismo y Pesimismo', Gilbert Simondon (2018) propone una nueva manera de abordar el problema del pesimismo, un enfoque que no trata de tomar este como el resultado de una actitud, ni tampoco como un sistema de pensamiento. Las páginas que siguen las dedicaremos a exponer en qué consiste el pesimismo entendido como conducta y a pensar cómo puede plantearse la integración de la misma en una filosofía de la individuación, esto es, cómo puede ser (...) un elemento clave de su desarrollo. Así, reconsideraremos la relación que guarda el fenómeno de la angustia con la constitución de lo transindividual y, asimismo, exploraremos la relación entre un «pesimismo» que busca prolongar y rebasar el pesimismo, un transpesimismo, y el pesimismo de la fuerza de Nietzsche como su antecedente. A la luz de todo esto, el problema del pesimismo aparecerá, en última instancia, como un problema de energía psicológica, de alimentación, y su resolución como la cuestión cibernética o allagmática de su organización e in-formación. (shrink)

This paper explores how language emerged not from an enlarged brain that then produced tools, but through the co-evolution of tools, gestures, and cortical development. Drawing on André Leroi-Gourhan's groundbreaking palaeoanthropological work showing that tool use and language share common origins in rhythmic gestural sequences, we trace how human communication has continuously transformed through technical mediation. Through Augustine of Hippo's puzzlement at witnessing silent reading in 397 CE, the Irish scribal innovation of word separation in the 7th-8th centuries, and contemporary (...) digital transformations, we demonstrate that our relationship with language continuously co-evolves with technical systems. The paper integrates perspectives from multiple disciplines: Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technology and his concept of "tertiary retention" (technical memory), Gilbert Simondon's theory of transindividuation (how humans and technics mutually constitute each other), and Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games (showing how different technical mediations enable different forms of life). Through detailed historical analysis of reading practices, we reveal how each technological transformation from flint-knapping to alphabetic writing to digital media doesn't simply record language but fundamentally reconstitutes what language is and how humans engage with it. Understanding language as technogenesis reveals that communication has always been a hybrid human-technical phenomenon, continuously transforming through the interplay of biological and technological evolution. (shrink)

This article examines how contemporary media technologies transform the conditions of visuality, challenging anthropocentric models of perception historically grounded in the human gaze. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, it argues that vision is not merely extended by technical apparatuses but reconfigured through processes of technological individuation and transindividuation. From optical devices and perspectival systems to algorithmic media and machine vision, the image progressively detaches from embodied human perception and becomes an operational entity within technical infrastructures. (...) Through an analysis of historical and contemporary media systems, the article develops the concept of distant visuality to describe modes of seeing that function beyond phenomenological experience. In this context, vision emerges as a distributed process shaped by material, computational and mnemonic systems, marking a transition toward the deanthropologization of perception and the emergence of posthuman and nonhuman regimes of visuality. (shrink)

Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of " the anthropomorphic illusion. " Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because (...) they do not resemble us. The anthropomorphic illusion therefore causes us both to overestimate our power as singular individuals and to underestimate the power of social and political institutions. If we understand ourselves and institutions as " transindividuals " rather than on the illusory model of substantial individuality, it is unproblematic to attribute individuality to collective powers, like the commonwealth, and makes better sense of how we are determined by external forces. (shrink)

One might gather from a reading of Lacan’s ouvre that he never advanced an explicit and systematic theory of resistance and defense, his early critique of IPA methods notwithstanding. Indeed, the combativeness of this critique may lead readers to think that any talk of defense analysis is non-Lacanian. Yet such an omission of a key psychic phenomenon presents a puzzle for clinicians and theorists alike, insofar as it disallows a reckoning with a real-life phenomenon. Taking as its focus Lacan’s remarks (...) in Seminars 1 and 2, this article pushes beyond Lacan’s critique of Ego Psychology, claiming that it is possible to establish a positive Lacanian theory of defenses and of defense analysis in the clinical context. To this end, the article offers a systematic and standardized reconstruction of a positive – distinctively Lacanian – view of what defenses are, where they come from, and how analysts should handle them. In so doing, it presents his startling claim that resistance itself was ultimately a red herring, an artificial problem occasioned by the analyst’s erred handling of the transindividual defenses speaking through the analysand. (shrink)

This paper examines how specific concepts of the self shape discussions about the ethics of changing sex. Specifically, it argues that much of the debate surrounding sex change has assumed a model of the self as authentic and/or atomistic, as demonstrated by both contemporary medical discourses and the recent work of Rubin (2003). This leads to a problematic account of important ethical issues that arise from the desire and decision to change sex. It is suggested that by shifting to a (...) properly intersubjective and performative model of the self, we can better understand (1) the diagnosis of transsexuality; and (2) issues of success, failure and regret with regard to changing sex. The paper also reveals the important implications this shift has for how the relationship between medical practitioners and transindividuals is understood. The paper concludes by showing how the model of the self as authentic can individualise identity and thus downplay or overlook the tight intertwinement between self and other. A properly intersubjective, performative concept of the gendered self places other people at the centre of both an individual’s attempt at self-transformation and the ethical issues that arise during this process. (shrink)