Differences in Becoming. Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze on Individuation
Abstract
It is no coincidence that Gilles Deleuze has seen in Gilbert Simondon a major inspiration for his own endeavour of thinking of difference as an operation which owes nothing to dialectical mediation or to the work of the negative. Indeed, both Deleuze and Simondon, try to conveive difference not merely in logical terms, but rather in energetic ones. Both their philosophies are inseparable from a notion of life understood itself as a vibrant and modulatory difference, made of multiple, serpentine lines. The driving hypothesis is that, although both Simondon and Deleuze’s notion of life are essentially related to the notion of differential individuation, Simondon thinks of individuation as transductive difference while Deleuze conceptualizes it as intensive difference.