Transindividuation is a crucial and often misunderstood concept in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy. If individuation explains how an individual comes to be, and the preindividual names the field of potential that makes this possible, then transindividuation is about what happens between individuals—how they co-form, co-become, and evolve together within shared fields of meaning, relation, and transformation.

It is neither a fusion of individuals into a collective, nor an abstraction of the social—it is a process through which shared subjectivity and collective reality become possible.

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1. What Is Transindividuation?

Transindividuation refers to:

• The process by which collective individuation occurs.

• The shared field of relation in which individual and collective transformations happen together.

• The actualization of the preindividual that individuals carry within them, but which can only be resolved or expressed through relation with others.

In short: The individual is never fully formed on their own. They require others—and shared structures—to individuate further.

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2. How It Works: From Preindividual to Collective Individuation

Simondon argues that:

• Each individual retains a preindividual reserve—a surplus of potential that remains unresolved after individuation.

• This surplus cannot be resolved alone. It requires a collective or relational field—a we—to be further actualized.

• Through processes like language, culture, emotional bonds, symbolic systems, and shared labor, this excess finds expression.

This ongoing relational resolution is transindividuation:

• It’s not just interaction—it’s co-formation.

• It doesn’t eliminate individuality—it deepens it through relational intensification.

• It allows individuals to access and resolve parts of themselves they couldn’t reach alone.

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3. Transindividuation ≠ Society as System

Simondon strongly resists reducing the social to:

• The abstract individual of liberal political theory (atomistic, self-contained).

• The totalizing system of structuralism or functionalism (individuals as mere cogs).

Instead:

• The collective emerges through transindividuation.

• There is no ready-made society imposing itself—society is also a becoming.

He writes:

“The collective is not a given but a problem to be constituted and resolved through transindividual processes.”

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4. Examples of Transindividuation

a. Language

• Language is not simply a tool individuals use—it’s a shared medium that enables and shapes individuation.

• Through language, we resolve emotional, symbolic, and cognitive tensions that could not be processed alone.

b. Collective Action or Invention

• In technical invention, collaboration allows individuals to co-constitute new realities neither could achieve alone.

• Example: Scientific breakthroughs or artistic movements are rarely the work of one person in isolation.

c. Love or Political Solidarity

• These are not just feelings or affiliations.

• They are processes that allow individuals to become different than they were—with others, through others.

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5. Transindividuation and Psychic Individuation

Simondon makes a distinction:

• Psychic individuation is the inner process of becoming a subject.

• Collective individuation is the becoming of a collective.

But they are mutually dependent:

• The subject only becomes fully itself by participating in collective meaning-making.

• The collective only forms through the contributions and transformations of singular individuals.

Thus, transindividuation bridges the psychic and collective—it is the middle term where subjectivity and collectivity are co-produced.

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6. Stiegler’s Use of the Concept

Bernard Stiegler, a key inheritor of Simondon, reworks transindividuation in terms of technics and memory:

• He argues that tools, media, and symbolic systems serve as tertiary retentions—external memory supports that mediate collective individuation.

• Transindividuation, in this view, is shaped by how we share and access collective memory, education, and culture.

For Stiegler, crisis (like attention collapse or social fragmentation) occurs when transindividuation breaks down—when individuals cannot co-construct meaning or process their preindividual tensions with others.

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7. Why It Matters

a. Ontologically

Transindividuation reveals that:

• Being is always relational and incomplete.

• Individuation is never a closed process; it opens out onto the world and others.

b. Ethically & Politically

• Atomized subjects and closed systems are fictions that lead to alienation.

• Real transformation—personal or collective—requires conditions for transindividuation: dialogue, shared practices, symbolic mediation.

c. In Mental Health

• Preindividual tensions unexpressed or unshared can become sources of psychic suffering.

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Summary

Transindividuation is the dynamic relational process by which individuals and collectives co-individuate through shared structures, symbols, and practices. It is the condition for becoming-with, thinking-with, and resolving the excess that no individual can carry alone.

Simondon’s vision is a non-reductive, non-totalizing ontology of relation—one that offers a radically different way of thinking subjectivity, collectivity, and transformation.

ChatGPT said:

The preindividual is arguably the most radical and generative concept in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy. It reconfigures how we think about existence, difference, and becoming—not by starting with fully-formed individuals, but by locating a domain of potential that precedes and exceeds individuation. The preindividual is the groundless ground of being—not a void, but a charged field of tensions, incompatibilities, and metastability.

Let’s unpack it carefully:

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1. Against the Already-Formed Individual

Most Western philosophy—Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, even Hegel—takes the individual as the basic unit of thought: self-contained, stable, already-formed. Simondon breaks with this. For him:

• The individual is not the beginning; it is a phase.

• Something comes before the individual. Not chronologically before, but ontologically prior—a kind of being-before-being.

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2. What Is the Preindividual?

The preindividual is not a thing, substance, or even a state. It’s a field of potentiality—a metastable condition containing unresolved tensions and gradients of energy or information. Importantly:

• It is not chaos or pure formlessness.

• It is structured, but not yet actualized into a determinate individual.

• It is charged with potential, like a tightly coiled spring or a supersaturated solution just waiting for a disturbance to precipitate form.

Simondon calls this metastability: the system is not at rest, but is overdetermined, loaded with more potential than any one outcome can resolve.

Key point: The preindividual is not what the individual emerges from like clay from which a pot is formed. It is an ongoing excess that remains in the individual and can be reactivated in further individuation.

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3. Individuation as Resolution of Tensions

When individuation occurs—whether in a crystal, a living being, or a psychic event—it happens by:

• Triggering a phase shift or transduction (Simondon’s term).

• Resolving some tensions in the metastable field.

• But not all—there’s always a residue of the preindividual that persists.

This residue allows for:

• Further individuation (the process is never final).

• The transindividual relation—shared fields of becoming across subjects or systems.

So: Individuation never fully uses up the preindividual. Individuals are always haunted by their own excess, open to transformation.

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4. Preindividual and the Human Subject

For Simondon, the human psyche is never fully individuated. It is split between:

• What has been individuated (the stable aspects of identity).

• What remains preindividual (unresolved tensions, emotional or cognitive potentials).

This is why human beings are:

• Always open to change, growth, transformation.

• Capable of connecting with others (via the transindividual) because we share preindividual fields.

This can be compared to the unconscious in psychoanalysis—but Simondon avoids any spatial model like "depth" or repression. Instead, the preindividual is ontological, not psychological. It’s not a hidden part of the individual—it is anterior to and immanent in every individual.

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5. Philosophical and Political Stakes

a. Ethical & Political Implications

Simondon’s preindividual destabilizes the idea of fixed identity or atomized subjectivity:

• There is no “true self” hidden underneath.

• We are always in process, and always share something with others before identity.

This undercuts essentialist politics or rigid individualism. It offers a foundation for relationality, transformation, and co-becoming.

b. Ontological Reorientation

The preindividual lets us think of being not as a substance, but as a potential for individuation. This has echoes in:

• Deleuze’s “virtual”

• Whitehead’s “eternal objects” and “concrescence”

• Quantum fields or dynamic systems in physics

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6. Technical Example: Crystallization

Simondon uses crystals to model individuation:

• A supersaturated solution (preindividual) contains the conditions for the crystal.

• A tiny disturbance (like a dust mote) triggers crystallization—a phase shift.

• The crystal grows, resolving the metastable field into a structure.

• But the solution still retains uncrystallized potential.

Here, you see the preindividual as a reservoir of transformation.

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7. Comparison: Not Pure Potential, Not Chaos

It’s important to avoid conflating the preindividual with:

• Aristotle’s potentiality (dunamis)—which is tied to a final cause or form.

• Heidegger’s Being—which is too closely tied to human Dasein.

• Chaos or disorder—which lacks internal structure.

Instead, the preindividual is structured potentiality without pre-given form—a tension-rich field that can produce multiple individuations without being reducible to any of them.

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Final Summary

The preindividual is Simondon’s name for the ontological excess from which individuation emerges and toward which it always remains open.

It is:

• Before the individual,

• In the individual,

• Shared across individuals,

• And not exhausted by any actualization.

Simondon’s metaphysics thus rethinks being as an ongoing becoming, fueled by the preindividual, shaped through individuation, and extended across transindividual relations.