#9901. Simondon Contra New Materialism: Political Anthropology Reloaded

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 24-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Social Sciences (all);
Sociology and Political Science;
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Abstract:
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, epistemologically 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.
Keywords:
Barad; Descartes; Hobbes; new materialism; political anthropology; Simondon; Wiener

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