Mutatis mutandis; or, Analogy and Justification in Simondon’s System

This article is about procedures of justification in Simondon’s philosophical system. Broadly speaking, the article poses the question of what makes—or fails to make—Simondon’s arguments convincing, what binds or grounds his analogies, what gives them their normative force. Focusing on Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information as well as on the important, shorter text, “Form, Information, and Potentials,” it examines what Simondon calls his “analogical method” and explains how the method works as a justificatory procedure. And it raises the question of whether the analogical method assumes the perspective of a certain idealism, an idealism that would otherwise appear to run counter to what has been described as Simondon’s objectivism, materialism, or philosophy of nature. In the end, to resolve these conflicting characterizations of Simondon’s system, the article turns to debates about analogy in literary history, showing how literary analogy has similarly served to negotiate between the necessary and the contingent, inner and outer experience.