Far Stranger than Borrowing: Simondon, Bréhier, Deleuze, Guattari

This essay considers Gilbert Simondon’s relation to the history of philosophy, above all to the work of his teacher Émile Bréhier, and charts Simondon’s borrowing from the template of Bréhier’s multi-volume History of Philosophy in the posthumously published portion of his doctoral thesis, “History of the Notion of the Individual.” This form of external, synthetic borrowing is likened to Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bréhier’s notion of the incorporeal in The Logic of Sense, and illustrates a form of Simondian philosophical transindividuation in which a seeming appropriation is the vehicle for a new orientation that synthesizes and blends thought, exceeding the individual thinker. Deleuze’s appropriation of Simondon, however, reflects a second type of internal, disjunctive borrowing whereby Deleuze ostensibly draws on Simondon’s concepts to populate the less favored side of Deleuzian differenciation, as is the case in Difference and Repetition. Simondon thus serves a double-edged role as enabler and antagonist, and ultimately a precursor for the subterranean style of internal double-agency that Deleuze perfected with Félix Guattari.