Fissile Ethics: Reading Simondon in Times of Radioactive Immanence

Concerned by nuclear disasters unfolding on a planetary scale, many scholars have issued persuasive calls for us to reconsider how we conceptualize radioactivity. In this article, I show how Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation has something arguably crucial to add to these approaches, for it allows us to enlarge and deepen our understanding of radioactivity. First, I consider Simondon’s comments on nuclear fission, while situating them within his philosophy of individuation. Second, I trace the connections Simondon draws between physics and ethics. Simondon shows how the deductive method in physical sciences, which has lingered on the wave, summons an ethics of self-cosmos relations, while the inductive method, stressing the particle, leans toward an ethical relation of self to self. Simondon then reworks and enlarges the notion of complementarity to argue for a transductive ethics centered on relations of self to other. In this way, I show how the philosophy of individuation offers an ethics that is both timely and significant for this era of radioactive immanence and planetary fallout.