Affectivité et invention chez Gilbert Simondon. Du vivant au transindividuel

In this paper we will show how the concepts of affectivity and invention play a fundamental role both in Simondon’s attempt to account for the relations between the living individual and its environment and in its questioning of the passage from the individuation of living beings to the transindividual individuation. We will first see how affectivity generates a problematic between the individual and its environment that can only be solved by the inventive polarization of the living individual. We will then underline how the limits of individual affectivity call for a transindividual individuation which is accomplished by the intervention of the group as the possibility for the individual to take part in a collective invention that, by exceeding its individuality, allows it to prolong itself.