Transindividuality

= concept from Etienne Balibar that indicates individuality is always social

Description

Jason Read:

"This term, although associated with the work of Gilbert Simondon, is positioned by Balibar between two ways of understanding the relation between the individual and society. The first considers the individual to be immediately given, society, or the state, is then nothing other than the sum total of the effects of individual wills, actions, and decisions. Opposed to this idea is the conception of society, culture, or the state as an organic or functional totality, determining and constituting the individuals and subjects it requires. Balibar traces these two positions throughout the history of philosophy, in which the myriad different positions in philosophy were cast into two poles: the individual or society, freedom or totality.

More to the point for Balibar is the idea that transindividuality is a way out of this impasse, out of this deadlock, which posits the individual or society as the starting point, reducing everything to its will or functions. Transindividuality is not so much a third way, but a way of thinking the unavoidable interrelation of the other two. Transindividuality underscores the fact that individuation is always individuation in and of a particular collectivity. Balibar develops this argument specifically with respect to Spinoza (in part influence by Alexandre Matheron’s monumental study, which developed the idea of “transindividuality” avant la lettre), but he also finds the idea in Marx, Freud, and (with some reservations) Hegel. Spinoza’s thought, with its general orientation of “not opposed but different” seems to be a useful and necessary figure for overcoming persistent dualisms; with Balibar’s focus on transindividuality we can add individual and society to the more well known oppositions between God and nature and mind and body, the oppositions that Spinoza overcomes, or at least displaces through his anomalous position. As Balibar argues there is a certain sense in which Spinoza argues that everything that exists is an individual, defined by its particular conatus, or striving, but this individual is itself affected to act in a determinate manner by its relations with others. The individual is not opposed to the collective but is a modification of it, and vice versa." (http://unemployednegativity.blogspot.com/2010/08/transindividuality-equaliberty-short.html)