Staff Profiles

POLI5001 Political Thought 1

POLI5007 Political Thought 2

SOCI6005 Theorising Society

POLI6001 Freedom, Justice and Political Thought

Modules taught

• Political and Social Thought

• Nationalism, Identity and Ethnicity (seminars) The State and Revolution

• Marx and Marxism

• Fascism

• Introduction to Politics

• Politics in Comparative Perspective

• Advanced Research in international Relations (MA)

Supervision

I welcome PhD proposals in the following subject areas: History of Political Thought (esp. Seventeenth Century), Contemporary French Political Theory (esp. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Gilbert Simondon), Political and Social Theory. 

Current supervisions:

Massimo Bardin, Cinema and Political Pedagogy in Pasolini and Deleuze

My area of academic specialisation is political theory/philosophy and the history of political thought. My research focusses on the relationship between science, technology and politics in both early modern philosophy and twentieth-century French philosophy. I have undertaken studies of the influence of Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy on the development of Hobbes's political theory, and the reception of French philosophy, epistemology and classical sociology on Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation processes. As part of my research, I seek to develop a critique of the ideological function of natural scientific models conceived as ontological and epistemological foundations within social and political theory.

Research group membership

• European Hobbes Society
• CIDES Centre international des études simondoniennes (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme - Paris-Nord)
• Centre for Global Politics, Economy and Society (Oxford Brookes University)

Books

• Bardin A, Epistemology and political philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: individuation, technics, social systems, Springer (2015)
  eISSN: 1879-7210 ISBN: 9789401798303 eISBN: 9789401798310
  Abstract This combination of historiography and theory offers the growing Anglophone readership interested in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon a thorough and unprecedented survey of the French philosopher's entire oeuvre. The publication, which breaks new ground in its thoroughness and breadth of analysis, systematically traces the interconnections between Simondon's philosophy of science and technology on the one hand, and his political philosophy on the other.The author sets Simondon's ideas in the context of the epistemology of the late 1950s and the 1960s in France, the milieu that shaped a generation of key French thinkers such as Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. This volume explores Simondon's sources, which were as eclectic as they were influential: from the philosophy of Bergson to the cybernetics of Wiener, from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to the epistemology of Canguilhem, and from Bachelard's philosophy of science to the positivist sociology and anthropology of luminaries such as Durkheim and Leroi-Gourhan. It also tackles aspects of Simondon's philosophy that relate to Heidegger and Elull in their concern with the ontological relationship between technology and society and discusses key scholars of Simondon such as Barthelemy, Combes, Stiegler, and Virno, as well as the work of contemporary protagonists in the philosophical debate on the relevance of technique. The author's intimate knowledge of Simondon's language allows him to resolve many of the semantic errors and misinterpretations that have plagued reactions to Simondon's many philosophical neologisms, often drawn from his scientific studies.Website 

Journal articles

• Bardin A, Ferrari M, 'Governing progress: From cybernetic homeostasis to Simondon’s politics of metastability'
  The Sociological Review 70 (2) (2022) pp.248-263
  ISSN: 0038-0261 eISSN: 1467-954X
  Abstract

  In this article we analyse the idea of progress and show that, since its early-modern inception, it has relied on a twofold commitment. On the one hand, it rests on a project of mathematical modelisation of natural and social reality, deterministically conceived. On the other hand, it requires the production of a stable social order capable of implementing that model. This stance, we argue, is still dominant and defines the ‘(hyper-)modern condition’. Following Gilbert Simondon, we take the cybernetic notion of dynamic stability (‘homeostasis’) as paradigmatic of the hyper-modern condition. As we explain, this core notion has covered multiple epistemic domains, including the social sciences, and contributed to reformulate the modern idea of progress within the terms dictated by neoliberal governmentality. The connection we establish between cybernetics and neoliberalism will eventually allow us to use Simondon’s theory against both. In our view, Simondon’s concept of ‘metastability’ supports an alternative understanding of progress based on the ideas of social change and the government of normative invention, which includes the opening of social systems to a future beyond their own preservation.
  

  Website 
• Bardin A, Raimondi F, 'Shall we forget human nature? Political anthropology and technics from Marx and Engels to Simondon'
  Contemporary Political Theory Online first (2022)
  ISSN: 1470-8914 eISSN: 1476-9336
  Abstract

  Human nature is something of a taboo on the left wing of contemporary political theory and scarcely more than a common-sense assumption on its right wing. This article aims to expose the taboo and challenge the assumption. There is no way, we argue, to defeat conservative political theory without delving into political anthropology. With this purpose in mind, our paper analyses the writings of Marx and Engels, and Simondon’s concepts of the transindividual and technics. It shows that Simondon’s theory of technics allows new interpretations of many of the themes scattered in Marx and Engels’s works, and helps formulate a materialist political anthropology that entails a political project of liberating ‘human nature’ from labour.

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Liberty and representation in Hobbes: a materialist theory of 'conatus''
  History of European Ideas Online first (2021)
  ISSN: 0191-6599 eISSN: 1873-541X
  Abstract

  The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes’s political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philosophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and explains them against the background of Hobbes’s elaboration of a deterministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on ideas of individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance. The second section explains why the concept of representation that Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be interpreted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes’s materialist theory of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination.

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Simondon Contra New Materialism: Political Anthropology Reloaded'
  Theory, Culture & Society 38 (5) (2021) pp.25-44
  ISSN: 0263-2764 eISSN: 1460-3616
  Abstract

  This paper responds to an invitation to historians of political thought to enter the debate on new materialism. It combines Simondon’s philosophy of individuation with some aspects of post-humanist and new materialist thought, without abandoning a more classically ‘historical’ characterization of materialism. Two keywords drawn from Barad and Simondon respectively – ‘ontoepistemology’ and ‘axiontology’ – represent the red thread of a narrative that connects the early modern invention of civil science (emblematically represented here by the ‘conceptual couple’ Descartes-Hobbes) to Wiener’s cybernetic theory of society. The political stakes common to these forms of mechanical materialism were attacked ontologically, epis- temologically and politically by Simondon. His approach, I will argue, opens the path for a genuine materialist critique of the political anthropology implicit in modern political thought, and shifts political thinking from politics conceived as a problem to be solved to politics as an arena of strategic experimentation.

  Website 
• Bardin A, Carrozzini G, Rodríguez P, 'The Work of Simondon: Introduction to the Special Issue'
  Philosophy Today 63 (3) (2019) pp.567-570
  ISSN: 0031-8256 eISSN: 2329-8596
  Website 
• Bardin A, 'From life to matter: Simondon’s political epistemology'
  Philosophy Today 63 (3) (2019) pp.643-657
  ISSN: 0031-8256 eISSN: 2329-8596
  Abstract

  Simondon’s philosophy of individuation attacks the opposition between liberty and necessity, a key institution of the supposed ontological ‘difference’ between the human being and nature in most of modern political thought. Distinguishing between ontological and epistemological determinism, I will show the political significance of Simondon’s refusal to either reduce human beings to natural determinism or save their alleged metaphysical nature. Simondon inherits part of his critical programme and a good deal of the tools he uses to construct it from Georges Canguilhem. My reading starts from an enigma concerning quantum mechanics the former jotted down on paper while involved in the Second World War antifascist struggle. I will suggest that Simondon’s philosophy exposes the two equally anthropomorphic understandings of nature shared by fascism and technocracy. This will allow me to explain the ideological function voluntarism and human engineering can jointly perform by reinforcing and exploiting the apparent opposition between liberty and necessity, on the basis of their complementary teleological justification for political action.
  

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Materialism and Right Reason in Hobbes’s Political Treatises: A Troubled Foundation for Civil Science'
  History of Political Thought 40 (1) (2019) pp.85-110
  ISSN: 0143-781X
  Abstract After abandoning the approach taken in The Elements of Law, Hobbes used De cive to establish his new civil science on a materialist basis, thus challenging the dualist foundations of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy. This shift is analysed here with close reference to the discontinuity in Hobbes’s use of the concepts of ‘laws of nature’ and ‘right reason’. The article argues that, the descriptive nature of mechanics notwithstanding, De cive’s foundational aim left civil science with the normative task of producing its own material conditions of possibility until, in Leviathan, Hobbes went as far as reconsidering Plato’s philosophical commitment to political pedagogy.Website 
• Bardin A, Rodriguez P, 'A vindication of Simondon’s political anthropology'
  Australasian Philosophical Review 2 (1) (2018) pp.54-61
  ISSN: 2474-0500 eISSN: 2474-0519
  Abstract

  Our article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements (the ‘three orders of consideration’) for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon's way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’.
  

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Hobbes, materialismo e libertà'
  Scienza e Politica 30 (58) (2018) pp.51-70
  ISSN: 1590-4946 eISSN: 1825-9618
  Abstract

  L’antropologia politica di Hobbes è fondata su un processo di elaborazione del concetto di libertà che dipende, a sua volta, dallo sviluppo del progetto di un sistema generale delle scienze volto a rendere compatibili ontologia materialista e fondazione epistemologica. Questo articolo analizza in particolare la problematizzazione del concetto di libertà dopo il De cive, fino al collasso delle sue componenti descrittiva e normativa nel Leviatano. In questa luce vanno rilette anche alcune innovazioni concettuali del capolavoro hobbesiano, attraverso cui le libertà naturali degli uomini sono integralmente assorbite nel funzionamento artificiale del corpo politico. = Hobbes’s political anthropology is grounded on a concept of liberty whose elaboration was influenced by the development of his project for a materialist philosophical system. Hobbes’s attempt to provide a definitive foundation for civil science led him to re-elaborate the concept of liberty after De cive, and eventually conflate its descriptive and normative components in Leviathan. Some of Leviathan’s conceptual innovations can thus be related to Hobbes’s attempt to absorb the natural liberties of individuals in the body politic’s artificial functioning.
  

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'L'epistemologia politica di Simondon'
  Aut Aut 2018 (377) (2018) pp.91-105
  ISSN: 0005-0601
  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Philosophy as political technē: The tradition of invention in Simondon’s political thought'
  Contemporary Political Theory 17 (4) (2018) pp.417-436
  ISSN: 1470-8914 eISSN: 1476-9336
  Abstract Gilbert Simondon has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers and theorists,
  despite he is rather renowned as a philosopher of technics – as the author of Of the Mode of
  Existence of Technical Objects – who also elaborated a general theory of complex systems in
  Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information. A group of scholars has
  developed Gilles Deleuze’s early suggestion that Simondon’s social ontology might offer the
  basis for a re-theorisation of radical democracy. Others, following Herbert Marcuse, have
  instead focused on Simondon’s analysis of the relationship between technology and society.
  However, only a joint study of Simondon’s two major works can reveal their implicit
  political stakes. As I will argue, Simondon’s anti-Aristotelianism and his anti-Heideggerian
  understanding of the Greek origins of philosophy, allow us to conceive philosophical thought
  as a ‘tradition of invention’, that is, a pedagogical technē endowed with the political task of
  maintaining the openness of the social system and allowing normative invention to emerge
  from within.Website 
• Bardin A, Carrozzini G, 'Organising invention through technical mentality: Simondon’s challenge to the civilisation of productivity'
  Culture and Organization 23 (1) (2017) pp.26-33
  ISSN: 1475-9551 eISSN: 1477-2760
  Abstract According to Simondon, it is through the implementation of a ‘technical mentality’ that a technocratic system grounded on a communitarian ‘ethics of productivity’ can be transformed into a system of metastable functioning as a value. Simondon’s overall project is twofold, aiming
  both at a unified paradigm for the social sciences, and at a pedagogy of technics, inspired by the concept of the technical mentality. The goal of this article is to provide a conjoint and consistent analysis of Simondon’s paradigm by connecting the concepts of ‘organising amplification’ and
  ‘technical mentality’.Website 
• Bardin A, Raimondi F, 'Del hombre a la materia : Simondon a la luz de Marx y Althusser'
  Demarcaciones : revista latinoamericana de estudios Althusserianos 4 (2016) pp.116-132
  ISSN: 0719-4730
  Abstract Una tentativa de aproximación conjunta de Simondon, Marx y Althusser se ve
  enfrentada con tres pensadores cuya distancia es puesta en evidencia por los pesos respectivos
  de sus historiografías filosóficas: puede ser que un día, cuando podamos comprender el
  pensamiento de Simondon a partir de sus efectos, podamos hablar de él en plural, así como
  hoy debemos elegir entre varios Marx y varios Althusser. Entonces hablaremos del Marx al que
  Simondon se refiere de manera polémica, en particular a través de su crítica del paradigma del
  trabajo, al cual le opone su nuevo paradigma, anti-sustancialista y anti-determinista. Este
  paradigma, que estaba lejos de las visiones oficiales de los partidos comunistas, era en medida
  compartido por Marx y Althusser. A los fines de aclarar esto, nos referiremos brevemente a
  diferentes aspectos de la filosofía de Althusser que, aunque fueron elaborados en otras
  matrices teóricas y políticas, suenan familiares a los de Simondon. Luego discutiremos –desde
  un punto de vista marxiano– los límites de la aproximación política simondoniana, para
  finalmente indicar, dentro de su epistemología, la fuente de una posible filosofía política
  materialista. Una crítica de la antropología de la libertad y la determinación, con la que
  Althusser trata nivel histórico, parece abrir un camino común. Este no es un camino que
  Simondon habría aceptado calificar como “materialista”, pero nos permite comprender aquello
  que su filosofía nos autoriza a pensar: de hecho, el propósito de nuestra intervención es sugerir
  que la “epistemología política” de Simondon nos lleva a responder a los presupuestos teóricos
  sobre los que se ha desarrollado el patrón dominante de la ciencia política moderna.Website 
• Bardin A, 'The monstrosity of matter in motion: Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes’s political epistemology'
  Philosophy Today 60 (1) (2016) pp.25-43
  ISSN: 0031-8256 eISSN: 2329-8596
  Abstract Along the path opened by Galileo’s mechanics, early modern mechanical philosophy provided the metaphysical framework in which ‘matter in motion’ underwent a process of reduction to mathematical description and to physical explanation. The struggle against the monstrous contingency of matter in motion generated epistemological monsters in the domains of both the natural and civil science. In natural philosophy Descartes’s institution of Reason as a disembodied subject dominated the whole process. In political theory it was Hobbes who opposed the artificial unity of the body politic to the monstrous multiplicity of the multitude. Through a parallel analysis of the basic structure of Descartes’s and Hobbes’s enterprises, this article explains in which sense Hobbes’s peculiar form of materialism is in fact to be considered a surreptitious reduction of materialism to its ideological counterpart, Cartesian dualism, and to its implicit political-pedagogical project.Website 
• Bardin A, Menegalle G, 'Introduction to Simondon'
  Radical Philosophy 189 (Jan/Feb) (2015) pp.15-16
  ISSN: 0300-211X eISSN: 0300-211X
  Website 
• Bardin A, Pellarin S, Vicenzutto D, 'Un’ontologia della rivoluzione. Badiou con (Deleuze, Lacan)'
  Journal of Badiou Studies 3 (1) (2014) pp.48-75
  ISSN: 2049-9027 ISBN: 9780692232835
  Abstract The impressive force of Badiou‟s philosophy resides in its capacity to directly question the
  connection between ontology and politics. According to Badiou, the autonomy of politics as a
  „generic procedure‟ cannot be disjoined from the mathematical formalisation of the relationship
  between One and multiplicity. Crucial to his concern has been the reference to both Deleuze and
  Lacan, who he assumes have accomplished two different traditions in twentieth-century French
  philosophy: „vitalist mysticism‟ and „mathematising idealism‟. It is in the second one, although in
  discontinuity with Lacan, to which Badiou sutures his project.
  The Lacanian concept of the „not-all‟, in its relation to the notion of singularity, is the theoretical
  tool which allows Badiou to shape his own thought in relation to both Deleuze and Lacan.
  According to Badiou, if the first did not escape the ontological identification of Being and the One,
  the second ended cancelling the radical contingency of the Subject. From his perspective the two
  failures are different outcomes of the same fundamental incapability of defining the ontological
  status of the event.
  Our hypothesis is that the two lines of thought sketched by Badiou in fact share precisely the
  problem which emerges in his philosophy with exemplary clarity: it is the problem of conceiving
  and recognising the eruption of the entirely new (the event) within the given ontological horizon,
  namely the problem of revolution. The transposition of this problem from the political field
  appears to be the ground of Badiou‟s own mathematical ontology. The question posed by our essay is whether Badiou‟s ontological-political stance – although representing it in its purity – is actually part of the problem that haunted most of French (political) thought during the last century.Website 

Book chapters

• Bardin A, 'Sur la technicité de la philosophie : l’oeuvre de Simondon à la lumière de la note complémentaire' in Clarizio E, Guchet X (ed.), Vie, anthropologie, politique. Perspectives italiennes contemporaines en philosophie des techniques, Éditions Mimésis (2019)
  ISBN: 9788869761898
  Abstract

  This paper takes the understanding of philosophy as political techne to be at the core of Gilbert Simondon’s thought. This is shown against the background of the Note Complémentaire, a short text written at the same time as his two main works Du mode d’existence des objets techniques and L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. An analysis of the specific function played by technics within culture in Simondon’s thought helps draw a line that connects the two books. Culture is conceived as a regulatory apparatus of social systems, made of structures and processes of transindividual individuation recurrently made metastable by both biological and technical factors. In my conclusions, I deal with Simondon’s understanding of philosophy as a pedagogical tradition, that is a subset of culture carrying and spreading the schemas of political invention it has developed from technics since its pre-Socratic origins.
  

  Website 
• Bardin A, 'La société, «machine autant que vie»: régulation et invention politique entre Wiener, Canguilhem et Simondon' in V. Bontems (ed.), Gilbert Simondon et l'invention du futur. Actes de la décade des 5-15 août 2013 du Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, Klincksieck (2016)
  ISBN: 9782252040201
  Website 
• Bardin A, 'Cultura y técnica entre Bergson y Leroi-Gourhan. La política como problema en Simondon' in Blanco J, et al. (ed.), Amar a las máquinas. Cultura y técnica en Gilbert Simondon, Prometeo Libros (2016)
  
• Bardin A, Carrozzini G, 'Simondon, tecnica e mito' in Leghissa G, Manera E (ed.), Filosofie del Mito nel Novecento, Carocci (2015)
  ISBN: 9788843075218
  Website 
• Bardin A, 'On substances and causes again: Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and the critique of the metaphysical roots of determinism' in Sarti A, et al (ed.), Morphogenesis and individuation, Springer (2015)
  ISBN: 9783319051000 eISBN: 9783319051017
  Abstract In his main work, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Gilbert Simondon displayed a theory of the discontinuous processes of individuation (or ‘ontogenesis’) from which structures emerge. Linking the concepts of singularity and historicity through the paradigmatic assumption of quantum physics, Simondon attacked both determinism and indeterminism by way of an original critique—neither empiricist nor idealistic—of the concepts of substance and cause.
  
  Il faut arriver à dissoudre cet énorme bloc du déterminisme métaphysique qui pèse sur la pensée scientifique
  
  Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifiqueWebsite 
• Bardin A, 'Cultura y técnica entre Bergson y Leroi-Gourhan. La política como problema en Simondon' in J. Blanco, D. Parente, P. Rodríguez, A. Vaccari (ed.), Amar a las máquinas. Cultura y técnica en Gilbert Simondon, Prometeo Libros (2015)
  ISBN: 9875747270
  Website 
• , 'De l’homme à la matière, pour une ontologie difficile. Marx avec Simondon' in Barthélémy JH (ed.), Cahiers Simondon 5, l'Harmattan ()
  

Areas of expertise

History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Political Philosophy

Conferences

Recent invited papers

• 2021 – University of Hildesheim (Germany): 'Gilbert Simondon: Ecological, aesthetic and technological modes of existence' (international conference)
• 2021 – RELES, Red Latinoamericana de Estudios Simondonianos: 'Simondon indisciplinar' (international seminar series)
• 2019 – University of Padua (Italy): ‘The Government of Entropy’ (international conference)
• 2019 – Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana of Medellin (Colombia): ‘IV Coloquio Internacional Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Formation and Technology’ (international conference)
• 2019 – Goldsmiths, University of London (UK): ‘After Progress: Modernity in Ruins’ (symposium series)
• 2019 – Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany): ‘Between Primary and Secondary Information: Simondon and the question of complexity and control’ (workshop)
• 2019 – King’s College London (UK): ‘Simondon and the Concept of Information’ (interdisciplinary symposium)
• 2018 – USP Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil): ‘Gilbert Simondon, os sentidos da individuação’ (international conference)
• 2018 – Université de Montréal (Canada): ‘Architecture in Light of the Notions of Form and Information’ (Phyllis Lambert Seminar)
• 2017 – Durham University (UK): ‘Epistemology and Ontology of the Milieu: from Canguilhem to Simondon’ (international conference)
• 2017 – Kingston University (UK): ‘Simondon and Technics’ (workshop)
• 2017 – Bicocca University of Milan (Italy): ‘Simondon and Althusser’ (international conference)
• 2016 – Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany): ‘The Tradition of Invention: Philosophy as Political Techne according to Simondon’ (international conference).
• 2015 – Paris I La Sorbonne (France): ‘Political Invention between Technicity and “Philosophical Thought”’ (international conference).
• 2015 – Sapienza University of Rome (Italy): ‘Simondon between Individuation and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques’ (lecture series).
• 2015 – UBA University of Buenos Aires and National University of Córdoba (Argentina): ‘Beyond the Social Automaton: Models and Images for the Body Politic after Leviathan’ (lectures).

Press, publicity and reviews

Book reviews of Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015:

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/epistemology-and-political-philosophy-in-gilbert-simondon-individuation-technics-social-systems/

http://www.ladeleuziana.org/2015/07/03/review-epistemology-and-political-philosophy-in-gilbert-simondon/