71 definitions
The book's index
The Genesis of the Individual
51 concepts · 71 definitions
- affectivity1
- analogy1
- anxiety1
- atomism1
- becoming1
- Being2
- classical logic1
- collective1
- complementarity1
- crystal1
- cybernetics1
- discovery1
- form2
- gestalt theory1
- group1
- haecceity1
- hylomorphism2
- identity1
- individual4
- individuation5
- induction1
- information5
- interiority1
- invention1
- knowledge1
- life2
- living being3
- machine1
- mediation1
- milieu1
- monad1
- negative1
- object1
- ontogenesis1
- participation1
- past1
- plant1
- preindividual2
- principium individuationis1
- psyche2
- relation2
- sensation1
- society1
- structure1
- subject1
- substance1
- synthesis1
- time1
- transindividual1
- unity1
- world1
Information (n.) is never a thing sent but the strain between two realities out of step — the meaning that flashes up when they suddenly become one system.
Information (n.) begins not with the sender but with a receiver on the verge of changing; tell something to a settled system and nothing has been said.
Information (n.) must be rescued from the engineers: mistaking it for signals and channels repeats the ancients' mistake of taking form for a mold.
Information (n.) always lives in the present: the recipe for a becoming cannot exist before the becoming it guides.
Individuation (n.) cannot be known from outside, only done: we grasp how things become themselves only by becoming ourselves alongside them.
Individuation (n.) never produces an individual alone; it always produces a couple — the individual and its surroundings, born in the same stroke.
Individuation (n.) is not the thing that needs explaining; it is the place where the explaining is to be found.
Individuation (n.) is a system's partial, provisional truce with its own incompatibility.
The Individual (n.) is only a phase of being — a partial answer that never spends all the potential it came out of.
The Individual (n.) is neither a substance nor a cog of society: the collective is already inside it, as the unfinished part it was born with.
The Individual (n.) carries an unspent inheritance from before it existed — a charge from which further births can still come.
The Individual (n.) should be read off the process that made it, never the process read off the individual — we keep hurrying past the birth to admire the baby.
The Living being (n.) is not just the outcome of individuation, like a molecule, but the theater where individuation keeps playing.
The Living being (n.) is both more and less than one: it carries a problem inside itself and is also a piece of somebody else's larger problem.
The Living being (n.) is a knot of information sending messages through itself — a system inside a system, brokering between two scales.
Life (n.) is an individuation that never ends: a crystal is born once and finished, while a living thing keeps on being born.
Life (n.) is the discovery, in the middle of a conflict, of a new set of rules that gathers all the warring parts into one system.
A Relation (n.) is not a bridge built between two things that already exist; it is itself a being, still growing.
A Relation (n.) is born at the same moment as the things it relates; it does not wait around for them to exist first.
Hylomorphism (n.) always arrives too early: it lays out the matter and the form before the making begins, and so never witnesses the moment a thing is born.
Hylomorphism (n.) is the workshop mistaken for metaphysics: the craftsman's picture of stamping a shape onto stuff, blown up into a theory of how everything comes to be.
The Preindividual (n.) is more than one thing, which is why the law of the excluded middle cannot get a grip on it.
The Preindividual (n.) is being before it has any phases — not yet one thing, and so not yet out of step with anything.
The Psyche (n.) cannot settle its own case alone; the unfinished charge it carries from before birth is exactly what ties it to others.
The Psyche (n.) is a being trying to solve a problem in which it is itself one of the pieces.
Form (n.) must give way to information — not a mold pressed on from outside, but the meaning that arises when a mismatch resolves itself.
Form (n.) is a notion distilled from finished products, so it sees only an impoverished world with every potential already drained out.