Imagination and Invention

by Gilbert Simondon, Joe Hughes (Translator), Christophe Wall-Romana (Translator)

A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images

Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty— Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work. Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Ben]

10/10.

[Micah]

The image and imagination have always seemed fundamental and overdetermining for philosophers, but also enigmatic, not easily placed in relation to reasoning, sensation, memory etc. For Simondon the image belongs to the living, and in fact is a kind of living organism itself, almost a parasite, growing, mutating, evolving and branching out. Neither inside nor outside, it brings together extremes by actively formalizing, recruiting and amplifying. Passing through several cycles, it enriches the body as it interfaces with the milieu, becoming a symbol and culminating in a creative prosthesis that can be detached and proliferate.