Process and Relation: Origins of the Autonomist Theory of Individuation
Any political theory is built on the foundation of a certain ontology, an integral part of which is the problem of an individual. For a long time, the ontological primacy in the European thought was attached to the concept of an individual that was understood as a complete and selfsufficient unit. However, today one can talk about the growing popularity of the approach that views an individual as a relative reality in a state of continuous formation i.e., the process of individuation. This approach is developed by the Italian intellectuals, whose general ideological view is known as autonomism (P.Virno, M.Lazzarato, A.Negri etc.). The article examines the origins of the theory of individuation and its political implications within the autono mist thought. The first part of the article examines the ways of representing an individual in the ontologies of B.Spinoza and G.Simondon. The author demonstrates that the procedural and relational understanding of an individual proposed by these philosophers contributes to bridging the gap between the collective and the individual not only in politics, but also in thinking. An individual is a consequence of the concretization of the general and retains a connection with it. The second part analyzes the psychological and linguistic aspects of individuation, elaborated in L.Vygotsky’s psychology and M.Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue. Individuation is interpreted as a movement from the social to the individual, carried out with the help of various tools, primarily by the means of the language. The author evaluates the reception of these thinkers’ ideas in the context of autonomism. The author concludes that the autonomist concept of individuation is a synthetic theory that brings together the general aspects of the consi dered above schools of thought into a single perspective. In fact, the concept is a large-scale revision of the ontological and anthropological foundations of thinking about politics. Its goal is to destroy the idea of a “sovereign individual”, which was born within the liberal tradition, and, as a consequence, to liberate the sphere of the collective from the control of capital.