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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

Human progress cannot be measured by what people produce but by the stages of production. The shift from the development of language in the classical period to religion in the medieval and technical progress after the Renaissance does not tell the whole story. Each of these domains forms an internally consistent system involving people as both agents and subjects of development, and each system tends towards a stifling completeness at its height. Each successive system represents a more primitive need: to communicate, to be at one with the world, to sustain life. As such, each is progressively more universal. But technical progress is not truly systemic, passing by peoples of the underdeveloped world, and requires reflexive thought to bring out this failure, and to integrate technical progress with human progress as a whole.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Translator's Note -- Introduction -- The Challenge for Psychology -- The Ethical and Religious Challenge of the Problem -- The History of Ideas and its Dialectic of the Whole -- Animal and Man in Light of the Ontogenesis of the Vital and the Psychical -- First Lesson -- Antiquity -- Pythagoras -- Anaxagoras -- Socrates -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The Stoics -- Conclusion of the First Lesson -- Second Lesson -- Problems and Challenges -- The Apologists -- Saint Augustine -- Saint Thomas -- Giordano Bruno -- Saint Francis of Assisi -- Montaigne -- Descartes -- Malebranche -- Bossuet -- La Fontaine.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Editors' Introduction: Simondon, Finally -- Chapter 1 Technical Mentality -- Explications -- Chapter 2 'Technical Mentality' Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon -- Chapter 3 Identity and Individuation: Some Feminist Reflections -- Chapter 4 Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality -- Implications -- Chapter 5 The Question of Anxiety in Gilbert Simondon -- Chapter 6 Infra-Psychic Individualization: Transductive Connections and the Genesis of Living Techniques -- Chapter 7 'Du mort qui saisit le vif ': Simondonian Ontology Today -- Chapter 8 The Aesthetics of Gilbert Simondon: Anticipation of the Contemporary Aesthetic Experience -- Resonances -- Chapter 9 Gilles Deleuze, a Reader of Gilbert Simondon -- Chapter 10 Science and Ontology: From Merleau- Ponty's 'Reduction' to Simondon's 'Transduction' -- Chapter 11 The Question of the Individual in Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon -- Chapter 12 The Theatre of Individuation: Phase- Shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger -- Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon -- Notes on Contributors -- Index