The Theater of Individuation: Phase-shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger1

We know very well that where Heidegger says that time is the veritable principle of individuation, Simondon responds that there is no principle of individuation, but the process of individuation. Since the reading that I proposed of Being and Time, I have maintained that one of the major concepts that has allowed for the philosophical advances of the twentieth century—as much neglected and misunderstood as it has remained, also in Heidegger—is the concept of primary retention discovered by Husserl in 1905. I will not explain again here the reasons that led me to claim that even if I share with Husserl the point of view that absolutely distinguishes primary retention, which is the “big now” of perception, to speak like Gérard Granel,3 from secondary retention, which is, like the second synthesis of the Critique of Pure Reason, the result of reproduction and imagination in memory and thus as past,4 I no longer agree at all with Husserl when he claims that primary retention owes nothing at all to secondary retention. I have tried to show that primary retention is always a primary selection and that this selection is always brought out in function of secondary retentions that anticipate the primary retention in the form of secondary protentions (with the primary protentions being carried by the temporal object that supports the phenomenon) and that as such filter it. Furthermore and above all, I have attempted to show that the conditions under which secondary retentions perforate primary retentions, which are thus primary selections, are overdetermined by the factical and prosthetic conditions under which the now can have access to its already-there that is past and secondary, namely through the artifacts in which what I call “tertiary retentions” consist, which is to say, the supports of what we are about to examine as a process of individuation.