philosophy of Gilbert Simondon 1924-89) is a key resource for current rizing that questions the idea of the an as a privileged and stand-alone "ty. By otfering an altogether new theory what constitutes an 'individual', he tively challenges the basic tenets of ern logic and metaphysics, and with _,commonly assumed ideas about unity identity. At the same time, Simondon's osophy has inestimable value as a tive to contemporary approaches taking inspiration from cybernetics information theory, tend to conflate · g being and technical being on the ption that there are no significant erences between humans and other igent systems such as machines. Jnstead of talking about substance, er and form, Simondon conceives of individual in terms of systems and es - with special emphasis on the 'on of'metastability', which he borrows thermodynamics. The problem with received ways of conceiving the indi- al, whether from the substantialist oint or from the hylomorphic view- t, is that there is no proper place for JProcess of individuation; that is, for the sis of the individual. Classical notions unity and identity, which conceives the 'dual either as a self-identical entity or a conjunction of form and matter, t us from understanding ontogen- the becoming of being. As Simondon lnts out, the ancients, who in their thcor- g recognized nothing but instability stability, movement and rest, had no conception of metastability. For them, g excludes becoming because 'being implicitly presumed to be in a state of le equilibrium at ail times' ( 1992: 301) . 1 reason why the ancients failed to nize the existence of states with relative permanence was that, as Simondon explains, they did not have an appropriate physical paradigm to help them make sense of such states. 'In order to define metastability, it is necessary to introduce the notion of the potential energy residing in a given system, the notion of order and that of an increase in entropy' (ibid.: 302). Only then is it possible to get a firm grasp of the becoming of being 'as it doubles itself and falls out of step with itself [se déphaser] in the process of individuating' (30 l ). Simondon's notion of the individual challenges established ideas about oneness and sameness in two respects: first, the indi- vidual is never completely one with itself, and second, it is not the whole being but merely a phase in the ongoing genesis of being. The individual, therefore, has only a relative reality; there is always more to being than what is made to appear in a single act of individuation. To corne to terms with this 'more', the non-identity of the individual with itself, Simondon introduces the notion of the 'preindividual'. The idea that becom- ing happens in phases, and that the indi- vidual has only a relative existence as an expression of one of these phases, presup- poses the existence of a preindividual state. As Muriel Combes succinctly puts it: Before ail individuation, being can be understood as a system containing puten- tial energy. Although this energy becomcs active within the system, il is called potcn- tial because il requires a transformation of the system in order Lo be structurcd, that is, to be actualized in accordancc with structures. Preindividual being, and in a gcncral way, any system in a meta- stable statc, harbors potcntials that arc incompatible becausc thcy bclong to dimensions of bcing. Combes 2013: 3-4 This is why prcindividual being - conceivcd as a metastable system rife with potentials