JORGE FELIPE HENRY

In the following research, the relationship between Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical work “Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information” (ILFI) and Maurice Leenhardt’s anthropological work “Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World” (DK), is approached through concepts that are outside philosophy and anthropology. We will bring to DK, via analogy, notions Simondon borrowed from thermodynamics, quantum physics and cybernetics, such as metastability, dephasing and transduction, field, information, entanglement, non-locality and non-individuality. We will use these concepts to problematize the emergence of a subjacent field from which everything unfolds via a process of individuation. The collective phase of this process is transindividuation, a relationship between inchoative, metastable parts that slide off each other through transduction, a process that can be perceived in action in a fluid collective like the Canaque, studied by Leenhardt. What is at stake here is the “being of the relationship” (non-anthropological, but of the living, “do kamo”) instead of the “being”. In fact, the Canaque seem to exist like waves of information – a transindividual collective.