Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology is the first book in English dedicated entirely to the work of this French philosopher. Although the importance of Simondon's thought for twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy is clear – his work is foundational for Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, and resonates in the writings of other prominent thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito – relatively little attention has been paid to Simondon in the English-speaking academy. The few scholars writing about Simondon in English who have contributed to this collection – Brian Massumi, Elizabeth Grosz and Miguel de Beistegui, amongst others – are, next to some philosophers not included here (Alberto Toscano, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers for example), the exceptions that confirm the rule.

Born in 1924, Gilbert Simondon was a doctoral student of both the French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By 1958, he had finished both his main thesis, L'Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l'information [Individuation in Light of the Notions of Form and Information], and his supplementary thesis, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects), for the French doctoral degree. While Du mode d'existence was immediately published in France and quickly turned into an influential book, it would take until 1964 for the first part of Simondon's main thesis to be published.