Gilbert Simondon is not only the author of an original reflection on technology and technical objects. As the systematic publication of his courses on psychology shows, his project was to constitute a general anthropology, studying perception, imagination, memory, invention, by situating human originality in each case within the set of living beings. He aimed in fact – which is already legible in the third part of the book on the technical object – to elaborate nothing less than a metaphysics that would define the human manner of being-in-the-world in all its manifestations. For those who had the chance to follow his courses, he always had something of the frankness and power of the pre-Socratic philosophers; he spoke Being, the presence of man to it as living being, producer, thinker and artist.

I will proceed in this text in three unequally developed moments. I will first present the general conception of Simondon's aesthetics. I will next examine several more particular points on the arts and on works [of art], and finally I will underline the aspects under which Simondon's thought seems to me to have today a particular import.

The conception of aesthetics in Simondon is expressed in the third section of his 1958 thesis, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, titled ‘Essence of technicity’. This section, highly speculative, undertakes to give the sense of the genesis of technical objects in relation ‘to the set of thought, the existence of man, and his manner of being in the world’ (MEOT 154).