Abstract

This article draws a line between two strands of transindividual theory as a means to centre and problematise the question of political form. Acknowledging Gilbert Simondon’s critical influence on the field, the paper turns instead to a reading of the explicitly political and nominally Marxian current of transindividual philosophy found in the work of Étienne Balibar and Jason Read. While granting the notion derived from Marx of the transindividual as an ensemble of relations, the paper first addresses an argument from Balibar that opens up the question of a limit by placing a quasi-transcendental at the heart of the transindividual. Between Balibar’s suggestion of a politics that proceeds to ‘the edge of the transindividual’, and Read’s argument that politics is bound to the tensions of the existing order, I argue that for all their achievements theories of the transindividual leave open the question of political form. The paper addresses this problem by offering a theory of political form that derives from a critical reading of Alain Badiou, and by advancing the idea of communism as a subtractive and exceptional supplement to the already existing relations of the transindividual.