Individuation and Attunement: Identities in Process

Abstract

Picking up the thread of an asubjective realism introduced in the first chapter, this chapter focuses on the question of individuation. Because pure experience lacks a transcendental subject as the source of identity, it intensifies questions of how to stabilise and identify either objects or enduring subjects. This metaphysical problem of individuation operates at the intersection between the abstract and the existential. The chapter argues that both Deleuze and Whitehead shift the nature of this problem from one of identifying discrete individuals to understanding processes of individuation that are perspectival, scale-relative, and by degree. The chapter develops three theses that emerge as consequences of this shift.