Milieu and Nonidentity:

Rethinking Education in the Anthropocene through Adorno and Simondon

Abstract

This article rethinks education in the Anthropocene through a paralogical relation between Theodor W. Adorno and Gilbert Simondon. It begins from the claim that ecological crisis has rendered increasingly inadequate those educational and philosophical models that presuppose a stable, self-transparent, and sovereign subject confronting an external environment. In response, the article examines the conceptual shift from environment to milieu and develops its significance through Isabelle Stengers and Georges Canguilhem, for whom milieu designates a constitutive, value-laden, and relational field rather than a neutral surrounding. On this basis, the article turns to Adorno’s concepts of nonidentity, negativity, and critique, and to Simondon’s account of individuation, preindividual reality, transduction, and the individual–milieu coupling. Its central argument is that these two frameworks can be placed into a paralogical relation that preserves their differences while making their tension philosophically productive. Simondon makes subject formation thinkable as an open and unfinished process inseparable from milieu, while Adorno preserves the critical force needed to resist reconciliation, closure, and identity thinking. The article concludes that education in the Anthropocene should be understood as formation within mediation, dependence, and collective becoming, while remaining answerable to critique, suffering, and responsibility.