Vo-care,

the image for this week’s Hopeful Workshop for Minus Theatre Research Group – which you are invited to attend as we prepare material for our 3rd Project – the image is a visual quotation from Bernard Stiegler’s Acting Out – it is in fact part of another word. Here is the context:

Becoming-a-philosopher, I first asked myself: is this a vocation
and, if so, does it apply to me?
Vocation, according to its original religious meaning, is a name
“given to those who ‘feel called,'” writes Catherine Clement: “Vo-
care, to call, signifies that all vocations are addressed to the indi-
vidual, called by his name, as himself.”
Religious vocation is therefore individual It happens to the indi-
vidual: it is a moment of that which I am about to call a process of
individuation.

It is from page 1. The emphases in the last sentence indicate that Bernard Stiegler is drawing from the theory of Gilbert Simondon. The process of individuation referred to in the encounter with vocation might be called – in keeping with Simondon’s theory – the transindividual: the transindividual is necessary for psychosocial individuation. It comes in an encounter such as Stiegler describes with ‘vocation’ – receiving a calling. Simondon illustrates the chance nature of the encounter with the passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra where the tightrope walker falls at Zarathustra’s feet and Zarathustra takes up the stranger’s dying body as it were suddenly that of a friend.

Minus Theatre’s method is called ‘a theatre of the individual’, where the individual is to be understood in the sense Simondon gives it, of being a stage-of-being in the process of individuation.