Before 'I': the procedural ontology of affect by Gilbert Simondon in conflict with the narrative model of Paul Ricoeur and the pragmatic model of Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosophy of the 20th century confronted the fundamental problem of the genealogy of meaning: where and how does significance arise in the pre-reflexive experience – in the realm of language or in the field of social practices? This article contrasts three radical answers to this question. Simondon’s process ontology asserts the primacy of the affective pre-individual event, through operations of transduction the "I" and meaning are crystallized. This approach radically denies the assumptions common to Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Wittgenstein’s pragmatics. While for Ricoeur, experience takes shape exclusively through linguistic and narrative mediation, and for Wittgenstein meaning is already anchored in the public rules of the language game, Simondon appeals to a pre-linguistic and pre-social stage, where meaning only begins to emerge as an effect. The foundation of the methodology lies in a strategy of confrontational synthesis, aimed at revealing the ontological gap between Simondon’s process ontology and the reflexive-discursive approaches of Ricoeur and Wittgenstein. Through categorical analysis (“pre-individual,” “transduction” / “narrative identity,” “hermeneutics of the self” / “language game,” “form of life”) and problem-oriented confrontation, the ontological and genetic primacy of the pre-reflexive affective field over models of mediation through language and narrative is demonstrated. The result is not integration, but a map of philosophical conflict asserting the ontological priority of affect. The novelty of the research lies in the systematic comparison of process ontology with two dominant paradigms of modern thought, revealing their implicit correlationalism: both Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Wittgenstein’s pragmatism proceed from an already established correlate between subjectivity, language, and the world (narrative or practical), ignoring the pre-subjective field. The relevance of the work is determined by contemporary philosophy's quest to overcome correlationalism and anthropocentrism. The analysis of affect as a transductive operator offers a powerful tool for critiquing anthropological limitations in both interpretive and analytical traditions, paving the way for a non-reductive thought about life, body, and meaning. This ontological shift moves the focus from ready-made structures of consciousness and language to the dynamics of becoming, reopening the question not of how we understand an already given world, but of how the world emerges from the pre-linguistic realm of affect.