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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
François Laruelle�s �non-philosophy� or �non-standard philosophy� represents a bold attempt to rethink how philosophy is practiced in relation to other domains of knowledge. There is a growing interest in Laruelle�s work in the English-speaking world, but his work is often misunderstood as a wholesale critique of philosophy. In this book Anthony Paul Smith dispels this misunderstanding and shows how Laruelle�s critique of philosophy is guided by the positive aim of understanding philosophy�s structure so that it can be creatively recast with other discourses and domains of human knowledge, from politics and ethics to science and religion.
This book provides a synthetic introduction to the whole of Laruelle�s work. It begins by discussing the major concepts and methods that have framed non-philosophy for thirty years. Smith then goes on to show how those concepts and method enter into traditional philosophical domains and disempower the authoritarian framework that philosophy imposes upon them. Instead of offering a philosophy of politics or a philosophy of science, Laruelle aims at fostering a democracy of thought where philosophy is thought together and equal to the object of its inquiry.
This book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy, and anyone who wants to discover more about one of its foremost practitioners.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Works by François Laruelle
Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Philosophy?
Notes
Part I: A Generic Introduction
1: Theory of the Philosophical Decision
“Choose this day whom you will serve”: non-philosophical indifference to philosophical faith
Tracing the structure
Can there be a philosophy in general?
Notes
2: The Style of Non-Philosophy
No philosophy in the wild
Thinking in-One and its effects
Determination-in-the-last-instance
Unilateral duality
Force-(of)-thought
Rules for writing non-philosophy
First names
Operators
Notes
Part II: Unified Theories and the Waves of Non-Philosophy
3: Politics, or a Democracy (of) Thought
The equivocation of politics and philosophy
Laboring under the principle of sufficient philosophy
A materialist reading of deconstruction
A materialist politics and a theory of power and force
Can thinking be democratic?
Notes
4: Science, or Philosophy's Other
From the philosophy of science to the posture of science
The division of labor on the factory floor of theory
On non-epistemology and the description of science
Real objects and objects of knowledge
Homo sive natura
: or, human science and human philosophy
Notes
5: Ethics, or Universalizing the Stranger-Subject
Generic deracination
Stranger victims: from the theory of the stranger to the general theory of victims
The stranger before self and Other
Thinking under the victim as generic name
Identity and the universal: non-philosophy and critical race theory
Conclusion: the good news of deracination
Notes
6: Fabulation, or Non-Philosophy as Philo-Fiction
Art is the world without the world
The art of thought
Fiction is a matter of insurrection
Notes
7: Religion, or a Rigorous Heresy
Beyond philosophy's orthodoxy
Orthodoxy and heresy in French secular Christologies
Theory of the Future Christ
Gnostic hatred of the world
Indifference to the world and assistance to the human
From the Future Christ to generic messianity
Notes
Conclusion: The Future of Non-Philosophy
The future, you ain't seen nothing yet
The future, a mode of the subject
No future and the non-future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Series page
Key Contemporary Thinkers Series includes:
Jeremy Ahearne,
Michel de Certeau
Lee Braver,
Heidegger
John Burgess,
Kripke
Claire Colebrook,
Agamben
Jean-Pierre Couture,
Sloterdijk
Colin Davis,
Levinas
Oliver Davis,
Jacques Rancière
Reidar Andreas Due,
Deleuze
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir
Nigel Gibson,
Fanon
Graeme Gilloch,
Siegfried Kracauer
Christina Howells,
Derrida
Simon Jarvis,
Adorno
Rachel Jones,
Irigaray
Sarah Kay,
Žižek
S. K. Keltner,
Kristeva
Moya Lloyd,
Judith Butler
James McGilvray,
Chomsky, 2nd edn
Lois McNay,
Foucault
Marie-Eve Morin,
Jean-Luc Nancy
Timothy Murphy,
Antonio Negri
Ed Pluth,
Badiou
John Preston,
Feyerabend
Severin Schroeder,
Wittgenstein
Susan Sellers,
Hélène Cixous
Anthony Paul Smith,
Laruelle
Dennis Smith,
Zygmunt Bauman
James Smith,
Terry Eagleton
James Williams,
Lyotard
Christopher Zurn,
Axel Honneth
Copyright page
Copyright © Anthony Paul Smith 2016
The right of Anthony Paul Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7122-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7123-9 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Anthony Paul, 1982-
Title: Laruelle : a stranger thought / Anthony Paul Smith.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037053| ISBN 9780745671222 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745671239 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Laruelle, François.
Classification: LCC B2433.L374 S65 2106 | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037053
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J'éclate. Je suis le feu. Je suis la mer.
Le monde se défait. Mais je suis le monde.
La fin, la fin disions-nous.
Aimé Césaire, “Les armes miraculeuses”
Aimer un étranger comme soi-même implique comme contrepartie: s'aimer soi-même comme un étranger.
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce
Acknowledgments
First I want to acknowledge Alexander R. Galloway for recommending this project to Polity, and John B. Thompson for commissioning it. This book is the result of a number of years of research and writing, and John has been supportive and patient throughout the process. Toward the end of the writing of this book, Alex's own book engaging with Laruelle was published, and thinking alongside of his reading helped me to get clarity on a number of important issues. My sincere gratitude also goes to Elliott Karstadt, editorial assistant at Polity, who guided me throughout the process in what is mostly a thankless task, and to George Owers who took over that task after Elliott's departure. Thank you to Leigh Mueller for her work as copyeditor. She has improved the text greatly.
This book was written concurrently with François Laruelle's Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide, a study of one of Laruelle's most important works. As with that book, I am thankful to the readers of drafts: Alice Rekab, Michael O'Neill Burns, and Marika Rose. My gratitude also goes to my colleagues in the Department of Religion at La Salle University, especially the support of the chair, Maureen O'Connell, and the encouragement of Jack Downey and Jordan Copeland. I acknowledge the financial support provided by Tom Keagy, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at La Salle University, which allowed me to participate in the colloquium held at Cerisy in September of 2014 on Laruelle's non-standard philosophy, where I presented aspects of chapter 5. There I benefitted from conversations with Ian James, John Ó Maoilearca, Joshua Ramey, Rocco Gangle, Drew S. Burk, Katerina Kolozova, and others. Further elements of chapter 5 were presented at “Superpositions: A Symposium on Laruelle and the Humanities,” held at The New School in New York. I am thankful for the invitation to speak from Rocco, Julius Greve, and Ed Keller, and for comments from Dave Mesing, Ed Kazarian, and Benjamin Norris. Elements of chapter 6 were presented in 2012 at the Leeds Art Gallery at the invitation of Anne Reid, for “Abandoned Projectors: A Pavilion Forum.” Parts of chapter 7 were presented in Dublin at the 2013 Mystical Theology Network conference “Mystical Theology: Eruptions from France,” and I benefitted from the comments of Louise Sullivan, Marika Rose, and Kate Tomas there. Earlier versions of chapter 7 appeared in Postmodern Saints of France: Refiguring “the Holy” in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. Colby Dickinson (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013) as “Laruelle and the Messiah before the Saints,” and in Analecta Hermeneutica 4 (2013) as “‘Who do you say that I am?’: Secular Christologies in Contemporary French Philosophy,” and I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the publishers of these titles to reproduce in full. Parts of chapter 3 were presented in New York at the 2014 “Derrida Today” conference, and I am thankful to Michael Naas for his comments and provocations. Alex Dubilet was also present at many of these events and I am thankful for the discussions we had in New York over trips to pizza parlors. These were but continuations of the many discussions we have had about Laruelle and related problems as we work along parallel but distinct paths.
This book is dedicated to Daniel Colucciello Barber. His intellectual creativity and insights are only matched by the loyalty and care he shows in friendship. Everything I have written feels indelibly marked by his thought, and even where we may differ it nonetheless feels like grace: a grace without any hope of achievement.
Abbreviations of Works by François Laruelle
Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Philosophy?
A certain desire for the end is endemic to twentieth-century philosophy. This is true of both the so-called Continental and analytic varieties. That end may take the form of the end of philosophy itself as it diffuses into a thousand other scientific disciplines claiming to be able to answer the old questions more concretely. Or that end may only be the end of metaphysics or history, the end of phenomenology, the end of language, or the death of God or Man, just the small death of the author – one may even look forward to the grand death of everything in the solar catastrophe, or perhaps one simply wants to be done with judgment. It seems that most philosophers want something in the end, while perhaps most readers just want to be done. “Are we done?” This is perhaps a familiar question at the end of an introduction to philosophy lecture by some bored undergraduate forced to take it as part of their core courses. Setting aside the source, the question remains in the desire of so many philosophers: are we done with philosophy?
The question arises because philosophy is in the midst of an identity crisis. This is nothing particularly new. If we go back, all the way back to the beginning of institutionalized philosophy in Plato's Academy, then we might read his acceptance of the impossibility of a philosopher-king at the helm of an ideal republic after the death of Dion of Syracuse as the first major crisis of philosophy.1 For the identity crisis of philosophy is a crisis over the point of philosophy and the ability of philosophy to affect the so-called “real world.” For Laruelle, philosophy desires to affect the Real itself, and it cannot because the Real is always already indifferent to it. Since philosophy cannot affect the Real it desires to affect, it must then settle for second-best, which is affecting the world, just as Plato settles for advising the new rulers of Syracuse after the death of Dion. And yet philosophy cannot even live up to second-best.
The non-philosophy of François Laruelle suggests that this is the wrong question to ask: it is a false question. Bergson defined this kind of question as being one that leads us to a false answer. The true question is not “Are we done with philosophy?”, but “What is to be done with philosophy?”2
This book explores the answer to this question that Laruelle provides in his non-philosophy. The point of non-philosophy is not a different philosophical analysis of the traditional materials that philosophy has tended to dominate, but a mutation or recoding of the machinery of philosophy itself in order to create a new practice of thought. Non-Philosophy is not simply a “new philosophy.”3 It does not add yet another voice to interminable debates, but at its best aims for something different, something strange and alien to standard philosophy. Non-Philosophy is stranger than philosophy. And this hitherto untold strangeness lies behind the two-fold purpose of this book. The first part of the book provides a generic introduction to non-philosophy, tracing its most general structures. In this part of the book, the reader will be introduced to the fundamental inquiry into the essence of philosophy that Laruelle's method of “dualysis” constitutes. In Chapter 1, I explicate Laruelle's theory and analysis of what he calls the “Philosophical Decision.” This is a constant theme throughout Laruelle's oeuvre, though most clearly laid out in Philosophies of Difference (1986, and 2010 in English translation) and Principles of Non-Philosophy (1996, and 2013 in English translation). The theory of the Philosophical Decision requires that we also investigate Laruelle's theory of the One, which allows Philosophical Decision to emerge from the background noise of philosophical machinery acting upon various fields. Chapter 2 turns to the methods employed by Laruelle to mutate and make a new use out of the Philosophical Decision. Laruelle himself calls these methods a “style” and “syntax” and so this chapter surveys and explains this style and syntax. It explains the sometimes mystifying aspects of Laruelle's written style as part and parcel of the practice of non-philosophy, as his syntax is constructed in such a way as to address philosophy's underlying self-sufficiency. Therefore the intentionally difficult syntax aims not at confusion but at a reorganization of thought itself. Part I of the text gives the reader a synthetic view of non-philosophy that prepares them for the specificity of Laruelle's engagement with the other materials that populate Part II of the book.
Part II is organized into five chapters to evoke the five waves of non-philosophy. These waves are Laruelle's own division of his work into five distinct periods that remain largely consistent over time, but with new materials and focus in each period. However, I do not present here a simple history of non-philosophy, as I have elsewhere presented such a history by focusing on either the change in axioms that guide each wave or the history of the conjugation of science and philosophy.4 Instead I have picked five significant thematics running throughout each of the five waves and show how these thematics are engaged with from his early work to his most contemporary, and in turn how they help to develop the practice of non-philosophy.
I have chosen this structure in part to address a criticism by Ray Brassier, one of the early Anglophone readers of Laruelle and translator of some of his essays. It was Brassier's work, alongside John Ó Maoilearca's, that introduced me to non-philosophy. And while I have learned a great deal from both of them, it was a certain annoyance (philosophy does not only begin in wonder!) at the criticism Brassier makes in Nihil Unbound that spurred me to undertake this book in this particular way. He claims that Laruelle's work is always focused simply on the machinery of non-philosophy, writing:
one cannot but be struck by the formalism and the paucity of detail in his handling of these topics, which seems cursory even in comparison with orthodox philosophical treatments of the same themes. Indeed, the brunt of the conceptual labour in these confrontations with ethics, Marxism, and mysticism is devoted to refining or fine-tuning his own non-philosophical machinery, while actual engagement with the specifics of the subject matter is confined to discussions of more or less arbitrarily selected philosophemes on the topic in question. The results are texts in which descriptions of the workings of Laruelle's non-philosophical apparatus continue to occupy centre-stage while the philosophical material which is ostensibly the focus of analysis is relegated to a perfunctory supporting role.…Thus in his book on ethics (Éthique de l'étranger) Laruelle does not actually provide anything like a substantive conceptual analysis of ethical tropes in contemporary philosophy; he simply uses potted versions of Plato, Kant, and Levinas to sketch what a non-philosophical theory of ‘the ethical’ would look like. Similarly, in his Introduction to Non-Marxism he does not actually engage in an analysis of Marxist theory and practice; he simply uses two idiosyncratic philosophical readings of Marx, those of Althusser and Henry, as the basis for outlining what a non-philosophical theory of Marxism would look like.5
It appears that, for Brassier, non-philosophy has not delivered on any of its perceived promises. He even states in his characteristically harsh style that “Laruelle's writings have yet to inspire anything beyond uncritical emulation or exasperated dismissal.”6 On this reading, non-philosophy would remain an ultimately fruitless bootstrapping that, aside from the machinery itself, offers nothing new to philosophy as such.
Brassier's criticism hinges on what I see as a fundamental misunderstanding of Laruelle's non-philosophy. He confuses the philosophical material that Laruelle pulls from standard philosophy with material that Laruelle aims to analyze. But Laruelle does not want to provide us with another philosophical analysis. Instead he wants to use the different philosophical analyses to do something with philosophy, without making any claim about the Real that conditions every theoretical project. To show how Laruelle does this, I engage with his corpus generically (or synthetically in the standard philosophical idiom) rather than linearly. This means that I do not present a developmental reading of non-philosophy. Laruelle himself says that such a reading of non-philosophy as a linear evolution would be artificial: “It is more a question of kaleidoscopic views, all similar yet rearranged each time…Each book in a sense reprises the same problems ‘from zero’, again throwing the dice or reshuffling the cards of science, philosophy, Marxism, gnosis, man as Stranger and Christ. The essence of non-philosophy would be, let's say, fractal and fictioned.”7
This also means that I really do aim here at a general introduction to non-philosophy. While at times I mark certain differences in my understanding of non-philosophy from others who have engaged with Laruelle's large body of work, this is not a book aiming to mark out a certain space or assuming major familiarity with the specific debates amongst Francophone and Anglophone non-philosophers. Instead, I firstly hope to help new readers of Laruelle to gain a foothold in his own texts, rather than this text alone, by explicating some of the main concepts and questions that non-philosophy engages with. I then turn to helping new readers situate non-philosophy in relation to some other debates in various areas of philosophy and theory more generally, through creative readings of those concepts and questions alongside other forms of thought that I take to be radical. The radical nature of these other discourses is assessed on the basis of their incisiveness and rigor in their understanding of the world as well as their strangeness according to the norms of the standard model of philosophy and various forms of theory produced by that model.
I attempt to model the fractal nature of non-philosophy in the structure of the book. Fractals are complex patterns that remain self-similar across different scales. This means that ultimately there is a single overarching shape to the book that is found in each chapter. So, Part I of the text scales out to consider non-philosophy generally as a theory and practice. Chapter 1 presents Laruelle's theory of the Philosophical Decision, which is often taken to be the critical aspect of non-philosophy. Laruelle, however, presents this theory as a diagnostic of philosophy, an act of identifying what it is that makes philosophy in general. The purpose of this is not to destroy philosophy, but to disempower it so that it loses its self-sufficiency, or at least has its authoritarian impulses much weakened. Chapter 2 then turns to the style of non-philosophy. Here we look at the way non-philosophy works with philosophy as a material, the syntax it deploys, and some of the concepts that operate on philosophical material. If the theory of Philosophical Decision is the negative and critical move of non-philosophy, then its style is its constructive mode. The two ultimately cannot be separated since the negation of philosophy allows for philosophy to be used in the production or fabulation of new forms of theory.
After this general introduction to non-philosophy, we then move to Part II of the book in which we look at how it operates on the different scales imposed by specific domains of knowledge. We begin with politics in chapter 3, where we see an equivocation of politics and philosophy. Here we look at the way that politics and philosophy mirror one another in their decisional structure through an investigation of Laruelle's early works in political philosophy. We then turn to his later conception of a “democracy (of) thought” as the model that non-philosophy attempts to follow in thinking various theoretical materials together. This moves us from politics to science in chapter 4, since it is science that allows Laruelle to think otherwise than philosophically. Here we look at the way that science enacts a very different kind of relationship regarding the thinking of an object and the real object. We see here the beginnings of Laruelle's focus upon the human in the way in which he sees science as a fundamentally humane form of thinking that blocks the possibility of presenting a singular essence of the human. This evocation of the human moves us then to the question of ethics in chapter 5. Here we investigate Laruelle's attempt to create a new kind of humanism, or non-humanism, by putting him in dialogue with important critical theorists on the question of race. This helps to elucidate Laruelle's thinking, but also puts him in dialogue with those outside of the mainstream of philosophy who are engaged in projects more like non-philosophy than those within the discipline of philosophy proper. Here we begin to see the importance of certain kinds of fictions in his theory as he develops the importance of names like “victim” and “stranger” for his ethical theory. And so, in chapter 6, we turn to his conception of philo-fiction to investigate further his theory of fiction and the ways in which non-philosophy acts as a kind of philo-fiction or “science-phiction.” As we see there, this notion of philo-fiction speaks to the general shape of non-philosophy as it again posits a radically foreclosed Real-One untouched and unrepresentable by philosophy, but also posits that we may write stories regarding, that we may fabulate, rigorous fictions that speak to our unlearned knowledge about the radical immanence of this Real. This emphasis on fabulation or the fictive aspects of naming in non-philosophy opens us to a discussion of religion in chapter 7. Here we investigate the importance of messianism and mysticism to Laruelle's work, not as an escape from reality, but as human fictions that express demands regarding the salvation of human beings as well as the need for something beyond worldly forms of thought to think through what such a salvation would be. This connection of religion and science fiction through their fictive elements is made by Laruelle himself as he claims that religion, in the form of a gnosticism that runs throughout the institutional forms of religion, poses the same question as science fiction: “should we save humanity? and What do we mean by humanity?”8 I then conclude the book by examining what possible future there may be for non-philosophy. I do not argue that the future will be Laruellean or make any grandiose claims about the power of non-philosophy to change the world. As we may come to see in our living it, there is nothing particularly laudable about the future. Yet the future comes regardless, and it may be that non-philosophy offers tools for doing something with the future in the now.
I have my criticisms of Laruelle's project, but its supposed fruitlessness is not one of them.9 I have almost entirely left my criticisms of Laruelle to the side, seeing my role in writing this introduction as being to balance the scales somewhat and present the strengths of Laruelle's project. To do so I have put Laruelle in creative dialogue with other thinkers, though not often ones in the mainstream of philosophy in either its Continental or analytic modes, as I have already said. From my limited perspective, analytic philosophy appears to still be conditioned largely by a hegemonic Liberal political project and is in many ways moribund as it works out increasingly self-referential and self-limiting problems. At the same time, Continental philosophy has largely continued to focus on explicating its own history or moving toward new forms of metaphysics. One could introduce Laruelle in this standard way, comparing him to this analytic philosopher or placing him in this Continental history.10 I could also simply give the facts regarding Laruelle's development; I could place him in his historical context (he was born in France in 1937 and has lived out most of his adult life in Paris), list his books (he has written over 25 books, with his first appearing in 1971), detail and assess his debates with Derrida, Luc Ferry (former French Minister for Youth, National Education, and Research), Badiou, and others. Such an approach has merits, but it does not show the power and potential of non-philosophy. Non-Philosophy provides resources for carrying out radically creative work that can take traditional tropes in standard philosophical discourse and combine them with exciting forms of thought taking place without regard for that tradition. In being stranger than philosophy, it allows one steeped in the history of philosophy to radically refuse the borders of philosophy and other forms of human knowledge. More importantly, it breaks down the frame imposed by that history of philosophy when considering questions of identity, universality, ethics, knowledge, science, faith, art, and other traditional themes of philosophy.
I have elsewhere tried to show how Laruelle's non-philosophy may help to dissolve certain problems in environmental philosophy and may fruitfully engage with the science of ecology. Philosophers often ignore ecology as a science, even if it has become somewhat in vogue to give attention to certain environmental issues or to borrow some concepts from the wider field of environmental studies – like the anthropocene. While the science of ecology may not have the cachet of neuroscience or cosmology, it is already doing rich philosophical work and the method of non-philosophy draws that out. That text, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature, does more to show the creative possibility for Laruelle's non-philosophy of science (he calls this both a non-epistemology and a unified theory of science and philosophy) than does my chapter on science in this text. Instead, here I have tried to show the importance of science for the project of non-philosophy and how Laruelle in general understands the relationship, creating a kind of introduction that may be supplemented by my earlier text and Laruelle's own many books on the topic. In this book, I focus most on the overarching politico-ethical arc of non-philosophy, specifically by showing how Laruelle's project may join with the critical theory of race in an attempt to create a humanism made to the measure of the Human-in-Human rather than the measure of the world or a bleak cosmos.11 These fields are not normally respected by institutional philosophers, and undoubtedly many of the thinkers referenced alongside of Laruelle are unconcerned about the proliferation and reproduction of institutional philosophy. Insofar as institutional philosophy fails to respect these fields and thinkers, it does so because those thinkers dare to consider problems that are much harder to think through than an Anglo-pessimism I regard as cheap in its talk of a cold world or the ultimate heat death of the universe. We are here, fragile creatures that we are, and, regardless of any future death, that fact of existing matters in both the physical and moral sense, regardless of how finite or limited that mattering is.
The two-fold purpose of this book really flows from one underlying drive: to show what can be done with non-philosophy and let that doing speak for itself. Many readers have come to Laruelle and felt exasperated at the strangeness of it, overwhelmed by how painful it was to work through the texts. And, for all that pain, what does the reader get? Detractors and even early adaptors have sat in judgment upon Laruelle's project and ruled it fruitless. I embrace Laruelle's fruitlessness, unlike these detractors, as a kind of anti-natalism regarding philosophy (though likely not an anti-natalism regarding human beings), precisely because it may join with projects on the fringes of institutional philosophy and theory more generally. I have no desire to have this judgment overturned on appeal – no desire for a debate on whether or not Laruelle's non-philosophy is truly fruitful. Like many works and methods of theory, it has already gone forth and multiplied in ways unrecognizable to philosophy's reproductive regime. Thought always multiplies. Only a naturalist version of theodicy – a “naturdicy” or “biodicy” – would look to the number of intellectual offspring or to successful grant applications in order to declare that this truly is the best of all possible intellectual worlds. Intellectual brilliance is fragile and it dies and passes from the earth. Perhaps it does so everyday with every lost language and every doctoral graduate who remains unemployed.
One of the reasons I was first drawn to Laruelle's non-philosophy was precisely because of its rejection of theodicy in every form, even those that persist after the death of God. So to those who sat in judgment, not only of Laruelle but of those who have tried to take up the method and project it in their own way, I can only respond, “You say so” (Matt 27:11).12 That non-philosophy is philosophically fruitless is indeed the good news proclaimed here. As this is not a book of mystagogy, at least not in any straightforwardly derogatory sense, the drive behind it is to show the ways in which non-philosophy allows us to enter into traditional or standard philosophical material and do something with it. For better or for worse, we are not done with philosophy, but we may be able to do something with it. For, however fragile and finite that doing is, it will always be real.
Notes
1
Plato,
Letter VII
, 337d.
2
There is a common misunderstanding that non-philosophy is an “end of philosophy” project. To cite just two examples, the foremost proponent of object-oriented philosophy, Graham Harman, and his most virulent critic, Peter Wolfendale, both make this mistake regarding Laruelle. See Graham Harman, “Review of François Laruelle's
Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy
” in
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25437-philosophies-of-difference-a-critical-introduction-to-non-philosophy, June 21, 2013, and Peter Wolfendale,
Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), p. 228 n. 286. Laruelle has consistently rejected the discourse around the “end of philosophy” as a way that philosophy continues itself under new forms, but he has done so most forcefully in SU. For a further critique of Harman's reading of Laruelle see Anthony Paul Smith, “Editorial Introduction: Laruelle Does Not Exist” in
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
19.2 (2014): pp. 1–11. There I expand upon this critique of Harman's view of philosophy as “illuminator” and defend Laruelle's sense of blackness as the essence of identity. I will revisit this in chapter 5, where I show the ways in which non-philosophy may come into dialogue with critical theory especially on the question of identity and race.
3
As this text aims to introduce readers to Laruelle's own writings, I have sometimes adopted his own stylistic choice of capitalizing certain important terms, which he appears to have inherited from his studies in German philosophy. While I do not follow Laruelle's style completely, preferring to try to perform non-philosophy in an English idiom, the hope is that the occasional use of his style will allow the reader to turn to Laruelle's original work without the shock that some experience. While some have expressed a certain exasperation at this stylistic choice by Laruelle, I tend to see it as akin to certain forms of literature that eschew the idiomatic rules of writing in favor of a particular expression. That said, some have likened Laruelle's writing to a Frenchman who has overdosed on German philosophy, and it is true that there is a kind of internalization of Kantian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian writing tics, as if he was thinking German through French. This may be true, but at the same time there is also the clear intention in many of his texts to parrot or even parody the standard philosophical writing he is engaged with as a material practice.
4
See Anthony Paul Smith,
A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought
(New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 73–81, and
François Laruelle's Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 11–21.
5
Ray Brassier,
Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 132–3, 252 n. 19.
6
Ibid., p. 118. It's interesting to note that this characteristically acerbic remark follows the earlier statement, “our aim is not to denigrate Laruelle's achievement, which strikes us as nothing short of extraordinary, but on the contrary to dislodge a rebarbative carapace which, far from warding off misinterpretation, seems to have succeeded only in barring appreciation of his thought's significance” (ibid.). This attempt to save Laruelle from himself resulted in further misinterpretations of Laruelle's work by those attracted to Brassier's project of deflationary rationalism-
cum
-nihilism – a project that, aside from being self-avowedly philosophical in forms antithetical to Laruelle's non-philosophy, includes an anti-humanism that borders on a misanthropic drive toward human extermination. Any confusion with that project would require massive excisions – likely performed sadistically without anesthesia – from Laruelle's actual project of “human defense.” Regardless of these misinterpretations made by Brassier's readers and the distaste I have for his project, the skill shown in his recasting of Laruelle is undeniably clever – and remarkably so. Despite that skill, Brassier's work has shifted a great deal in focus since the publication of
Nihil Unbound
, at least based upon Brassier's most recent published work, and so does not include any further engagement with Laruelle. At the time of
Nihil Unbound
, he found Laruelle's work to be useful for a particular purpose: “The nub of this philosophical re-interpretation will be that Laruelle has not achieved a non-philosophical suspension of philosophy but rather uncovered a non-dialectical logic of philosophical negation: viz., ‘uni-lateralization’ ” (ibid., p. 120).
7
François Laruelle, “What Is Non-Philosophy?,” trans. Taylor Adkins, in
From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought
, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), p. 210.
8
SU, p. 3.
9
The claim that Laruelle's non-philosophy is a fruitless enterprise was made by Brassier. While I have a certain positive valuation of this claim – namely, that non-philosophy is fruitless from the perspective of producing more philosophy – it is worth noting here that the comment was made prior to any other real engagement with Laruelle in English. Readers will have to make their own decision as to whether or not Brassier's claims regarding the general fruitlessness of non-philosophy remain true in the light of his own impressive project in
Nihil Unbound
and a number of other recent texts taking up the method of non-philosophy in less nihilistic forms – namely, through pragmatic engagements with environmental theory, film, animal studies, feminism and gender theory, media studies, and others. See Smith,
Ecologies of Thought
; John Ó Maoilearca,
Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ch. 8, and
All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Alexander R. Galloway,
Laruelle: Against the Digital
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Katerina Kolozova,
Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Ian James,
The New French Philosophy
(Cambridge: Polity, 2012), ch. 7, which also promises a forthcoming book that engages with Laruelle in a central way to examine questions of technique and the experimental nature of contemporary philosophy.
10
I have done this to some extent in Smith,
François Laruelle's Principles of Non-Philosophy
, especially in ch. 6.
11
This may bring to mind the words of Aimé Césaire in
Discourse on Colonialism
(trans. Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), when he writes: “at the very moment it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the World” (p. 73). However, despite the terminological differences, Laruelle is in fundamental agreement with Césaire's point since Césaire is arguing for an expanded, potentially infinite understanding of the human based upon the many different ways the human manifests. “The world” names, in a certain sense, the set of those differences, which Laruelle would object to as a concept that may obscure the human, but this is not in any way a major distinction between principles.
12
All translations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version.
Part IA Generic Introduction
1Theory of the Philosophical Decision
“Choose this day whom you will serve”: non-philosophical indifference to philosophical faith
Philosophy has a faith that is particular to it. Laruelle claims that everything we call philosophy shares the same invariant structure as what he calls “decision.” The particularity of this faith is revealed by theorizing this decision and tracing the general practice of philosophy in its unrecognized piety. As we move toward a purely abstract or generic presentation of Philosophical Decision, I will introduce increasingly technical language before responding to some criticisms of Laruelle's theory. But before we descend into the technical details it may be useful to first anchor ourselves in the model that Laruelle uses when he presents the work of non-philosophy, claiming that it may be thought of as an apparatus or a machine, which in his latest work Laruelle compares to a particle collider.1 Standard philosophy is inserted into this apparatus and is worked upon. This processing of philosophy through the apparatus is what allows for the identity of philosophy to emerge or be seen. We shall start at the end and travel backwards. First we will turn to the summary of the results this apparatus provided and then look at the formal or generic structure which Laruelle constructed from this theoretical collider.
While each of Laruelle texts essentially starts from zero, there are certain texts where the greater emphasis is given to the identification of philosophical decision. Our main reference points will be Philosophies of Difference and Principles of Non-Philosophy, with supplements from other texts, like the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy (1998, and 2013 in English translation) which provides for us a summary of the findings of the theoretical inquiry into philosophy's identity:
Philosophy's principal and formalized invariant or structure: in accordance with philosophy, which does not indicate it without also simultaneously auto-affecting philosophy and affecting its own identity; in accordance with non-philosophy which this time gives Philosophical Decision a radical identity (of) structure or that determines it in-the-last-instance. Its synonyms: dyad and unity, amphibology, unity-of-contraries, mixture, blending – they are even likely to have a double usage, intra-philosophical and non-philosophical, which changes its sense. Philosophical Decision is a mixture of indecision and decision, never pure decision.2
Even in this general definition we see that Laruelle is attentive to the ways in which this decisional structure may manifest in a variety of ways, as he lists the various synonyms and recognizes that this decisional structure relies on a certain “amphibology” or structural inconsistency. We also see in this definition a recognition that there are at least two ways of reading the meaning of this structure, much in the way classical economics and Marxist economics are able to recognize the underlying structure of economics while their presentation of that structure varies greatly. For philosophy this recognition of a structure is a matter of speaking to philosophy's power, what it does, and why it matters that it does it. Whether it is an eliminativist philosophy that aims to cull certain manifest mythologies from the way in which we think, or it is a matter of a productive philosophy aiming to change the world, each philosopher finds a sufficient reason for their existence as a philosopher.
The supreme example of this confidence in philosophy is given voice perhaps most forcefully by Laruelle's contemporary, Alain Badiou. When asked about Laruelle's non-philosophy Badiou responded, “I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real.”3 There is in that moment of laughter an expression of philosophy's supreme confidence, even if only in the promise of philosophy rather than its actuality since we know many philosophers are disillusioned with their work and the work of their colleagues, but still await something like a philosophical messiah (to bring to mind that double “end of philosophy” referenced in our introduction, according to which this messiah could be the fulfillment of philosophy's promise within philosophy itself or through a proliferation of other disciplines). Decision, with regard to philosophy, names the agon or contest of philosophy. It names the belief that there could emerge from the history of philosophical battle the right philosophy, and that philosophy may access this Real or what we might more colloquially refer to in English as the truth.
Non-Philosophy may be bold in its claim to have identified something invariant to philosophy, but its boldness comes from a refusal to attempt a circumscription of the Real or to provide any end or goal for thought at all. Non-Philosophy is in this way a kind of sobering up from philosophical drunkenness and its attendant harassment of the Real. Laruelle continues in the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy with his intervention, repeating to philosophy what it said the night before:
The Philosophical Decision is an operation of transcendence that believes (in a naive and hallucinatory way) in the possibility of a unitary discourse of the Real.…To philosophize is to decide on the Real and on thought, which ensues from it, that is to philosophize is to believe philosophy is able to align the Real and thought with the universal order of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the Logos), but also more generally in accordance with the “total” or unitary order of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy.4
Philosophy has a faith in itself, it has its own driving myth.5 In relation to philosophical faith, non-philosophy acts similarly to the field of religious studies, especially as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the scientific study of the bible. Scholars like Ernest Renan and Ferdinand Christian Baur, building off the work of Spinoza and Erasmus, began to use new techniques in the study of Christian scriptures. In so doing they treated that scripture like one object among others, equal in the sense that it too could be subjected to this sort of critical inquiry. Non-Philosophy comes to philosophy – every philosophy – as something that claims a certain sufficiency, much like some religious communities look to scriptures or dogmas as having sufficiency in their disclosure of truth, and non-philosophy then treats that philosophy as something subject to critical inquiry.
The unity given to the world by either Christian scripture/dogma or philosophy is not truly sufficient. It is not rooted in some timeless essence. But, as those scholars of biblical literature showed with regard to scripture and as Laruelle shows with regard to philosophy, they developed contingently and did so radically. Everything that takes place in philosophy is grounded upon radical contingency.6 It could be otherwise. The committed biblical inerrantist counts his blessings that he was not born an aboriginal, and the philosopher praises the achievement of Plato. But it would be absurd, it would be pure theodicy or naturdicy, to think there was a reason the Christian was born in Indianapolis or Sheffield or that the name of Plato survived but that of some forgotten African thinker did not. And so, when the philosopher comes along and declares to the neophyte, “choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15), the non-philosopher refuses for there is simply no sufficient reason to choose: “there is no reason to ‘choose’ Heidegger rather than Nietzsche or vice versa.”7 To continue with the example of Heidegger(–Derrida) and Nietzsche(–Deleuze) that Laruelle explores at length in his Philosophies of Difference, there is no reason to choose because it is already a forced choice. It all depends from the start how difference is posed (in the case of these philosophies of difference), for in that initial posing or positioning by the philosopher the choice is already made.
The choice does not need to be made, however, when one realizes that there is no reason to absolutely pose or position difference or any other philosophical elemental as “everything” or “the All”: “To perceive the sheer expanse of this model [the invariant structure of philosophy], one must go back to the canonical enunciation: Everything is (Water Earth, Fire, etc.).”8 The history of philosophy is the history of the debates over such choices because philosophy is itself rooted in absolute contingency (a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason made by Laruelle decades before Meillassoux made such a move popular amongst some in Continental philosophy). It is because of this absolute contingency that philosophy turns to decision.9 Absolute contingency is as close as Laruelle comes to a positive description of the One, which often appears to take the form of a kind of apophaticism or “un-saying,” but the One is not the object of his analysis. Indeed, his point will be that philosophizing about the One (or Real, as he uses these terms largely interchangeably, depending upon context) is precisely what philosophy does. Since non-philosophy is a science of philosophy, it wants to investigate that act of philosophizing rather than the One itself (which is un-representable and thus foreclosed to such speculation). Laruelle then looks to what lies beneath philosophy's choice itself, the choice that allows for the manifestation of all philosophy's positions and, ultimately, the way in which both forms of philosophy work in terms of continuing to be productive of thought despite their seemingly mutually exclusive claims.10 What underlies it is what Laruelle calls the One in its radical immanence – no reflection need be done and no choice can be made, for the One is indifferent to all of its effects, to all the various philosophies that manifest from it. Thus the point is to model thought from the One, rather than aiming to think the One. The point is simply not to play the philosophical game at all, not to suspend some decision in favor of another, but to be indifferent to every form of the decision.
Here we come to an element of non-philosophy not often acknowledged in its early Anglophone reception – and when it was acknowledged it was often denigrated. For what underlies all philosophical decisions, claims Laruelle, is the human in its finitude and radical immanence. This is the abyssal ground of all philosophy for Laruelle: the human. It is important that we understand this is not a philosophy of the human, nor a denial that intelligence is found elsewhere (as he also explores animal life and artificial intelligence), but that the lived (reality) of the human is purely contingent and it is out of the human contingency that human thought comes:11
