May 2, 2024
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from Türkiye
seen from Canada
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from Germany
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from India
seen from Germany
Laruelle's project can best be summed up as a thought-experiment in the fullest meaning of this phrase--the experience of thought and the thought (of) experience--the experiment being concerned with what philosophy would become were it not representational at all, but rather the thing itself. By this I don't mean to take philosophy as an aspect of Mind that is the Real (even if its most 'complete' aspect), for that would just be one more idealism, one more philosophical positing. Rather, the question is: what would we find if all philosophies, in their plurality, were real (and so not in accordance with their mutual exclusivity, their exclusive claims on truth and reality)? In this sense, Laruelle provides us with an application of Badiou's subtractivism to philosophy per se, that is, in place of being as such equally sheer quantity or set-membership (Badiou), what philosophy is as such becomes sheer decisionism, that is, the pure attempt to evaluate the Real. This collective form or structure is both that which all philosophies have in common and that which makes them real. There is consequently no fallacy in going from the fact to value because values (transcendental evaluations) are types of facts once the'e been reduced en masse to all there is (the totality of philosophies each trying to establish its 'truth' as the one that ought to be true. As the most rigorous thought of immanence possible, non-philosophy allows every philosophy its truth and reality, not in the name of an epistemological relitavism (more Continental philosophy), but through a hypothetical Real-ism (a kind of Post-Continental naturalism).
John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy, p. 149.
[N]on-philosophy works by taking a philosophical dyad as its material, not by thematising it (for this would only be a meta-duality or representation of the Real). It is notable that the more thoroughgoing pluralism of Laruelle is founded on a spatial signification (laterality), while that of Deleuze, which is still home to a distinction between common doxa (or Ur-doxa) and true philosophy, is founded on language and the voice (univocity).
John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: an outline, p. 146
A unilateral duality is a non-relational 'relation' between the Real and philosophy. This sounds paradoxical, of course: if one asks the question, 'what is the relation between relation and non-relation?', one might at first simply refuse to answer (no less than we seemed to be at an impasse when we asked 'what is the difference between differences in degree and differences in kind?'). Or one could venture the following response: 'it is a unilateral duality', by which Laruelle appears to mean another order of relation. This special relation renders philosophy level (lateral) with all other thought--save non-philosophy itself of course. It also uni-versalises (unilaterialises) thought relative (or according) to the Real. And finally, this non-relation just is non-philosophy, it is what it does.
John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: an outline, p. 147.
[The non-philosophical] determination-in-the-last-instance or 'as if' causality must not be thought of as a mysterious causality from an 'ulterior' world, some 'world-behind-the-scenes'. It is not causa sui, but determined 'before all determination'. It is the causality specific to non-philosophy in general; an immanent, occasional causality. Being wholly uni-directional, from the Real to the thought-world, it is 'rigorously irreversible' (and not just empirically so, but conceptually too). And being a kind of occasional cause means that determination-in-the-last-instance is a causality of the moment (in-the-last-instance). This singularity of the 'last-instance' indicates that the Real is the unique real cause (as the void is for Badiou) and is 'occasional' because it is dited 'to the moment where it manifests itself'. But this moment, though singular, is not in the present. The temporality of the occasion of futural and explains why this determination is hypothetical, following the deductions of a 'what if' thinking ('what if thought was a thing'). The event of thought is the advent of thought, its manifestation-in-the-last-instance, the force (of) thought.
John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: an outline, p. 147.