#nonphilosophy

[orbpill]

The non-philosophy of François Laruelle

[nonsenselab]

Aqua Rara 2014-ongoing

[theendofbeauty]

We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calm remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy.

Gilles Deleuxe and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? First appeared in French in 1991. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press, 1994. 

[luxfoks]

The “transcendental” aspect of the One appears in the threefold delineation of the “terms” which Laruelle takes it to “contain.” He describes these terms as “[1] a real or indivisible identity—the One-Real; [2] a term = X properly called, received from transcendence and which therefore is not immanent; [3] finally a term called ‘transcendental Identity,’ a veritable clone of the One which the term = X extracts from the Real.” Laruelle quickly reminds the reader that “in reality” (the way it is in-itself) the One is not reducible to any of these “terms.”† However, an elucidation of these terms is appropriate to our discussion. The first term bears the most similarity with mystical notions of the One, akin perhaps to the apeiron of Greek cosmology (the primal, formless chaos of Anaxagoras, Anaximander, etc.). It illustrates its primordial, undifferentiated identity. The second term obviously alludes to the crucial passage in Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” in the first (1781, A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, wherein he explains the proposition “A = B” (that is to say, the relation of subject to object, the “dyad” of which Laruelle speaks) rests on the transcendental possibility of their relation = X. As Laruelle writes, this term is “received from transcendence” because it transcendentally (noumenally) grounds the relation of a subject and a predicate which appear (phenomenally) unlike. Kant describes this as a necessary postulate of reason, a negative limit which can be invoked but not positively described. Laruelle later (implicitly) chides the reflective wonder which Kant tacitly adopted from Leibniz in viewing the amenability of the objective world to subjective cognition of it as justifying “the postulation of a ‘miracle,’ common sense or pre-established harmony, which dedicates philosophy to begging the question.” The final term, as Laruelle tells us, is abstracted/extracted (“over” and “out”) from this relation (X). In this respect the One is a clone (thereby ectypal) rather than original (archetypal) because it is conditioned by our empirical recognition of the relation by which we identify it. The dyad of A = B vows “revenge” on its duality, on its mutual alienation from its other, and “resigns its desire by extracting an image from the One (of) the One where the latter is not alienated.” I suspect this refers to the Hegelian henology, and accounts for the reciprocality of its 2/3 and 3/2 “fractional matrix.” The “3” side invariably refers to the transcendentally exterior “synthesis,” while the “2” refers to the immanently interior dualism of “thesis” and “antithesis” (to use crude Fichtean terms). It is my belief that Laruelle intends to identify non-philosophy primarily with the first of these terms, the “One-Real.” Only this term is truly original and “radically immanent.” The second term, by contrast, is based on an observation of a relation in Being and is thus ontological; the third term simply takes this ontic relation and purifies it logically. Laruelle suggests that Marxism came close to making the “discovery/invention” (a beautiful paradox) of the One-in-One or One-Real, by inverting Hegel’s idealism into materialism/realism. Still, it had fallen prey to the old Hegelian practice of scolding the “common consciousness” (only now it was “false consciousness”) as an “ideological” byproduct over which it exalted itself as a material science. Again it fell back on assigning to ordinary cognition a regrettable status as non-philosophical, or “unscientific” (to use a Leninist epithet).

Ross Wolf, "Thoughts on François Laruelle’s Preface and Introduction to Principles of Non-Philosophy (as translated by Fractal Ontology’s Taylor Adkins)"

[luxfoks]

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.

[luxfoks]

[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

[luxfoks]

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.

[luxfoks]

[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.