Laruelle

A Stranger Thought

Anthony P. Smith

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745671239, 9780745671222
• eBook ISBN: 9781509508921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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.

Part I
A Generic Introduction

1
Theory 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 denigr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Works by François Laruelle
• Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Philosophy?
• Part I: A Generic Introduction
• Part II: Unified Theories and the Waves of Non-Philosophy
• Conclusion: The Future of Non-Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement