A Biography of Ordinary Man

On Authorities and Minorities

François Laruelle, Jessie Hock, Alex Dubilet, Jessie Hock, Alex Dubilet

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509509966, 9781509509959
• eBook ISBN: 9781509509997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France's leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines. One of Laruelle's first systematic elaborations of his ethical and "non-philosophical" thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy offers a rigorous science of individuals as minorities or as separated from the World, History, and Philosophy. Through novel theorizations of finitude and determination in the last instance, Laruelle develops a thought "of the One" as a "minoritarian" paradigm that resists those paradigms that foreground difference as the conceptual matrix for understanding the status of the minority. The critique of the "unitary illusion" of philosophy developed here stands at the foundation of Laruelle's approach to "uni-lateralizing" the power of philosophy and the universals with which it has always thought, and thereby acts as a basis for his subsequent investigations of victims, mysticism, and Gnosticism. This book will appeal to students and scholars of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and cultural theory.

I
WHO ARE MINORITIES?

6. The Two Sources of Minoritarian Thought

Theorem 1. There are two sources, two paths, of minoritarian experience and thought. Minorities as “difference,” grafted on the body of the State and of Authorities in general. And minorities who are real below difference: individuals as such, or without qualities, “ordinary people,” who precede the State, and whose concept is no longer difference.

Here and there, in the warp and weft of games of power, marginalized individuals or collectives obsessed by their identity claim their “difference.” De facto differences (historical, cultural, political, institutional, linguistic, sexist, ageist, etc.); de jure differences (ethical and juridical); the right to difference . . . These are effective minorities, and they are found in the World, History, Language, etc. But they are not the subject of a specifically minoritarian experience and thought, which could be said to be only for and through them. This type of minorities, whatever more or less elaborated concept philosophy provides it, is well known: they are nothing but margins, gaps, lateral effects of games of power, their foam and their scraps. To think minorities as “difference” is to reduce them to their fusion with or – which is not very different – their difference from the State, conceiving of them as stato-minoritarian mixtures, as modes or projections of power relations, profits and losses of an indefatigable grind – history.

The other thought, properly minoritarian and no longer stato-minoritarian, radicalizes the conditions of the problem. It asks what would minorities be who would not form an additional universal – the intersection of the great authoritarian universals, Language, Sex, Culture, Desire, Power? Who would be par excellence real or formed of individuals as they are? It demands that we think people as nothing-but-individuals: before the State, Language, Text, Authorities, etc. But what is a thought that would only be by and for minorities, not too broad or too universal for individuals, and one that would ensue from them irreversibly as from the real itself?

The solution resides in a “Minority Principle,” which, being itself minoritarian, is no longer exactly a “principle” – we will return to this point – and which requires that the authentic minority, that is, individuality, be laid bare and decide to think through itself.

Theorem 2. Minorities determine Authorities in the last instance, who do not determine them in return.

“Determination in the last instance” is a formulation whose Marxist use, completely pervaded by empiricism and materialism, could not elucidate it radically enough to dispel its mystery. It has two sides: first of all, it registers the pre-statist autonomy of minorities and the pre-authoritarian existence of individuals; then, it draws the consequences this has for their “relation” to Authorities. This order is decisive: we will not grasp the truth of this formulation until the essence of minorities is clarified; it alone will explain why they form a “last instance” in a radical sense that is no longer entirely philosophical. How can minorities distinguish themselves from the State and its sub-systems and constitute an absolute sphere of individual existence, irreducibly autonomous from all relations and games of power? This is the first question. The second: why do the various aggregates of these relations, which have the form “institution” and the form “State,” enjoy only a relative autonomy, and why do they remain paradoxically dependent on “minoritarian” – which is to say simply real – individuals? “Determination in the last instance” is the key to these relations. It contains the novel meaning of a unilateral – non-reciprocal or non-reversible – determination. The stake of a thought of individuals as they are, or as minorities, is the experience of a radical irreversibility or uni-laterality in thought: how can individuals act on these universals, which seem to crush them? How can determination (and which one?) go from the individual to the State, rather than in the inverse direction?

It will take time to learn how not to inscribe minorities on the body of the State, to unlearn this immemorial philosophical gesture, and to no longer believe that we do well when we reduce them to more or less marginal or partial members of the body-State, to mere modes of Sex, of Language, of Traditions, etc. Ontology and politics, which serve us as thought, have never been able to conceive of individuals as anything other than modes of the State or of the great universals. What good is the deepest thought to us? A certain unitary complex, “metaphysics-and-its-surpassing,” “metaphysics-and-its-difference,” “representation-and-its-difference”: this unitary paradigm has never been able to conceive of multiplicities that would not be of Being or of the State, even when it claimed to “destroy” them. Even more so, onto-theo-politics, including the interrogation it carries out of its own essence, has been content to prematurely determine the essence of minorities as multiplicities-of-the-State, of-Language, of-Text, of-Desire, etc. This is what must be unlearned.

Theorem 3. Minoritarian determination in the last instance, which is the specific causality of the finite individual on the World, History, and Authorities in general, institutes a bifocal or two-pronged thought. It distributes the matter of existence or the life of the existent in a “uni-lateral” manner.

On the one hand, there are individuals as they are – we will return to this expression – who escape at least in their essence from Culture, History, and the State, and disappoint the hope Authorities have of ensuring their mastery. On the other hand, there are all of the powers of regulation, without exception, which produce or maintain a social or political body. These are overwhelmingly unitary Authorities or games of power, which are seductive but no less unitary. The “last instance” demands a strict respect for the uni-laterality of these relations and, above all, of these non-relations, which metaphysics no more than Marx or Nietzsche, not to mention the cultural and historical sciences, knew how to tolerate. The entire power of singularity or individuality, without any synthesis, must be put to one side only, and the entire power of synthesis must be cast exclusively to the other, and this without exchange, fusion, or reversion (“dialectical” or not), even if by definition the institutional and statist forces of the production of power (juridical rules, political institutions, economic exchanges and struggles) always tend towards the encompassing of minorities.

We do not yet know how this economy is possible. The claim to elevate unilaterality to a principle, to insert a radical irreversibility into thought, to elucidate a specific causality of the singular over the universal in the ordinary – without qualities – individual, form the coherent body of a nothing-but-minoritarian thought. But these claims so violently collide with common sense and Greco-unitary philosophy that they must be brought back to their sole “principle,” that is, based in the “real” in the rigorous sense of this concept, in the intimacy of the most incontestable experience. How could such a split – which claims to cast de facto and de jure minorities to the side of the powers of the State and denounce them as mere margins, necessary for its functioning – be anything but abstract and fictive from the perspective of philosophy and politics, without support in cultural and historical diversities? How will it be anything but overwhelmingly “metaphysical” and “ideological”? An objection without an object. On the one hand, the essence of real minorities will no longer be defined philosophically, politically, or culturally, etc., but by a real essence that does not participate in these universals. On the other hand – and this is a consequence of this way of thinking – what we call unilaterality will no longer be, in a “critical” and classical manner, a line of division or demarcation, or even a synthesis, a continuity, or a continuation. There is no “line of demarcation” or even of “difference” “between” minorities and Authorities, between individuals laid bare and the powers of the World. We renounce these politico-philosophical processes, which regularly amount to making minorities into a sub-system, at best a “member” or a “difference,” of these great entities – the State, Culture, Language, etc.

Theorem 4. Nothing-but-minoritarian thought begins neither with God nor with things, neither with Being nor with the Other. Nor even with “man,” insofar as he comes together with or forms a team with these unitary fetishes. It begins with the real, that is, with the One or the ordinary individual. It is the One that grounds “individuel” causality, unilateral or in the last instance determination.

A real and scientific concept of minorities is a discriminating concept, a criterion that finally distinguishes individuals from all the subsets of Authorities or of universals. We find this concept immediately in the “One” rather than in “Being.” The last presuppositions of a minoritarian thought are those of the One, and no longer those of Being (of its meaning, its truth, its place, its difference, etc.). The One is only real – this is the hypothesis that will constantly guide us – but Being is a real that is merely possible, a “possible experience.” And it is in this One that the power to uni-lateralize is rooted insofar as it forms an order that commands that the rest, that is, Authorities, be thought after the One, starting from it and according to an irreversible order of experiences. This division is only legitimate if it merges with the experience of the real, determined and described under conditions that are rigorous, that is, phenomenal and not – since we begin with real rather than with philosophical universals – phenomenological. This nothing-but-real on the basis of which we move and think is thus the experience (of) the One, which will also prove to be the experience of determination in the last instance. Meditating on the essence of the One, then on its consequences for the philosophical and the political – these are the first steps of a nothing-but-minoritarian thought.

Theorem 5. The political forgetting and denial of the essence of the State originate in the forgetting and the denial of the essence of minority or the One.

The restitution of this essence to its truth produces more than one reversal of the traditional relations of the State and minorities, of the World and individuals. Different than a new economy, an effect that is other-than-economic: the essence of minorities has no need for the essence of the State, it is the essence of the State that needs the essence of minorities; it is the State that cannot be correctly defined except from an absolute and positive essence, that of finite individuals – as is the case in general with authoritarian Universals, which are thus determined without reciprocity. If the minority principle is of interest, it is due to the rigor of its interpretation. It no longer entails “distinction” or “difference,” but the independence of minorities – at least when grasped in their real concept – with regard to any power, that is, any relation of power. And inversely, it entails that relations, which we will call games of power, have no real possibility or existence except as uni-lateral in relation to these minorities, which are their determination in the last instance.

Doubtless, as soon as the minoritarian becomes “effective” and extends its essence into a political existence, as soon as it is inscribed in communal and political lines, continuities, and becomings, as soon as it acquires goals and means, it cannot avoid appealing to the State and to Authorities to carry out its work, cannot avoid mixing its responsibility with that of the State – a process through which the State has always known how to render itself indispensable. But this is the great danger proper to “effective” minorities alone, to those that enter into politics: by dint of crossing swords with the State wherever it is present, they confuse their means with those of their adversary. In one sense, it is true that these individuals know no enemy but the State and its institutional variants, nor have they any seducer more impressive than them; and, in any case, it belongs to the essence of these minorities that are inscribed in the World and History to be vulnerable to seduction, to be able to be imitated and compromised by powers that are hardly “minoritarian,” simulated by Authorities with which they form a “stato-minoritarian complex,” whose tricks, illusions, and paralogisms we will continue to explore. But a theory of “real” minorities describes these minorities as by definition inalienable: the individual, real rather than effective, is not a part of the machine of the State, despite the minoritarian mimesis the State develops as its motivation and innermost goal.

It is obviously the One, insofar as its causality is that of “determination in the last instance,” that carries the possibility of these relations and non-relations of unilaterality, and thus also the possibility of a description of the individual without qualities, of ordinary man as distinct from man defined by the World or by anthropo-logical difference in general.

Theorem 6. The two experiences of minorities are not entirely foreign to each other, because Authorities (and the effective minorities who are inscribed in the sphere of Authorities) are determined in the last instance by the minorities we will call “individual” or real. We call effective minorities, those of which authorities are capable, “stato-minoritarian.”

The minoritarian individual (or the individual “as he is”) is a Janusfaced being, who only communicates unilaterally or with a single side. Multiple and dispersed straightaway, he is constrained by his essence, the One and its positive in-completion, to refuse to be defined by a group, a community, a commerce of any relations whatsoever. Not only does he not fall under regularities and continuities, but he refuses even to elevate his singular case into a rule, to make a law from his singularity, to identify the latter with the former: this is the minoritarian properly speaking, the dispersive or the positive diasporic, the One rather than the Other. Then, in a seemingly contradictory manner, even though it ensues “uni-laterally” from this first definition, “the man of the most comprehensive responsibility, who has the conscience for the over-all development of man”³ (Nietzsche): this is the stato-minoritarian, the individual who justly makes law or who merges with the State and becomes an Authority in his own way. In requiring the absolute autonomy of minorities with regards to the State, the Minority Principle demonstrates that minorities, at least as they are traditionally defined as “differences,” are nothing but powers of the State; and inversely, that the State’s own becoming constrains it to merge with minorities to constitute a stato-minoritarian sphere. From this arises a second, onto-theo-political, definition of minorities, a second source of minoritarian thought, the one of which philosophy has been “capable.”

“Double” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translators’ Introduction
• Foreword
• INTRODUCTION: A Rigorous Science of Man
• CHAPTER I: Who Are Minorities?
• CHAPTER II: Who Are Authorities?
• CHAPTER III: Ordinary Mysticism
• CHAPTER IV: Ordinary Pragmatics
• Analytical Table of Contents
• Index
• End User License Agreement