Superpositions

Laruelle and the Humanities

Rocco Gangle, Julius Greve

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786602473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Théorie critique

One of the most important French philosophers working today, François Laruelle has developed an innovative and powerful repertoire of concepts across an oeuvre spanning four decades and more than twenty books. His work—termed non-philosophy or, more recently, non-standard philosophy—has garnered international attention in recent years and stands likely to have a significant impact on the critical practices of the humanities in the near future. Bringing together some of the most prominent scholars of Laruelle, Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities explores the intersections of Laruelle’s work with multiple discourses within the humanities, including philosophy, critical theory, political theory, media studies, and religious studies. The book addresses two main questions: In what relation does non-philosophical thought stand with respect to the materials and methods of other disciplines? How can Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy be applied, appropriated and used by other discourses? Superpositions provides a useful introduction to Laruelle’s work for students and scholars, and marks an important intervention into one of the most vigorous and contested areas of contemporary scholarship in the critical humanities.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Superposing Non-Standard Philosophy and Humanities Discourse

Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve

How to found a rigorous science of the human, established in the rigor specific to theory as such—that is to say, in the experience of the full and phenomenally positive sense of theoria? One that no longer borrows its means of investigation, of demonstration, of validation, from existing sciences? It must be founded in the specific essence of its object, in the truth of its object: the discovery of the science of the human and that of the real essence of the human are the same thing.

—François Laruelle1

1. LARUELLE AND METHOD: OBJECTS, OBJECTIVES, OBJECTIONS

Discourses are meant to be determined, at least in part, by their objects. The discourse of biology is meant to be determined by living things, for instance, and that of economics by flows of production, consumption, and exchange. Sciences at any rate are intended to track determinations in their objects and generate knowledge in some form or another through these determinations. What about the discourse of philosophy? What is its determinate object? How does this object become philosophy’s aim or goal, its primary objective? What about the other fields and discourses grouped together, however loosely, as the “humanities”? What type of determination coordinates these “human” disciplines with their various objects and objectives? One way that the theoretical apparatus developed by François Laruelle over the past several decades may be understood is as an attempt to provide a new orientation of thought toward the concept of the object, in general, and the human object, in particular. Laruelle’s thought has become broadly known under the names of non-philosophy and, more recently, non-standard philosophy, and indeed the core concept of objecthood taken over and transformed by non-philosophy is that provided first by philosophy. The aim or objective of Laruelle’s work may be described in general as the honing of a human theoretical stance that would no longer objectify the human in the manner of philosophy and its disciplinary avatars but would instead proceed within and among the materials given by such disciplines via a method of immanent theory, or generic science.

One way to approach non-philosophy is thus by conceiving the new standpoint it registers with respect to the traditional objects of philosophy. It is this key aspect of Laruelle’s thought that bears special relevance for the humanities, since it is precisely the peculiar status of the objects of humanities discourse—products of human creative action—that gives these disciplines their special character. From a non-standard or non-philosophical point of view, the various objects investigated by philosophy are always already preformatted by philosophy itself. Thus philosophy essentially mediates itself through the objects it purports to examine. The basic point of non-philosophy, then, is to offer a tendentious yet robust and plausible account of philosophy’s “essence”—not, however, in order once and for all to fix philosophy’s identity and close its endless discussions about itself, its iterations and reiterations (this would be the philosophical analogue of non-philosophy’s project). Rather, non-philosophy seeks to operationalize, in a second step (although this question of ordering will prove to be crucial), its account of philosophy as a fresh chance under contemporary conditions of thought—political, aesthetic, scientific, religious/antireligious, ecological—to extend theory in creative and experimental ways that might otherwise remain stymied.

What is this non-philosophical account of philosophy’s essence? Or, to put it in pragmatic terms: How does Laruelle’s own conceptual discourse delineate what philosophy is? Despite a variety of superficially distinct formulations, the answer is quite straightforward: philosophy for non-philosophy consists in the decisional, abstract partitioning of a universal domain (typically Being or the All, but at times merely thinking or conceptually deflated material nature) into two indissociable standpoints, one relatively concrete and empirical and the other relatively structural and conditioning. What Laruelle, following Michel Foucault, calls the empirico-transcendental (or transcendental-empirical) doublet is one canonical instance of this (meta-)structure.2 Another important class of examples is given by the “philosophies of difference” indexed by the names Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze as well as their many commentators and followers.3 But it is also possible to go back to much earlier philosophical cases: the pre-Socratics (Heraclitus and Parmenides are paradigmatic here), Plato and neo-Platonism, pagan and baptized Aristotelianism, and related movements and traditions. These too are models of the basic philosophical algebra, two internally complex terms conceived equally as operations closed under their various synthetic compositions. The important point is that this algebra is by its very nature infinitely plastic, self-reflexive, and differentiating/differentiated, as well as endlessly auto-disruptive or self-critical. Rather than a fixed and rigid form into which particular philosophies might be crowbarred like Procrustean dreamers, this notion of an abstract theoretical algebra characterizing philosophy as such—a two-in-one of conceptual terms or functions that morphs naturally into a three-in-two (thus a two-in-one-in-three-in-two and so on)—is, for the immanent or non-synthetic stance, taken by non-philosophy, an always partial/impartial structure that both solicits and provides its auto/hetero-supplementation.4

The core claim of non-philosophy—arguably its sole claim or unique axiom, given the data of historical/a priori philosophy—is that for all the obvious differences and mutual incompossibilities among these cases of philosophy, their common mode of thinking depends upon the use of this doublet structure or what could also be called a plastic algebra as a strategy for self-legitimation. In other words, the difference and relation of the transcendental and the empirical (or whatever terms one might substitute for these in the fundamental partitioning) work to underwrite a claim to ultimate or foundational sufficiency for all forms of theory. Thus, philosophy is what it is in order to make all theory essentially philosophical. It presumes that it must be presumed.

It is here that a crucial point must be made, one that without being understood leads to a profound misinterpretation of the non-philosophical project. The apparent criticism of philosophical method as involving an essentially vicious or question-begging structure is in fact not a critique of philosophy. To critique philosophy is to be—canonically—philosophical. If anything, Laruelle’s position with respect to this point is no doubt closer to that of Aristotle, who may have been the first to point out that philosophy is simply unavoidable, that “even if one need not philosophize, one still has to philosophize.”5 This is not a criticism of the philosophical realm but the nullification in advance of every escape plan from it—as any reader of Laruelle’s work will readily admit, his discourse is by no means “anti-theoretical” but works instead toward the construction of a theoretical apparatus that uses philosophy and related forms of thought in the same way a painter would make use of paintings.6 Or, as Laruelle writes in the preface to the recent English translation of Theory of Identities (1992): “Non-philosophy is doubled more globally by a musical organization or tissue. Vertically, it is a spiraled thought, contrapuntal in spirit or with superposed themes. . . . Horizontally, it is a melody that exposes and reexposes the themes. Its profound or desired model is musical.”7

Rather than the driving motor of a critique, the vicious or question-begging structure of philosophy is, for non-philosophy, an occasion or opportunity for infinitely varied and experimentally open forms of thinking, frequently modeled on the perspectives assumed in artistic practices, such as music or photography, rather than the basic objective-representational stance of philosophy. How does this work? Since philosophy already grounds itself in advance of any possible critical exterior (every exterior, be it One or Other) the Real is always already configured for philosophy by philosophy. This is why non-philosophy necessarily produces—for philosophy—an effect of empty or ungrounded theory-by-fiat. It takes the self-legitimating structure of philosophy as a new free predicate or unsaturated term that may be treated as insufficient or underdetermined in itself, thereby becoming susceptible to being attached or conjugated in non-traditional ways with other terms, as well as with the objects and practices of other discourses. Thus it is wrong to claim simply that non-philosophy is merely a kind of thinking that brackets sufficiency or weakens philosophical pretensions tout court. In a much more interesting way, non-philosophy involves itself in theoretical discourses and practices in a way that is strictly prior to any question of sufficiency or insufficiency—it presents a new kind of thinking that is comparable to the way in which artistic practices like music, literature, or painting “think” according to their own parameters, partially independent, therefore, of their eventual capture by philosophical discourse and criticism. Even the notion of “philosophical sufficiency,” or what Laruelle also calls the “Principle of Sufficient Philosophy,” is not at all eliminated from the discourse of non-philosophy but is reconfigured as one simple material or term among many with which the non-philosopher may or may not experiment. It is for this reason that Laruelle is able to claim rightly that non-philosophy leaves philosophy within its own sphere as (regionally) autonomous. The “critical” force of non-philosophy then spills out as a secondary effect only after its initial deployment as an experimental practice.

The logic (or meta-logic) of philosophy as viewed from the standpoint of non-philosophy should thus be clear: an intrinsically incomplete or partial structure (a model for determination) grounds—ironically enough—a self-solicitation that produces the ideal effect of practical sufficiency. The cure for the ills of philosophy is, therefore, from the standpoint of philosophy, always more philosophy. In other words, philosophy’s overcoming of its internal problematics must be effectuated philosophically. However, what is crucial here is that this aspiration on philosophy’s part qua discipline also extends to other thinking practices. Science is here the canonical case. Philosophy treats science as that form of thought that remains all-too-determined by the positivity of its objects, as the system of discourses that is lost in its own data and thus cannot understand itself. In Heidegger’s (in)famous words from What Is Called Thinking?: “Science itself does not think, and cannot think.”8 While Heidegger’s claim should by no means be understood as straightforwardly as it may sound here, as many of his commentators have repeatedly asserted, it is still the case that this claim entails the following: science, according to philosophy, can only understand itself through philosophy. Why? Because philosophy is the very self-understanding of self-understanding. It is t...