Everything you need to understand both Laruelle's critique of difference and his project of non-philosophyGilles Deleuze described Laruelle's thought as 'one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy'. Now, Rocco Gangle - who translated Laruelle's philosophy into English - takes you through Laruelle's trailblazing book Philosophies of Difference, helping you to understand both Laruelle's critique of Difference and his project of non-philosophy, which has become one of the most intriguing avenues in contemporary thought. He (...) explains the context within which Laruelle's thought developed and takes you through the challenging argument and conceptual scaffolding of 'Philosophies of Difference'. (shrink)

"François Laruelle is one of the most important French philosophers of the last 20 years, and as his texts have become available in English there has been a rising tide of interest in his work, particularly on the concept of 'Non-Philosophy'. Non-philosophy radically rethinks many of the most cutting-edge concepts such as immanence, pluralism, resistance, science, democracy, decisionism, Marxism, theology and materialism. It also expands our view of what counts as philosophical thought, through art, science and politics, and beyond (...) to fields as varied as film, animality and material objects. Key features: Provides an overview of Laruelle's thought and an understanding of his contemporary relevance to contextualise his work for new readers ; Contains an exclusive interview with Laruelle and a new essay written by Laruelle himself ; Includes a bibliography of Laruelle's work and secondary literature."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

_Laruelle_ is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In _Laruelle_, Galloway (...) argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology. (shrink)

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s (...) philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital. (shrink)

François Laruelle emerged from the hallowed generation of French postwar philosophers that included luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Jean Baudrillard, yet his thinking differs radically from that of his better-known contemporaries. In Laruelle and Art, Jonathan Fardy provides the first academic monograph dedicated solely to Laruelle's unique contribution to aesthetic theory and specifically the 'non-philosophical' project he terms 'non-aesthetics'. This undertaking allows Laruelle to think about art outside the boundaries of standard (...) philosophy, an approach that Fardy explicates through a series of case studies. By analysing the art of figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Anish Kapoor, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell as well as the drama of Michael Frayn, Fardy's new book enables new and experienced readers of Laruelle to understand how the philosopher's thinking can open up new vistas of art and criticism. (shrink)

As one of the seminal theorists further developing François Laruelle’s politically-poised “non-standard philosophy,” Katerina Kolozova’s approach to animality and feminism is part of a particular post-humanist Marxist continuum (which includes Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles). Nonetheless, Kolozova distinguishes herself from this lineage by adhering to Laruelle’s method, liquidating philosophy of its anthropomorphic nexus. Thus, Kolozova also belongs to a more recently inaugurated and nascent tradition, working in tandem with post-Laruellean philosophers of media, technology, (...) aesthetics and feminist critique, such as Bogna Konior, Yvette Granata, Jonathan Fardy and John Ó Maoilearca. Within this variegated assemblage, Kolozova’s most recent project, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals(2019), saliently reconciles and radicalizes Haraway’s epochal dyad of the “inhuman”—a bifurcation riven by technology on one node and the animal on the other—by a resolution of superlative unity. This methodology, adhering to Laruelle’s system of“synthesis-without-synthesizing” attempts to dissolve the spectral chimeras that have haunted philosophy’s metaphysical heredity, proffering a generic identity. (shrink)

Laruelle's first book Phenomenon and Difference: An Essay on Ravaisson's Ontology is unanimously overlooked as having little relevance to his later non-philosophy. On the contrary, this paper analyses Laruelle's dissertation and Ravaisson's writings to show how Ravaisson enables Laruelle to develop non-philosophy's three central ideas of decision, radical immanence, and cloning. Firstly, Laruelle inherits Ravaisson's critique of Platonism and anti-Platonism as dividing the unity of being between two terms, of which one alone is conflated with being (...) to the detriment of the other as non-being. Moreover, Laruelle follows Ravaisson's third way of envisioning being as a radical immanence, which philosophy presupposes to constitute its dualisms by dividing being into opposed terms. Finally, Laruelle's cloning adheres to Ravaisson's eclectic method of expressing being's true immanence through his cohering of all philosophies, as well as disciplines like art and religion, into a single narrative of one and the same being's self-unfolding. (shrink)

A comparison and contrast of the notions of subjectivity and otherness in Levinasian phenomenology and Laruelle's non-philosophy.

In Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle develops the concepts and method of a more democratic form of thought where neither science nor philosophy is subjected to one another, but brought together in a more productive theoretical and practical relationship. While the potential importance of this project is clear, Laruelle remains famously difficult. Anthony Paul Smith provides an introduction and guide to the text that situates you amongst the figures and concepts Laruelle engaged with, provides a foothold for your (...) own understanding and, more importantly, potential use of the project of non-philosophy. (shrink)

This book examines the relevance of François Laruelle’s innovative notion of non-standard philosophy to critical and constructive discourses in the humanities, bringing together essays from prominent Anglophone scholars of Laruelle’s work and includes a contribution from Laurelle himself.

The following interview of Mark William Westmoreland with Anthony Paul Smith–well-known scholar and translator of François Laruelle –considers both implications and extensions of Laruelle's non-philosophy for contemporary thought. Smith has helped bring about a surge of interest in Laruelle due to his many translations of his texts as well as being the author or co-editor of several books on Laruelle. Discussed are in particular the difficulties and joys of translating and the usefulness of Laruelle's thought (...) for Smith's own work, especially in environmental and animal studies. Also considered are some themes of non-philosophy, the adaptability of Laruelle's thought for various disciplines, as well as new paths for Laruelle studies –new, unforeseen landscapes and uses of non-philosophy –that explore social phenomena such as race, racism, sexism, victim a.o. (shrink)

This book provides a critical introduction to François Laruelle’s writings on photography, with a particular focus on his two most important books on photography: The Concept of Non-Photography and Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. By unpacking and contextualising these works, this study provides a useful starting point for students and scholars who want to better understand Laruelle’s larger project, which he calls “non-philosophy”, or more recently, “non-standard philosophy”. With clear and concise explanations of the basics of non-philosophy, Laruelle (...) and Non-Photography demonstrates how Laruelle's thought challenges standard, philosophical approaches to photography, and culminates in a novel theory of "non-photography.". (shrink)

François Laruelle has rightfully earned the title of contemporary French philosophy’s archetypical heretic, having fostered the “non-standard” method of univocal genericity and spurred an altogether radical praxis, inciting a new generation of loyal followers that include Jason Barker and Ray Brassier. Laruelle’s method, often referred to as “non-philosophy” (though “non-philosophy” is an abbreviation of “non-standard philosophy”), withdraws from the metaphysical precept of separating the world into binarisms, perhaps epitomized by the formative division between “universals” and “particulars” in Kant’s (...) Transcendental Deduction. Laruelle’s method also rejects the “evental” nature of Being described by Heiddegger as the foundation for philosophy's “standard model,” which Heidegger termed Ereignis (often translated as “the event of Appropriation”). In its immanence, Laruelle’s “One” is understood as generic identity - an identity/commonality that reverses the classical metaphysics found in philosophy’s bastion thinkers (a lineage that runs from Plato to Badiou), where the transcendental is upheld as a necessary precondition for grounding reality. Instead, Laruelle asserts the “One” as the immanent real: generic, non-philosophical and axiomatic. (shrink)

Mysticism, theurgy, non-philosophy: this text will experiment with the three in an attempt to perform a non-philosophical hijacking of so-called theurgy. I will experiment with a comparison between Iamblichus' theurgy, Laruelle's non-philosophy, and the notion of the Vision-in-One. I claim their point of convergence is their allegiances to the theory of the One, derived from Plato's Unwritten Doctrines. The ancient notion of the One is subject to a similar procedural gesture in both Iamblichus and Laruelle, namely, the procession (...) of the One from the noematic to the aesthetic realm. What connects them is their rejection of the theory that the soul's descension from the One to the visible realm represents a degeneration of the Nous. In a concept akin to the very idea of theurgy, Laruelle proposes his Vision-in-One, which is to think from the One rather than the One. The Vision-in-One is an attempt to materialize the disembodied fate of the noema against realistic skepticism. (shrink)

In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for victims of crimes against humanity. Laruelle insists that the victim has been left out of philosophy and displaced by an abstract pursuit of justice. He offers a non- philosophical approach that reverses the victim/intellectual dyad and calls for compassionate insurrection. In this paper, we probe Laruelle's critique (...) of the committed intellectual's obligations to victims, specifically, through an examination of Sartre's "A Plea for Intellectuals." We hope to show the value of Laruelle's theory on victims, crime and power for imagining future-oriented intellectuals. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of the relationship between corporeality and the ordinary in the works of François Laruelle. This is done through the formulation of the ‘ordinary body’ that draws from across Laruelle's work on the ordinary, corporeality and photography in order to outline Laruelle's radically immanent account of embodiment. The critical outline of Laruellean corporeality and the ordinary body is drawn out via a critical posing of Laruelle in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari. In (...) doing so, the article indicates the singular difference between Laruelle, on one side, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, with respect to corporeal immanence and the usage of the everyday and ordinary. The article concludes with an argument that the relationship between the body and the ordinary in Laruelle's thought implies a novel non-philosophical or non-standard ‘poetics’ and usage of the ordinary. (shrink)

"Stains" can serve as a metaphor for the role allotted to meaninglessness not only by partisans of the deterritorializing force of "brute matter", but also by diagnosers of symbolic incompleteness. For both, the blindspot that will lead to the disturbance of a given regime of meaning must be determined through a smear or glitch which that regime cannot sublate: the mark of a Real stripped of systematising mediation. However, we argue that it is all too easy to allow the stringency (...) of this Real to be undermined by the inflation in its name of merely contingent empirical instances. Such blockages to theoretical and artistic practice can be removed with the aid of the articulation of incompleteness and inconsistency implied by François Laruelle's conception of the Real as non-consistent but hypercomplete "radical immanence". À rebours of Laruelle himself, different types of meaninglessness can then be distinguished, de-metaphorized, and conceptualized as "noise". (shrink)

This essay develops the concept of a “generic ethics” which engages with the Kantian conception of ethics developed between ends and means. This development takes place within a non-philosophical paradigm which brings science and philosophy together, attempting to move beyond the Kantian engagement with Newtonian physics to the contemporary quantum model. Ultimately the essay argues for a reconsideration of ethics such that the sufficiency of finality or ends is no longer taken as the standard of judgement and this leads to (...) a reconsideration of the place of technology. (shrink)

According to François Laruelle, French thought has been unduly influenced by corpuscular or atomist thinking, yet Laruelle has himself employed key atomist terms—in particular, that of the clinamen or swerve—in framing his own style of thought. This essay looks at this tension between atomism and anti-atomism in Laruelle’s thought, taking the measure of his contribution to a larger stream of postwar French thinking about the relevance and stakes of ancient atomism. Its contention is that Laruelle subtly (...) but really outlines a quantum theoretical resumption of ancient atomist philosophy—one that deserves closer attention and comparative study in the larger context of French philosophical interest in the atomists. A first section of the paper briefly describes Laruelle’s general project, along with his claim that he differs from his contemporaries because he uniquely escapes the dangers of what he calls corpuscular thought. A second section addresses the apparent tension between Laruelle’s claim to produce a non-corpuscular thinking and his consistent recent use of the atomist image of the clinamen, ultimately arguing that Laruelle sides with the clinamen against two forms of corpuscularity supposedly avoided by the clinamen itself but nonetheless usefully embodied in atomist thought. The final section of the paper draws up in preliminary terms a comparison between Laruelle’s understanding of his relationship to atomism and that of his contemporaries, focusing in particular on Alain Badiou. (shrink)

The Voice of Laruelle, the philosopher What is a voice in the context of the arts and philosophy? In the space of the philosopher's voice, in the complex grammar of his language is played his philosophical timbre, his own space, his particular voice, composed of concepts, articulated by the laws of coherence of the common philosophical language, with hypnotic specificities. These specificities are precisely the fruit of processes formerly called rhetoric, which I call non-hypnotics, one of whose functions is (...) just to speak in a double space: the common reference space of the reader or listener, and the conceptual virtual space peculiar to the philosopher. To the extent that the reader must pay increased and permanent attention to this double space, the philosophical trance effect, equivalent to the Ericksonian hypnotic trance, is facilitated. The difficulty of this double reading is the incessant passage from one code to another, which is also a hypnotic fascination. Heidegger prolongs and renews its structures and draws some effects from them, which provoke in the mind of the reader as an over-flow, a saturation effect, which itself favors the philosophical trance. Thus, each voice seeks to captivate the mind by confusing it with concepts, which seem at first sight familiar, but which reveal themselves with the use which is made, like formidable concepts to the power of unaccustomed fascination. One of the pleasures of reading Lareuelle's philosophy is due to this type of fascination with the philosophical voice and its language. (shrink)

Theory of the philosophical decision -- The style of non-philosophy -- Politics, or a democracy (of) thought -- Science, or philosophy's other -- Ethics, or universalizing the stranger-subject -- Fabulation, or non-philosophy as philo-fiction -- Religion, or a rigorous heresy.

"The Age of Non-Philosophy": Martin Heidegger and François Laruelle In his lessons at the College of France, Merleau-Ponty noticed that something ended with Hegel and that we perhaps entered in an age of non-philosophy. This poses the question if philosophy is coming to an end or if it can be rebuild from within by retaining its essence. While Merleau-Ponty is trying to restore philosophy from the inside, Heidegger and Laruelle open two different paths of a non-philosophical thinking from (...) the outside. The purpose of the article is to compare these two paths more in detail in order to articulate their differences as to the problems of identity, of the "thing of thought", of the role of science etc., and to show the radicality of Laruelle's undertaking, which aims not a Verwindung, nor an Überwindung of philosophy but its appropriation in a new unified theory of thought. One of the main thesis of the author is that Heidegger should not be considered only as a "philosopher of difference" but also as a thinker of identity as he has expounded four different identity concepts. Hence, it is argued that if Laruelle's critique of the convertibility of Erignis' identity is legitimate, his critique of Heidegger's amphibology of the One is questionable. (shrink)

이 논문은 중도의 태도를 가지고 있는 것으로 보이는 현대프랑스철학자 프랑수아 라뤼엘의 비-철학을 동양 사유의 한 전통인 중도의 사유방식 및 논리와 함께 비판적으로 계승하고 발전시키고자 하는 목적으로 살핀다. 이 과정에서 비-철학이 공성(空性)으로 볼 수 있는 내재적 실재로서 일원적 일자의 철저한 내재성으로부터 사유한다는 점과 동시에 일원적 일자의 내재성은 초월성과 내재성이 혼재된 차이의 철학의 전체적이거나 초월적 혹은 초월론적인 성질의 내재성과 그 결을 달리한다는 점을 밝힌다. 다음으로, 일자의 내재성으로부터 보는 일심, 즉 일원적 관점이 갖는 일원적 이원성을 검토하는 과정에서 라뤼엘의 일원적 관점은 필자의 ‘일원적 중도의 (...) 관점’의 도움을 필요로 한다는 사실을 검토한다. 일원적 관점은 실제로 비일자와 비-일자를 일원적 일자로 일원화시켜 보기엔 적합하지만 그들의 일원적 이원성, 즉 비-관계적 관계와 그들의 특이성을 함께 살피기 위해서 반드시 일원적 중도의 관점의 동반을 필요로 하는 것으로 보인다. 마지막으로, 비-철학적 사유로서 일원적 중도의 관점은 절대적 초월로의 위험이 있는 동양의 공(空)사상에 대한 집착의 태도에, 그리고 초월성과 내재성이 혼합되어 있는 차이에 대한 사유로서 해체론 시대의 철학에 철학의 종말이라는 형이상학적 허무로부터 벗어날 수 있는 미래 철학으로의 새로운 길을 제시하기 위한 결정적인 실마리가 될 수 있음을 밝힌다. (shrink)

All Thoughts Are Equal is both an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an exercise in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his "non-standard" approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking--including the nonhuman--are equal. John Ó Maoilearca examines how philosophy might appear when viewed with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. (...) He does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film (Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions) as an example of the non-standard method. Von Trier's film is a meditation on the creative limits set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how these limits can push our experience of film--and of ourselves--beyond what is normally deemed "the perfect human." All Thoughts Are Equal adopts film's constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle's radically new style of philosophy is best presented through our most nonhuman form of thought--that found in cinema. (shrink)

This article draws from François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy to locate gestures of philosophical "authority"or 'sufficiency"within recent work in the philosophy of theatre –including material from contemporary Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, and texts by Alain Badiou, such as In Praise of Theatre(2015). Whilst Badiou initially appears magnanimous in relation to theatre's own thinking -famously describing theatre as "an event of thought" that "directly produces ideas"(Badiou 2005: 72) -I argue that this very benevolence, from a Laruellean perspective, constitutes another form of philosophical (...) authoritarianism. In contrast, I indicate some affinities between Laruelle's non-standard aesthetics and the emerging field of Performance Philosophy -one aim of which, as distinct from the philosophy of theatre, would be to allow performance to qualitatively extend our concepts of thinking and/or to be attentive to the ways in which performance has already provided new forms of philosophy. (shrink)

본 논문은 라뤼엘의 비-철학에 의한 철학 비판, 특히 차이의 철학의 철학적 이중성과 철학적 결정의 문제점을 살핀 후, 내재적 실재 일자로서 일원적 일자의 철저한 내재성에 근거하여 사유하는 비-철학이 일원적 인과관계를 통해 제시하는 학문방법론으로서 일원적 이원분석을 연구한다. 본 논문은 이 과정에서 철학을 포함한 모든 학문의 보편적 방법론이고자 하는 비-철학의 일원적 이원분석이 갖는 철학적 의의를 크게 두 가지 측면에서 살핀다. 첫째, 일원적 이원분석은 서양철학의 맥락에서 차이와 해체 철학이 형이상학을 비판한 후 미래 철학으로의 길을 열기 위해 직면한 무력감을 극복하는 강력한 방법으로서 뿐만 아니라, 보편적인 (...) 학문방법론이 될 수 있다는 점이다. 둘째, 일원적 이원분석이, 동양 전통사유의 한 축인 중도의 논리를 현대의 학문방법론으로 계승하고 발전시키려는 사유작업 ― 중도학 ― 에 결정적인 실마리로서 하는 역할이다. (shrink)

François Laruelle has been developing his project of non-philosophy since the 1970s. Throughout this time he has aimed at nothing less than the discovery and development of a new form of thinking that draws its material from philosophy and related disciplines, but uses them in inventive new ways that are seen as heretical by standard philosophical approaches. The contributions to this volume highlight Laruelle’s own distinctive approach to the history of thought and bring together researchers in the Anglophone (...) and Francophone world who have taken up the project of non-philosophy in their own way, developing new heresies, sometimes even in relation to non-philosophy itself. The contributions here show the scope of non-philosophy with essays on gender, science, religion, politics, animals, and the history of philosophy. They are all brought together, not in a city of intellectuals bound together by law, but within a city of heretics bound together only by their status as stranger. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki. _. (shrink)

A review of Francoise Laruelle's General Theory of Victims, which places Laruelle's theory in the context of post-colonial theories of the subaltern subject after Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. The review questions whether Laruelle's General Theory of Victims really allows the so-called victims to speak for themselves, or simply represents another attempt by Western (French?) intellectuals to speak to/through the victims, for their own political and theoretical purposes.

Qu'est-ce que la "non-politique"? Est-elle pensable? Pourquoi l'évidence de la politique est-elle si forte? L'histoire de la philosophie occidentale est une tentation toujours renouvelée de "penser la politique depuis la non-politique". Nous pouvons indiquer qu'au moins, dans la modernité, les théoriciens du contrat social inventent déjà une idée révolutionnaire de "l'état de nature" qui est une notion non politique par excellence. Si nous admettons qu'il y a quelque chose de non politique, il y a au moins trois possibilités de penser (...) la non-politique qui nous conduisent à étudier trois théories radicalement distinctes : la "philosophie de l'avenir" de Nietzsche, la "psychanalyse" de Freud et la "non-philosophie" de François Laruelle. Non seulement ce sont les trois possibles conceptions de la non-politique, mais elles mettent en jeu le devenir historique de la notion non politique chez ces trois penseurs d'immanence. Nietzsche est le représentant du primat de la politique : la non-politique finit toujours par être surmontée et absorbée par le politique. Freud observe une différence irréductible entre politique et non-politique : l'une ne domine pas l'autre et vice versa. Enfin, Laruelle démontre que c'est la non-politique qui détermine en dernière instance la politique ; c'est l'Un qui fait un usage unilatéral du matériau occasionnel qu'est l'Autorité dont le coeur est la Pensée-Monde. (shrink)

This article offers two further philosophical engagements with the writings of the Apostle Paul. The recent work of Francois Laruelle on Paul in his turn to Christian non-theology is placed in dialogue with Nishitani Keiji’s account. This effort is accomplished by briefly grounding the discussion in Friedrich Nietzsche’s interpretation, where Paul is cast as the inventor of Christianity and the primary influence in the religion’s turn to a doctrinal and world-denying form of existence. As described here, Laruelle follows (...) the broad outline of Nietzsche’s interpretation, where Paul once more deviates from the example of Christ and is guilty of encouraging a turn away from the world towards concepts of transcendence and life after death. Nishitani, on the other hand, and despite his affection for Nietzsche’s thought, sees in Paul’s life and writings a turn towards immanence, and offers a heavily contrasting read of Paul, one which deserves greater attention. (shrink)

What happens when theory falters? A concern with the anthropocentric limitations of critical thought dominates contemporary cultural theory. For Joanna Zylinska, however, this concern often reflects a longstanding humanist anxiety, one that is today renewed in the form of ‘noir theory’, a reactionary scholarship that redeems the universalist human as the subject of reason. There is, though, more than one mode of noir theory, and a certain tendency of ‘noir’ affords the basis for theorizing another kind of universalism, a non-reactionary (...) account of the real. This article takes seriously the allusion to noir as a particular mode of detection. Its investigation begins with Gilles Deleuze, who commends crime fiction for providing an image of thought that works against humanist orthodoxy. Yet present circumstances demand investigating a blacker kind of noir, one that operates negatively, a noir theory that can be detected in the strange realism of François Laruelle. (shrink)

This essay will strive to provide the reader with various entry points into the project of François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy and its relation to non-aesthetics, via its relation to philosophy as rigorous fiction. It is a new genre, what Laruelle also calls a philo-fiction. Via Laruelle's preoccupation with photography as a new kind of thought, we will follow his trajectory of applying non-philosophy to photography. From his concept of non-photography and continued in Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, (...) class='Hi'>Laruelle's practice of striving to create a genre of thinking that would be akin to science fiction and use philosophy as material shows itself in the form of experimental, theoretical applications of his philo-fiction to the photo. In their performative thrust, one can begin to see the components or what he calls aspects of philosophy and quantum physics, including the use of superposition and the imaginary number, as well as conceptual personae and generic humanity. Laruelle's work has at its base a highly poetic, fictional strain that in striving to superpose philosophy and art (fiction) also has at its core a place for reducing the violence of decision and actions attempting to work within a space of radical immanence and radical passivity. A performation-withoutperformance. Laruelle will call the photo a ?weak insurrection.? This particle of Laruelle strives merely for such a poetic attempt. (shrink)

This book aims to see how the victim and the ‘identity of the Real’ are wedded to philosophers and intellectuals. Towards this aim Laruelle does not ‘leave philosophy to its own authority’ just as he does not ‘leave theology or religious beliefs to their own authorities’ (119).

Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating (...) and self-reproducing structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such. (shrink)