Abstract

François Laruelle's writing on Non-Photography is examined from its ontological condition to its desired form of a unity derived from the work of Kant, discussing precisely how the logic of transcendence and the ontology of immanence central to Laruelle's theory impact on how the photographic image is incontrovertibly involved with Kant's paradox of appearance and reality. In a context of burgeoning technoscience, which lays bare the meaning of Non-Photography for the seemingly impossible reversion to actual photography, the article goes on to consider Photo-Fiction in the context of the Real of science now yoked to an economy of technical models. But by foreclosing the Kantian Real by fractal‐virtual ratio, does not this science reify the Real of Identity and displace real photography with a photography in the Real? The article thus questions how Laruelle's' thesis hangs together in terms of its cause and the contingency of effect that infuses Laruelle's radical aesthetic.