From Decision to Heresy: Introduction to Non-Philosophy

by François Laruelle

Introductory collection of writings by a creative and subversive thinker, ranging from the origins of “non-philosophy” to its evolution into what Laruelle now calls “non-standard philosophy.” The question “What is non-philosophy?” must be replaced by the question about what it can and cannot do. To ask what it can do is already to acknowledge that its capacities are not unlimited. This question is partly no-one knows what a body can do. It is partly circumscribe philosophy's illusory power, the power of reason or the faculties, and do not extend its sufficiency in the shape of by way of another philosophy. It is also partly how much of philosophy can be transformed through practice, how much of it can be withdrawn from its “ideological” use? And finally, it is also partly how can one limit philosophical language through its proper use? This introductory collection of writings by creative and subversive thinker François Laruelle opens with an introduction based upon an in-depth interview that traces the abiding concerns of his prolific output. The eleven newly translated essays that follow, dating from 1985 to the present, range from the origins of “non-philosophy” to its evolution into what Laruelle now calls “non-standard philosophy.” Two appendices present a number of Laruelle's experimental texts, which have not previously appeared in English translation, and a transcript of an early intervention and discussion on his “transvaluation” of Kant's transcendental method.

Genres: Philosophy, France

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

François Laruelle was a French philosopher, of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle began publishing in the early 1970s and had around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle was notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. Until his death, he directed an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

Reviews

[Maxwell]

Obtuse and unfun. I hate this book.

Laruelle’s non-philosophy (or ‘nonstandard thought’) teaches you to distrust the overarching finality of discovering meaning, the deceptive myth of ‘evaluating in the last instance’, by submitting images of thought to an evaluative matrix which he naturalizes through a confoundingly baroque vocabulary. The sadistic opacity of these essays will torment any reader into a slack-jawed '...huh?' Well do your worst, punk.

I began with a morbid fascination for this horrible man terrorizing philosophy writ large which congealed into a deep appreciation for the insight and dare I say importance of his thought. Can't say it never tested my stamina though.

So: a new realism makes necessary a structured distance from the real itself, but every Urbanomic author / reader thinks they’re a realist or a materialist or whatever the most fashionable way of saying I’m not a stupid idealist is, and the structuration of these diffuse philosophical regimes are incompatible statements which lead to a kind of pedantic warmongering. Laruelle shows how these points of contradiction (or ‘decisional structures’) can be made orthogonal on a mobius strip. Now this is an two-bit vulgarization, but pedal-to-the-metaphysical I don’t think I could reproduce Laruelle’s account in anything resembling coherent speech.

We’ve never been in philosophy, we’re bewitched into consideration of ourselves as subjects of philosophy and in doing so have mangled humanicity by metastasizing a transcendental ontogeny as the primary process of thought. Truth, for want of a definitional consensus, provides an adequation of a concept and its object but Laruelle’s real, the ‘one’, accounts for mishaps, distortions and other modalities of falsity within its manifold. This creates a flattened / democratized typology of the concept which plugs philosophies into a ‘trascendental computer’ rather than combine them into an undifferentiated mush. Theoretically, anyway--I wonder if any Laruellians have quite managed it.

Non-philosophy, at least in the essays contained here, has no direct evaluative claims about politics, values, history or any clarifying examples often provided by philosophers in the spirit of mercy for their readers. You can extrapolate this stuff if you really want to--after all, the true essence of political conviction is to contort everything you like into a grotesquely deformed alignment with your politics--but doing non-feminism or non-postcolonialism would be...difficult, which is probably why Laruelle won’t catch on in comparative literature departments anytime soon. To this end, the worst thing I can say about Laruelle is he can engender the passive nihilism of endless speculation. The vortex of his thought has the epiphenomenal effect of disarticulating everyday concerns.

You don’t read Laruelle to directly assess the Real, but to reconfigure the mechanisms which do the assessing and sterilize the metaphysical debris embedded in those tools. Philosophies are fantasies about curing unknowing structured across intervals of decisionality, where we foreclose the variability of a function by ensconcing it in a concept. Laruelle is trying to find a way out of this trench warfare and unmoor arbitrary limitations on what a concept can do.

I hate this book. Five stars.

[AG]

I find it somewhat remarkable that I’ve never heard Laruelle described as a thinker who is basically dealing with the failure of Protestantism as that ambitious project to immanentize the eschaton.

This seems apparent in his return to the (Husserlian) crisis of the sciences in A Rigorous Science of Man, the essay with opens this collection. The divide between the human and natural sciences is a split which can be seen to inherit the conflict between Aufklarung and Sturm und Drang, or the pitched battle between reason and feeling. As outlined in “The Transcendental Method”, German Idealism and Husserlian phenomenology are each attempts to heal the wound with the spear which made the cut, so to speak, to produce a “veritas transcendentalis” (Baumgarten) or “Unity of experience” (Kant). This attempt guides the method of the “major” tradition of transcendental philosophy according to Laruelle, immanentizing the transcendent limit through an overturning of the transcendental-empirical division, whereas the “minor” tradition seeks to detach the real One from this vicious circle of delimitation (of a transcendent One) and transgression (traversal of the transcendental-empirical cut).

The difference between the major and minor traditions is markedly national in character: the major tradition being German (Kant, Fichte, Husserl) and the minor French (Descartes, Biran, Sartre, Henry). This is a clear “Protestant-Catholic” divide. The former can, strangely enough, be considered as a “Jacobinism in thought”, following a common reading of intellectual history where German philosophy achieves in theory what the French achieve in practice. From this insight the import of “Revolution within the Limits of Science Alone” becomes clear: Laruelle views transcendental philosophy (in the major tradition) as a “vanishing mediator” between Enlightenement reason and non-philosophical science, one which, briefly, lives within the self-making historical time of Protestant liberalism. Laruelle’s repeated insistence on an ahistorical practice of thought (against continental “positive” historicity and analytic “negative” rejection of historicism) stems from this insight.

With this in view, Laruelle’s “unilateral duality” of the One and the World, which seeks to think within a “uni-verse” of simple non-relations might be reconstrued as a revived “post-postmodern” Catholic thinking, or a small-c catholic semiotics of para-academic thought freed from the constraints of a systematicity which is seen to be concretely impossible by the real failure to organize the university (a project which can read into both Hegel and Heidegger’s projects). Without going into the details of his “non-logic”, I think that the “theoretical materialism” espoused by Laruelle is the most robust attempt at a counter-factual history of nineteenth century idealism where French spiritualism achieved the true “revolution in thought” attributed to the Germans.

What is especially interesting about this is the synthesis which Laruelle hints at between French spiritualism and historical epistemology a la Bachelard and Althusser. Non-philosophy can be seen as a radical extension of science/Marxist phil’s critique of the “spontaneous philosophy of the scientist”, that is, if we extend the idea of spontaneous philosophy to a generalized theory of “philosophical ideology” so to speak. In my view, Laruelle’s move is to extend the critique of spontaneous philosophy to a field of in-distinction between natural and human sciences, rejecting this entire domain and its false demarcation as a product of “anthropology”, or, an implicit view of philosophical anthropology as queen of the sciences. Thus, Laruelle stages an antinomy in the style of Kant, that of humanism or anti-humanism. This antinomy is denied, in favor of a naïve and pre-reflexive feeling for the essence of Man, which is that which neither side (not even so-called “post-humanism”) can grasp.

Of course, in all this talk of the One, there is something here which is highly reminiscent of Lacan. Reading Laruelle, its hard not to intuit that the great French psychoanalyst is something of a fellow traveller. It even feels appropriate to say that Laruelle’s real One is that aspect of “Yad’lun” that escapes via the non-All, and the transcendent One is the paradoxical inclusion of the phallic One within the set of signifiers. The transcendent one is even the “first position” of the Subject, as Laruelle conceives it. Is not the privilege of henology over ontology the very meaning of Lacan’s late teachings? Would this mean that Laruelle then is the first authentic writer on the non-relation qua mode of thought in-itself? I’m very tempted in this direction. But I’ll withhold judgment, lest it be that of God.

[michal k-c]

i think it’s both zero and five stars, so i settled on 3. insanely obtuse that i personally think works more as an accidental endorsement of logocentrism and Derrida’s thought. There is a good line about how deconstructionism is basically just Jewish Lacanianism though, i did have a chuckle at that

[not-even-that]

Almost nothing is better than Laruelle and GPT working together

[Mariam Rawwas]

This work has the fascinating dual character of sometimes seeming like it's merely recapitulating Nietzschean, Heideggerian, Wittgensteinian presuppositions ("anti-philosophy"), other times seeming genuinely original as a thought ("non-philosophy"). Essentially, the One is the transcendental immanence of finitude that is subjectivity itself ("man"), a phenomenology sans the Cartesian cogito, the minimal self-sameness of the individual, the study of which would be called "Science." Essentially, Laruelle's strategy consists in asking the simple question: couldn't we avoid the hermeneutic circle by simply never jumping into it in the first place? To set off outside of philosophy by not assuming the opposition between thing and presentation, not to mention representation, etc. The anti-Badiouianism is readily evident: the "minoritarian" is necessarily silent, forever outside the regime of the State, a Kristevan/Spivakian thesis, against the assimilationism of the event. I think I even agree with the critique of Marxism: if I may editorialize a bit, "Marxism" can only be thought within capitalism, but then comes to be generalized as a theory of all hitherto existing society, of all human political history, while Laruelle instead believes that it is to topology that we should turn to theorize revolution in general, which I think I can get behind: politics exists only in the revolutionary fold. I like the reading of terror as confusing objectivity for reality, of the constant attempt to legitimize the revolutionary process which can never truly be legitimized. But it's still a bit unclear just how different an "irruption" is from an event, other than its conceptual ungraspability. Laruelle introduces the method of "cloning" in differentiating the transcendental One from the real One. He then introduces "Heresy" as a potential alternative route for Non-Philosophy in addition to "Science," but this brings into question what Laruelle's vision of the relation between the disciplines is, which is never clarified. A final section applies his thinking to ecology. Michel Henry seems an essential touchstone for Laruelle, but I wonder how much his thought on the One connects to Lacan's yad'lun. Ultimately, I can't tell if this is a good introduction to Laruelle's thought or not.

[Thomas]

Never much been one for Kant, neo-Kantianism, or the discipline of academic philosophy so the selection of essays here doesn't provide much for someone more about substance-process philosophy (beyond the "hey trust me" referencing other works absent). While the failings motivating Laurelle come across germane there's, in other regards, a lack of sufficient non-philosophy. It's frustrating that to be done with Laurelle I'll have to read more Laurelle