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Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline
Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey's analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a 'showing', a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.
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- GenresPhilosophyTheory
272 pages, Hardcover
First published December 8, 2006
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83 people want to read
About the author
John Mullarkey
15 books3 followersJohn Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, UK since 2010.
In the past he taught philosophy and film theory at the University of Sunderland, England (1994-2004) and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2004 to 2010).
In 2014, his name reverted from the English ‘Mullarkey’ to the original Irish, ‘Ó Maoilearca’, which ultimately translates as ‘follower of the animal’. He now publishes under that name: John Ó Maoilearca.
In the past he taught philosophy and film theory at the University of Sunderland, England (1994-2004) and the University of Dundee, Scotland (2004 to 2010).
In 2014, his name reverted from the English ‘Mullarkey’ to the original Irish, ‘Ó Maoilearca’, which ultimately translates as ‘follower of the animal’. He now publishes under that name: John Ó Maoilearca.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 28, 2017
Any book which would proclaim the advent of a ‘post-continental philosophy’ was always going to be an ambitious one, and Mullarkey’s book is, if nothing else, just that. Through a study of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Lareulle, Mullarkey attempts to outline the contours of a new horizon in the philosophical landscape, one composed less by a reality already in place, than by a hope for what may one day arrive. Or, as Mullarkey puts it, it’s a book about an 'event-in-the-making', one for which it aims to serve as a midwife, a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that would help bring about the very thing it describes. And what it tries to describe, through its various adventures and travails, is the fate of thought of immanence.
Indeed, it’s immanence that Mullarkey sees as the golden thread running through the thinkers he examines, each grappling with the idea in their own idiosyncratic ways. Beginning with Deleuze, Mullarkey positions the former as something like a refractory point for philosophies of immanence, with both Badiou and Henry grasping one horn of Deleuzian problematic and extrapolating it to infinity - the 'objective science' of set theory for Badiou, and the subjective affectivity of Life for Henry. Deleuze himself gets portrayed as the great synthesizer of the tradition, attempting in all his works to fuse together and collapse traditionally opposed philosophical categories (sensibility and intelligibility, mechanism and vitalism, objectivity and subjectivity) in an attempt to work out a fully fleshed philosophy of immanence.
For Mullarkey though, all four philosophers - including Laruelle, who is a special case - compromise their commitment to immanence by harbouring ‘virtual’ remainders that, because not actual, vitiate their attempts to rigorously think immanence. Deleuze of course is explicit in his articulation of the actual/virtual pair, a move that Mullarkey sees as instantiating a ‘two world ontology’ that Badiou, Henry and Laruelle will attempt to overcome by eschewing any and all ‘virtualism’ in favour of a radical commitment to ‘actualism’. Indeed, it is the work of Henri Bergson who stands as the not-too-hidden shadow over Mullarkey's investigation, insofar as for Mullarkey, Bergson's philosophy is the best avatar for a properly 'actualist’ philosophy, one which has been twisted into unrecognizability by the Deleuzian ‘virutalization’ of Bergson. Thus it is that contemporary Bergsonisms like those of Keith Ansell-Pearson and Brian Massumi find themselves in Mullarkey’s sights, charged with not sufficiently marking the distance between Bergson himself and his Deleuzian reconstruction.
Bergson aside, Mullarkey nonetheless finds that for all their efforts, neither Badiou, Henry or Laruelle quite exorcise the spectre of virtualism that haunt their respective philosophies of immanence. Central to these failures, for Mullarkey, is the question of self-belonging and self-justification: how does a philosophy of immanence - which is supposed to leave nothing ‘outside’ - legitimate its own thinking as the ‘right’ one? If anything is affect, as it is in Henry for example, how can Henry charge other philosophies with being mistaken? If immanence accounts for everything, whence the possibility of being mislead by transcendence? What all these theories of immanence lack then, is a ‘theory of error’, which could explain how it is that we could even ever be mislead into thinking otherwise than immanence in the first place.
It’s in light of these issues that Mullarkey turns finally to the work of Francois Laruelle, whose ‘non-philosophy’ aims to abjure any attempt to make a claim about nature of things, and instead usher in an as-yet unheard ‘democracy of thought’ where all philosophies are accorded their own truths and realities, each given a place under the sun of a philosophical egalitarianism. Rather than a relativism, the claim goes, this would be a “Real-ism” that, refusing any attempt to prescribe or even describe the Real, grants it an autonomy that renders it entirely indifferent to all attempts to grasp it. Here, immanence reaches a fever pitch that, by eschewing any and all relation to thought - or ‘to’ itself even - allows Laruelle to side-step the thorny issue of self-justification. Nonetheless, even here, Mullarkey-the-philosopher refuses to follow Laruelle all the way, insisting that non-philosophy, rather than necessitating the abandonment of philosophy, ought to instead allow us to think philosophy in a different manner: specifically, a ‘diagrammatical’ manner.
Thus, in a closing chapter that displays the full ambition of the book, Mullarkey turns to the ‘diagram' as a vector of thought that would allow philosophy to think immanence in a way that would, to a large degree, escape many of the aporias previously outlined. Insofar as diagrams, rather than merely representing an exterior reality, instead enact the very thing they display in a ’spatialization of thought’, they function as a sort of ‘immanence-in-motion’, capturing immanence at an existential level, rather than a representational one. These are tough thoughts, made harder by the fact that in slipping from commentary to full blown ‘philosophising’, Mullarkey makes the last chapter feel a bit tacked-on, like ideas thrown in at the last minute that, in truth, deserve their own book to explicate properly. It’s an interesting chapter, but one that distracts from the rest of the study (and really, are diagrams - of all things - really the future of philosophy? Colour me skeptical).
Still, a minor squabble, all things considered. And there is a lot to consider - and admire. Of the larger squabbles, however, is that for all Mullarkey’s commitment to ‘actualism’, it’s not always clear exactly the nature of the ‘virtualism’ that he’s inveighing against. Indeed, ‘the virtual’, when he invokes it pejoratively, seems like a purely negative category for all that is simply ‘not actual’ (potentiality, possibility, capacities, etc). Yet why exactly virtuality is such a threat to immanence is not entirely clear. Mullarkey takes it for granted, for example, that Deleuze’s invocation of the virtual inevitably leads to a ‘two world ontology’, but nowhere in the chapter on Deleuze does he actually examine Deleuze’s detailed account of individuation to substantiate this claim. Indeed, without trying to put too fine a point on it, it almost felt as if Mullareky’s beef with virtualism ultimately amounted to an inability to make sense of it (although I do agree that neither Ansell-Pearson nor Massumi are the best places to turn here. John Protevi however...).
Still, if one can put all that aside and play along with Mullarkey to see where the ride leads, Post-Continental Philosophy is a deeply thought provoking and impressive study. Since its publication, the question of immanence has only grown in its bearing, and there are few better places to plant a foothold in amongst it than this book. Even with my disagreements, its undeniable penchant of lobbing just the right questions at just the right sore-points of ‘theory’ make this a book all the more important to study and respond to.
Indeed, it’s immanence that Mullarkey sees as the golden thread running through the thinkers he examines, each grappling with the idea in their own idiosyncratic ways. Beginning with Deleuze, Mullarkey positions the former as something like a refractory point for philosophies of immanence, with both Badiou and Henry grasping one horn of Deleuzian problematic and extrapolating it to infinity - the 'objective science' of set theory for Badiou, and the subjective affectivity of Life for Henry. Deleuze himself gets portrayed as the great synthesizer of the tradition, attempting in all his works to fuse together and collapse traditionally opposed philosophical categories (sensibility and intelligibility, mechanism and vitalism, objectivity and subjectivity) in an attempt to work out a fully fleshed philosophy of immanence.
For Mullarkey though, all four philosophers - including Laruelle, who is a special case - compromise their commitment to immanence by harbouring ‘virtual’ remainders that, because not actual, vitiate their attempts to rigorously think immanence. Deleuze of course is explicit in his articulation of the actual/virtual pair, a move that Mullarkey sees as instantiating a ‘two world ontology’ that Badiou, Henry and Laruelle will attempt to overcome by eschewing any and all ‘virtualism’ in favour of a radical commitment to ‘actualism’. Indeed, it is the work of Henri Bergson who stands as the not-too-hidden shadow over Mullarkey's investigation, insofar as for Mullarkey, Bergson's philosophy is the best avatar for a properly 'actualist’ philosophy, one which has been twisted into unrecognizability by the Deleuzian ‘virutalization’ of Bergson. Thus it is that contemporary Bergsonisms like those of Keith Ansell-Pearson and Brian Massumi find themselves in Mullarkey’s sights, charged with not sufficiently marking the distance between Bergson himself and his Deleuzian reconstruction.
Bergson aside, Mullarkey nonetheless finds that for all their efforts, neither Badiou, Henry or Laruelle quite exorcise the spectre of virtualism that haunt their respective philosophies of immanence. Central to these failures, for Mullarkey, is the question of self-belonging and self-justification: how does a philosophy of immanence - which is supposed to leave nothing ‘outside’ - legitimate its own thinking as the ‘right’ one? If anything is affect, as it is in Henry for example, how can Henry charge other philosophies with being mistaken? If immanence accounts for everything, whence the possibility of being mislead by transcendence? What all these theories of immanence lack then, is a ‘theory of error’, which could explain how it is that we could even ever be mislead into thinking otherwise than immanence in the first place.
It’s in light of these issues that Mullarkey turns finally to the work of Francois Laruelle, whose ‘non-philosophy’ aims to abjure any attempt to make a claim about nature of things, and instead usher in an as-yet unheard ‘democracy of thought’ where all philosophies are accorded their own truths and realities, each given a place under the sun of a philosophical egalitarianism. Rather than a relativism, the claim goes, this would be a “Real-ism” that, refusing any attempt to prescribe or even describe the Real, grants it an autonomy that renders it entirely indifferent to all attempts to grasp it. Here, immanence reaches a fever pitch that, by eschewing any and all relation to thought - or ‘to’ itself even - allows Laruelle to side-step the thorny issue of self-justification. Nonetheless, even here, Mullarkey-the-philosopher refuses to follow Laruelle all the way, insisting that non-philosophy, rather than necessitating the abandonment of philosophy, ought to instead allow us to think philosophy in a different manner: specifically, a ‘diagrammatical’ manner.
Thus, in a closing chapter that displays the full ambition of the book, Mullarkey turns to the ‘diagram' as a vector of thought that would allow philosophy to think immanence in a way that would, to a large degree, escape many of the aporias previously outlined. Insofar as diagrams, rather than merely representing an exterior reality, instead enact the very thing they display in a ’spatialization of thought’, they function as a sort of ‘immanence-in-motion’, capturing immanence at an existential level, rather than a representational one. These are tough thoughts, made harder by the fact that in slipping from commentary to full blown ‘philosophising’, Mullarkey makes the last chapter feel a bit tacked-on, like ideas thrown in at the last minute that, in truth, deserve their own book to explicate properly. It’s an interesting chapter, but one that distracts from the rest of the study (and really, are diagrams - of all things - really the future of philosophy? Colour me skeptical).
Still, a minor squabble, all things considered. And there is a lot to consider - and admire. Of the larger squabbles, however, is that for all Mullarkey’s commitment to ‘actualism’, it’s not always clear exactly the nature of the ‘virtualism’ that he’s inveighing against. Indeed, ‘the virtual’, when he invokes it pejoratively, seems like a purely negative category for all that is simply ‘not actual’ (potentiality, possibility, capacities, etc). Yet why exactly virtuality is such a threat to immanence is not entirely clear. Mullarkey takes it for granted, for example, that Deleuze’s invocation of the virtual inevitably leads to a ‘two world ontology’, but nowhere in the chapter on Deleuze does he actually examine Deleuze’s detailed account of individuation to substantiate this claim. Indeed, without trying to put too fine a point on it, it almost felt as if Mullareky’s beef with virtualism ultimately amounted to an inability to make sense of it (although I do agree that neither Ansell-Pearson nor Massumi are the best places to turn here. John Protevi however...).
Still, if one can put all that aside and play along with Mullarkey to see where the ride leads, Post-Continental Philosophy is a deeply thought provoking and impressive study. Since its publication, the question of immanence has only grown in its bearing, and there are few better places to plant a foothold in amongst it than this book. Even with my disagreements, its undeniable penchant of lobbing just the right questions at just the right sore-points of ‘theory’ make this a book all the more important to study and respond to.
December 17, 2022
Recommend the chapter on Deleuze for providing an “Actualist” reading of his work through a fidelity to his Bergsonism. (I did notice that Mullarkey clearly favors Bergson throughout the text.) The book’s other major perk is its treatment of the French Spiritualists and their revival in Henry and Laruelle. But I was left wanting a full study of the lasting influence of the Spiritualists — from Ravaisson to Bergson — on contemporary French thought.
I would avoid the rest. Mullarkey’s reading of Badiou’s Being and Event falls for the obvious trap of reading him against the background of vitalism. He misses the political decisionism grounding the mathematics — a critique of Badiou can’t miss that political action is the self-sufficient axiom of his system. The treatment of Henry and Laruelle was fine enough — though I don’t know the former and the latter is untreatable. There’s honestly not enough skin on the bones of the Laruelle chapter to warrant its inclusion except for as a pivot to the chapter on diagrams.
I would avoid the rest. Mullarkey’s reading of Badiou’s Being and Event falls for the obvious trap of reading him against the background of vitalism. He misses the political decisionism grounding the mathematics — a critique of Badiou can’t miss that political action is the self-sufficient axiom of his system. The treatment of Henry and Laruelle was fine enough — though I don’t know the former and the latter is untreatable. There’s honestly not enough skin on the bones of the Laruelle chapter to warrant its inclusion except for as a pivot to the chapter on diagrams.
January 23, 2020
This book has made me very excited to get around to reading François Laruelle and has also made me really want to search out some writings by Michel Henry. (still feel ambivalent towards badiou)
March 21, 2016
This was a very good introduction to thinking of François Laruelle and Pierre Henry aside from Deleuze and Badiou. But the chapter on Laruelle had a significant impact on me to research more his non-standard philosophy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews