Laruelle Quotes

“Although affiliated with materialist philosophy and particularly the historical materialism of Marx, Laruelle’s conception of the real is not simply reducible to a kind of primary matter or empirical reality. He has no interest in debating whether or not the real world exists outside our ability to observe it, or whether or not the real world is constructed out of countless small material atoms. These are the squabbles of philosophy, after all. The real, as non-philosophical, is defined precisely and axiomatically by Laruelle. The real is the unilateral duality specific to an immanent one.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“digitality entails a basic distinction, whether zeros and ones or some other set of discrete units—the four nucleobases of the genetic code or the twenty-six letters of the alphabet are just as digital as the base-two numeric encoding used in binary computers. Any digital medium will have a bed of genetically distinct elements. These elements form a homogeneous substrate from which constructions are built.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“What if philosophy is the problem, not the solution? What if the best response to philosophy is to cease doing it?”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“Laruelle endorses identity of the same, not heterogeneity or difference; his non-standard method requires ascetic withdrawal, not the kind of self-realization associated with the “me generation” of post-1968 philosophy; his ontology is rooted in a cryptography of being, not the more popular pornography of being (evident in the virtues of transparency, the strategies of capture, or the logics of aletheia); he requires a unilateral relation, not today’s hegemony of multilateral ecologies of difference (assemblages, rhizomes, networks). No wonder that Laruelle has been overlooked for so many years.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital