Principles of Non-Philosophy

Reviews / Votes

At last Laruelle's first full articulation of non-philosophy is available in English, a book every bit as consequential as Deleuze's Difference and Repetition or Badiou's Being and Event. Here Laruelle takes two of the most appealing traditions in western thought, immanence and materialism, and drives them all the way to the end of the night. In so doing he ceases participation in philosophy entirely, forming no relation with it. Instead Laruelle runs along side philosophy, in parallel to it, subjecting philosophy's basic mannerisms to a more rigorous axiomatization. By withdrawing from the decision to reflect, Laruelle discovers the immanent destiny of nature, perhaps for the first time. I am delighted to see the appearance of this English translation of Principles of Non-Philosophy, one of Laruelle's major works. The project is formidable: nothing less than "non-philosophy"-as in "non-Euclidean"- which is not the simple lack or absence of philosophy, nor what philosophy has marginalized, nor anti-philosophy, nor meta-philosophy, nor the end or death of philosophy. What's left? A withdrawal or suspension of the authority of philosophy in order to undertake a new practice of philosophy more "rigorous" than philosophy, to think not "about" but "from out of" and "according to" the non-objectifiable experience of what Laruelle calls radical immanence, the One, or the Real. It sounds at times not unlike Heidegger's idea that there is something to be thought in metaphysics to which metaphysics has no access. Our thanks to translators Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith for their considerable labor in making the important work of this daring if daunting thinker accessible to Anglophone readers.