Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Philosophy?

A certain desire for the end is endemic to twentieth-century philosophy. This is true of both the so-called Continental and analytic varieties. That end may take the form of the end of philosophy itself as it diffuses into a thousand other scientific disciplines claiming to be able to answer the old questions more concretely. Or that end may only be the end of metaphysics or history, the end of phenomenology, the end of language, or the death of God or Man, just the small death of the author - one may even look forward to the grand death of everything in the solar catastrophe, or perhaps one simply wants to be done with judgment. It seems that most philosophers want something in the end, while perhaps most readers just want to be done. "Are we done?" This is perhaps a familiar question at the end of an introduction to philosophy lecture by some bored undergraduate forced to take it as part of their core courses. Setting aside the source, the question remains in the desire of so many philosophers: are we done with philosophy?

The question arises because philosophy is in the midst of an identity crisis. This is nothing particularly new. If we go back, all the way back to the beginning of institutionalized philosophy in Plato's Academy, then we might read his acceptance of the impossibility of a philosopher-king at the helm of an ideal republic after the death of Dion of Syracuse as the first major crisis of philosophy.1 For the identity crisis of philosophy is a crisis over the point of philosophy and the ability of philosophy to affect the so-called "real world." For Laruelle, philosophy desires to affect the Real itself, and it cannot because the Real is always already indifferent to it. Since philosophy cannot affect the Real it desires to affect, it must then settle for second-best, which is affecting the world, just as Plato settles for advising the new rulers of Syracuse after the death of Dion. And yet philosophy cannot even live up to second-best.

The non-philosophy of François Laruelle suggests that this is the wrong question to ask: it is a false question. Bergson defined this kind of question as being one that leads us to a false answer. The true question is not "Are we done with philosophy?", but "What is to be done with philosophy?"2

This book explores the answer to this question that Laruelle provides in his non-philosophy. The point of non-philosophy is not a different philosophical analysis of the traditional materials that philosophy has tended to dominate, but a mutation or recoding of the machinery of philosophy itself in order to create a new practice of thought. Non-Philosophy is not simply a "new philosophy."3 It does not add yet another voice to interminable debates, but at its best aims for something different, something strange and alien to standard philosophy. Non-Philosophy is stranger than philosophy. And this hitherto untold strangeness lies behind the two-fold purpose of this book. The first part of the book provides a generic introduction to non-philosophy, tracing its most general structures. In this part of the book, the reader will be introduced to the fundamental inquiry into the essence of philosophy that Laruelle's method of "dualysis" constitutes. In Chapter 1, I explicate Laruelle's theory and analysis of what he calls the "Philosophical Decision." This is a constant theme throughout Laruelle's oeuvre, though most clearly laid out in Philosophies of Difference (1986, and 2010 in English translation) and Principles of Non-Philosophy (1996, and 2013 in English translation). The theory of the Philosophical Decision requires that we also investigate Laruelle's theory of the One, which allows Philosophical Decision to emerge from the background noise of philosophical machinery acting upon various fields. Chapter 2 turns to the methods employed by Laruelle to mutate and make a new use out of the Philosophical Decision. Laruelle himself calls these methods a "style" and "syntax" and so this chapter surveys and explains this style and syntax. It explains the sometimes mystifying aspects of Laruelle's written style as part and parcel of the practice of non-philosophy, as his syntax is constructed in such a way as to address philosophy's underlying self-sufficiency. Therefore the intentionally difficult syntax aims not at confusion but at a reorganization of thought itself. Part I of the text gives the reader a synthetic view of non-philosophy that prepares them for the specificity of Laruelle's engagement with the other materials that populate Part II of the book.

Part II is organized into five chapters to evoke the five waves of non-philosophy. These waves are Laruelle's own division of his work into five distinct periods that remain largely consistent over time, but with new materials and focus in each period. However, I do not present here a simple history of non-philosophy, as I have elsewhere presented such a history by focusing on either the change in axioms that guide each wave or the history of the conjugation of science and philosophy.4 Instead I have picked five significant thematics running throughout each of the five waves and show how these thematics are engaged with from his early work to his most contemporary, and in turn how they help to develop the practice of non-philosophy.

I have chosen this structure in part to address a criticism by Ray Brassier, one of the early Anglophone readers of Laruelle and translator of some of his essays. It was Brassier's work, alongside John Ó Maoilearca's, that introduced me to non-philosophy. And while I have learned a great deal from both of them, it was a certain annoyance (philosophy does not only begin in wonder!) at the criticism Brassier makes in Nihil Unbound that spurred me to undertake this book in this particular way. He claims that Laruelle's work is always focused simply on the machinery of non-philosophy, writing:

one cannot but be struck by the formalism and the paucity of detail in his handling of these topics, which seems cursory even in comparison with orthodox philosophical treatments of the same themes. Indeed, the brunt of the conceptual labour in these confrontations with ethics, Marxism, and mysticism is devoted to refining or fine-tuning his own non-philosophical machinery, while actual engagement with the specifics of the subject matter is confined to discussions of more or less arbitrarily selected philosophemes on the topic in question. The results are texts in which descriptions of the workings of Laruelle's non-philosophical apparatus continue to occupy centre-stage while the philosophical material which is ostensibly the focus of analysis is relegated to a perfunctory supporting role..Thus in his book on ethics (Éthique de l'étranger) Laruelle does not actually provide anything like a substantive conceptual analy­sis of ethical tropes in contemporary philosophy; he simply uses potted versions of Plato, Kant, and Levinas to sketch what a non-philosophical theory of 'the ethical' would look like. Similarly, in his Introduction to Non-Marxism he does not actually engage in an analysis of Marxist theory and practice; he simply uses two idiosyncratic philosophical readings of Marx, those of Althusser and Henry, as the basis for outlining what a non-philosophical theory of Marxism would look like.5

It appears that, for Brassier, non-philosophy has not delivered on any of its perceived promises. He even states in his characteristically harsh style that "Laruelle's writings have yet to inspire anything beyond uncritical emulation or exasperated dismissal."6 On this reading, non-philosophy would remain an ultimately fruitless bootstrapping that, aside from the machinery itself, offers nothing new to philosophy as such.

Brassier's criticism hinges on what I see as a fundamental misunderstanding of Laruelle's non-philosophy. He confuses the philosophical material that Laruelle pulls from standard philosophy with material that Laruelle aims to analyze. But Laruelle does not want to provide us with another philosophical analysis. Instead he wants to use the different philosophical analyses to do something with philosophy, without making any claim about the Real that conditions every theoretical project. To show how Laruelle does this, I engage with his corpus generically (or synthetically in the standard philosophical idiom) rather than linearly. This means that I do not present a developmental reading of non-philosophy. Laruelle himself says that such a reading of non-philosophy as a linear evolution would be artificial: "It is more a question of kaleidoscopic views, all similar yet rearranged each time.Each book in a sense reprises the same problems 'from zero', again throwing the dice or reshuffling the cards of science, philosophy, Marxism, gnosis, man as Stranger and Christ. The essence of non-philosophy would be, let's say, fractal and fictioned."7

This also means that I really do aim here at a general introduction to non-philosophy. While at times I mark certain differences in my understanding of non-philosophy from others who have engaged with Laruelle's large body of work, this is not a book aiming to mark out a certain space or assuming major familiarity with the specific debates amongst Francophone and Anglophone non-philosophers. Instead, I firstly hope to...