Are the things of this world given to thought? Are things really meant to be known, to be taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental constitution of the real--a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated recipient of the transcendental gift. Philosophy knows what things really are because things--all things--are given to philosophy to be known. Laruelle's trenchant essays show how this (...) presupposition controls even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these critiques persist in assuming that the disruptive other is in some way given to their own discourse--which shows itself thereby to be still philosophical. An effective critique of philosophy must be non-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of the One. From this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the question of another kind of thought--one that, instead of differentially relating to the world that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh, at One with what it can never know. Publisher's note. (shrink)

This study brings the thoughts of Derrida into conversation with François Laruelle’s non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy. Laruelle argued that Derrida is a philosopher of difference, thereby grouping Derrida together with Heidegger and Deleuze as philosophers of difference. The argument of this article is to explore Derrida’s work, bringing it into conversation with Laruelle’s non-philosophy and non-standard philosophy. This article is focussed specifically on Derrida’s democracy to come in line with Laruelle’s democracy of thought. The context of (...) this discussion is the end of philosophy or the closure of philosophy, and the opening of this closure for a democracy is yet to come – or whether the ideas of the end of philosophy or the closure of philosophy (metaphysics) are philosophical materials for Laruelle’s science of philosophy or non-philosophy. Laruelle does not seek a democracy to come, but understands these different thoughts as democracy of thought: all thoughts equal and unifacially turned not towards a democracy to come, but a future. (shrink)

La philosophie occidentale se définit comme pensée du réel. Inlassablement, en son autorité, elle proclame non seulement savoir ce qu'il est, mais aussi comment il doit évoluer et être transformé. Ce geste philosophique de décision et de prétention sur le réel, qui s'étend sur l'être humain, génère immanquablement quelque chose de l'ordre du pouvoir : l'Homme a besoin d'être gouverné, tel est le présupposé fondamental de la philosophie, qui fait du sujet philosophique, par essence, un sujet politique, mais aussi un (...) objet dans un mélange qui le prive de la reconnaissance de son Identité réelle. Ainsi, ce geste est-il de même à l'origine d'un mécanisme d'assujettissement qui produit ses effets tant que la pensée n'est pas libérée en amont de ce positionnement. L'enjeu est majeur : il s'agit de s'ouvrir à une réelle et radicale inaliénabilité permettant à l'humain de s'affranchir des rets qui l'enserrent, dans un monde toujours plus complexe et plus oppressif. (shrink)

"Philosophie et non-philosophie du poétique" indique une double attitude de la philosophie française contemporaine : pour maîtriser la pensée, elle revient sur soi, mais elle peut aussi ne pas participer à ce mouvement. Le "poétique", objet de l'attitude, implique alors le "poétique" et le "non-poétique", deux usages des expériences fondamentales du langage. La première expérience est la surdétermination du langage qui se rapporte à la pensée de la maîtrise. La deuxième est l'expérience de l'immanence du langage à soi sans retour (...) possible de la pensée. En passant par le poétique, la première attitude vise à la maîtrise de l'immanence. En passant par le non-poétique, la deuxième attitude remet en discussion la maîtrise de l'immanence par la notion d'une naïveté radicale et par la théorie du poétique. Nous parvenons ainsi à la distinction entre la pensée qui met l'immanence en discussion – la philosophie – et la pensée qui part de l'impossibilité de cette mise en discussion – la non-philosophie. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la "non-politique"? Est-elle pensable? Pourquoi l'évidence de la politique est-elle si forte? L'histoire de la philosophie occidentale est une tentation toujours renouvelée de "penser la politique depuis la non-politique". Nous pouvons indiquer qu'au moins, dans la modernité, les théoriciens du contrat social inventent déjà une idée révolutionnaire de "l'état de nature" qui est une notion non politique par excellence. Si nous admettons qu'il y a quelque chose de non politique, il y a au moins trois possibilités de penser (...) la non-politique qui nous conduisent à étudier trois théories radicalement distinctes : la "philosophie de l'avenir" de Nietzsche, la "psychanalyse" de Freud et la "non-philosophie" de François Laruelle. Non seulement ce sont les trois possibles conceptions de la non-politique, mais elles mettent en jeu le devenir historique de la notion non politique chez ces trois penseurs d'immanence. Nietzsche est le représentant du primat de la politique : la non-politique finit toujours par être surmontée et absorbée par le politique. Freud observe une différence irréductible entre politique et non-politique : l'une ne domine pas l'autre et vice versa. Enfin, Laruelle démontre que c'est la non-politique qui détermine en dernière instance la politique ; c'est l'Un qui fait un usage unilatéral du matériau occasionnel qu'est l'Autorité dont le coeur est la Pensée-Monde. (shrink)

At various universities across the country, philosophers are organizing faculty development workshops for non-philosophy faculty members who want to incorporate critical thinking about ethical and social justice issues into their courses. The demand for such programs is reasonably strong. In part this is due to the increasing pressure from professional associations (e.g., those of nursing and accounting) for the inclusion of ethics in the curriculum. In part, however, it is simply due to the recognition by faculty members across the (...) university that an adequate education must include some reflection on ethical issues. In this article we discuss some of the reasons for philosophers to become involved, describe a faculty development program that we are running, and offer some advice about how to succeed in such endeavors. (shrink)

Each generation invents new practices and new writings of philosophy. Ours should have been able to introduce certain mutations that would at least be equivalent with those of cubism, abstract art, and twelve-tone serialism: it has only partially done so. But after all the deconstructions, after Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, this demand takes on a different dimension: What do we do with philosophy itself? How do we globally change our relation to this thought, which keeps indicating that it (...) is increasingly conservative and repetitive? These two questions together have prompted what we call “non-philosophy.” Non-philosophy is not the negation of philosophy. It is the suspension of philosophy's claim to think the real, and it is the invention of new usages of thought and language that disrupt the rational narrative of the real, which is precisely what every philosophy is. Non-philosophy should rather be understood à la the “non-Euclidean,” namely, as a generalization of the philosophical beyond its traditional limitation by the unitary or “Heraclitean” postulate. From then on, an infinite number of philosophical decisions that are no longer mutually exclusive will correspond with any real phenomenon. Philosophy and Non-Philosophy is widely considered the first fully explicit elaboration of non-philosophy and one of its most important introductory texts. (shrink)

Chaque époque invente de nouvelles pratiques et de nouvelles écritures de la philosophie. La nôtre aurait dû introduire dans celle-ci des mutations au moins équivalentes à celle du cubisme, de l’abstraction, du dodécaphonisme : elle ne l’a fait que très partiellement. Que faire de la philosophie elle-même? Comment changer globalement notre rapport à cette pensée qui se démontre de plus en plus conservatrice et répétitive? Ces deux raisons ensemble sont à l’origine de ce que nous appelons la "non-philosophie", qui n’est (...) pas la négation de la philosophie.--. (shrink)

이 논문은 중도의 태도를 가지고 있는 것으로 보이는 현대프랑스철학자 프랑수아 라뤼엘의 비-철학을 동양 사유의 한 전통인 중도의 사유방식 및 논리와 함께 비판적으로 계승하고 발전시키고자 하는 목적으로 살핀다. 이 과정에서 비-철학이 공성(空性)으로 볼 수 있는 내재적 실재로서 일원적 일자의 철저한 내재성으로부터 사유한다는 점과 동시에 일원적 일자의 내재성은 초월성과 내재성이 혼재된 차이의 철학의 전체적이거나 초월적 혹은 초월론적인 성질의 내재성과 그 결을 달리한다는 점을 밝힌다. 다음으로, 일자의 내재성으로부터 보는 일심, 즉 일원적 관점이 갖는 일원적 이원성을 검토하는 과정에서 라뤼엘의 일원적 관점은 필자의 ‘일원적 중도의 (...) 관점’의 도움을 필요로 한다는 사실을 검토한다. 일원적 관점은 실제로 비일자와 비-일자를 일원적 일자로 일원화시켜 보기엔 적합하지만 그들의 일원적 이원성, 즉 비-관계적 관계와 그들의 특이성을 함께 살피기 위해서 반드시 일원적 중도의 관점의 동반을 필요로 하는 것으로 보인다. 마지막으로, 비-철학적 사유로서 일원적 중도의 관점은 절대적 초월로의 위험이 있는 동양의 공(空)사상에 대한 집착의 태도에, 그리고 초월성과 내재성이 혼합되어 있는 차이에 대한 사유로서 해체론 시대의 철학에 철학의 종말이라는 형이상학적 허무로부터 벗어날 수 있는 미래 철학으로의 새로운 길을 제시하기 위한 결정적인 실마리가 될 수 있음을 밝힌다. (shrink)

In _The Dictionary of Non-Philosophy_, the French thinker François Laruelle does something unprecedented for philosophers: he provides an enormous dictionary with a theoretical introduction, carefully crafting his thoughts to explain the numerous terms and neologisms that he deems necessary for the project of non-philosophy. With a collective of thinkers also interested in the project, Laruelle has taken up the difficult task of creating an essential guide for entering into his non-standard, non-philosophical terrain. And for Laruelle, even the idea of (...) a dictionary and what a dictionary is become material for his non-philosophical inquiries. As his opening note begins, “Thus on the surface and within the philosophical folds of the dictionary, identity and its effect upon meaning are what is at stake.”. (shrink)

A study of the methods, approaches, prayers, etc to realize the 'unity experience' with THE ONE REAL SELF (Vedanta, Hinduism, ) God (Judaism), Gottheit (Christianity), Buddha mind (Buddhism), The Beloved (Sufism, Islam) of a number of mystics from several religious traditions. I wrote about this in a number of books and articles, for example about methods, techniques, practices and methodology here: as well as exploring and illustrating the subject-matter of philosophizing here: Explorations, questions and searches not put down on paper (...) are probably more important than the ones mentioned above. These were occurrences for almost as long as I can remember. They took many forms, endless questions about everything under the sun, unsatisfied with unexplained socio-cultural institutions, communities, social relationships, social roles, behaviour, values, norms and much more – I had to question them rather than merely submit to them or act in accordance with them. Although I expressed these questions and queries about the status quo in many areas such as sport, art, social sciences, endless reading and marginal groups and relationships I realized that they form part of the philosophical discourse. Not the discourse that has become the expression of the professionalization of philosophy the last few hundred years, but of the not-institutionalized practice of original thinking, of creative philosophical thinking. As examples of the latter, Socrates, of course, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Plotinus, writers on Mysticism such as Meister Eckhart, van Ruysbroeck, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, from Advaita, Zen and other Buddhist schools, Wittgenstein, Hume, German Idealists, Rumi, novelists and poets, Paul Klee and other visual artists and many names who form part of the seeking for the unity-experience as explored in History of Mysticism (those who seek the unity experience, to become ONE with THE ONE, Godhead, the one real Self, Buddha mind, Sophos, etc). History of Mysticism *was first published by Atma Books in 1987, now and is a unique compendium of the lives and teachings of the world's best known mystics. They are presented in chronological order, and include representatives of every religious tradition, revealing the broad universality of genuine religious experience. expanded and revised Thirtieth Anniversary edition is available as a free downloadable PDF document on this website at my Downloads page. This book is fundamental for seasoned scholars of philosophy and religion as well as anyone new to the study of Mysticism. (shrink)

Each generation invents new practices and new writings of philosophy. Ours should have been able to introduce certain mutations that would at least be equivalent with those of cubism, abstract art, and twelve-tone serialism: it has only partially done so. But after all the deconstructions, after Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, this demand takes on a different dimension: What do we do with philosophy itself? How do we globally change our relation to this thought, which keeps indicating that it (...) is increasingly conservative and repetitive? These two questions together have prompted what we call “non-philosophy.” Non-philosophy is not the negation of philosophy. It is the suspension of philosophy’s claim to think the real, and it is the invention of new usages of thought and language that disrupt the rational narrative of the real, which is precisely what every philosophy is. Non-philosophy should rather be understood à la the “non-Euclidean,” namely, as a generalization of the philosophical beyond its traditional limitation by the unitary or “Heraclitean” postulate. From then on, an infinite number of philosophical decisions that are no longer mutually exclusive will correspond with any real phenomenon. _Philosophy and Non-Philosophy_ is widely considered the first fully explicit elaboration of non-philosophy and one of its most important introductory texts. (shrink)

The concluding chapter lays down the essential conditions for any genuine understanding between East and West, which can only come through the work of those who have attained, at least in some degree, to the realization of 'wisdom uncreate' ...

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"The Age of Non-Philosophy": Martin Heidegger and François Laruelle In his lessons at the College of France, Merleau-Ponty noticed that something ended with Hegel and that we perhaps entered in an age of non-philosophy. This poses the question if philosophy is coming to an end or if it can be rebuild from within by retaining its essence. While Merleau-Ponty is trying to restore philosophy from the inside, Heidegger and Laruelle open two different paths of a non-philosophical (...) thinking from the outside. The purpose of the article is to compare these two paths more in detail in order to articulate their differences as to the problems of identity, of the "thing of thought", of the role of science etc., and to show the radicality of Laruelle's undertaking, which aims not a Verwindung, nor an Überwindung of philosophy but its appropriation in a new unified theory of thought. One of the main thesis of the author is that Heidegger should not be considered only as a "philosopher of difference" but also as a thinker of identity as he has expounded four different identity concepts. Hence, it is argued that if Laruelle's critique of the convertibility of Erignis' identity is legitimate, his critique of Heidegger's amphibology of the One is questionable. (shrink)

The final lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? call for a non-philosophy to balance and act as a counterweight to the task of philosophy that had been described by them in terms of concept creation. In a footnote, Deleuze and Guattari mention François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but dispute its efficacy in terms of the designated relationship between non-philosophy and science, as had been realised by Laruelle at the time. However, the mature non- (...) class='Hi'>philosophy of Laruelle could indicate a resolution to the problematic relationship between science and educational philosophy that we have inherited due to the poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Non-philosophy suggests a framework for thought that includes science in a non-positivist style and provides the means to view education as a performative practice. This article explores the non-philosophy of Laruelle in education as a means to view education under the conditions of strict immanence and in line with an anti-phenomenological metaphysics of non-representation. Laruelle is perhaps one of the most important critics of Deleuze in France, and as such, his insights into the Deleuzian oeuvre reveal a way forward for education as a practice that analyses science, philosophy and politics through non-philosophy. (shrink)

This article connects François Laruelle's non-philosophical experiments with the axiomatic method to non-philosophy's anti-hermeneutic stance. Focusing on two texts from 1987 composed using the axiomatic method, "The Truth According to Hermes" and "Theorems on the Good News," I demonstrate how non-philosophy utilizes structural mechanisms to both expand and contract the field of potential models allowed by non-philosophy. This demonstration involves developing a notion of interpretation, which synthesizes Rocco Gangle's work on model theory with respect to non-philosophy (...) with Laruelle's critique of hermeneutics. I use Alexander Galloway's interpretation of "The Truth According to Hermes" as a case study of the limits non-philosophy sets upon its use as a basis for philosophical models, in contrast to arguments by Gangle regarding non-philosophy's greater genericity in comparison to philosophy. (shrink)

This collection brings together an internationally known and interdisciplinary group of scholars, including a major new essay by Laruelle himself. Together they use non-philosophy to cross the boundaries between philosophy and performance.

Providing an introduction to Laruelle's novel theory of 'non-epistemology' or 'unified theory of thought', this volumes challenges the way we think about the traditional philosophical problems.

Dealing with ethical issues is a central aspect of many professions. Consequently, ethics is taught to diverse student groups in universities and colleges, alongside philosophy students. In this paper, we address the question of how ethics is best taught to such “non-philosophy” student groups. The standard way of introducing ethics to non-philosophy students is to present them with a set of moral theories. We refer to this approach as the “smorgasbord approach”, due to the impression it is (...) likely to make on non-philosophy students approaching ethics as an academic discipline for the first time. This approach invites the assumption that adopting an ethical position is mainly a matter of choosing from this smorgasbord of different theories. We argue that this approach is problematic for several reasons, both theoretical and practical, and we suggest a methodsbased approach – focusing on methods for moral reasoning – as a more fruitful alternative. The main purpose of this paper is to explain and defend this methods-based approach to teaching ethics to non-philosophy students. In so doing, we also consider and meet some expected objections to this approach. (shrink)

In _Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty,_ editor Hugh J. Silverman has collected essays from the leading scholars in Continental philosophy, creating a forum for the discussion of contemporary writings and differing perspectives on the role of philosophy since the death of Merleau-Ponty: Sartre, Barthes, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas, and Derrida. Included in this volume is Silverman's translation of Merleau-Ponty's last course at the Collège de France in 1960-61 and an extensive research bibliography. Originally published (...) in 1988, _Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty_ is a fascinating inquiry into the developments, directions, and ruptures in Continental philosophy since Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961. (shrink)

Katerina Kolozova is a Macedonian philosopher whose publications from last two decades aim to analyze various topics using François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” or “non-standard philosophy.” Non-philosophy could be roughly described as radicalized deconstruction: Laruelle claims that not everything can be grasped by a philosophy: for Laruelle, “philosophy is too serious an affair to be left to the philosophers alone.”1 Non-philosophy opposes the “principle of sufficient philosophy” through which philosophy determines and decides what is (...) real. According to Laruelle, the ultimate limit of philosophical thought and its self-proclaimed sufficiency lies in its inherent tendency to close itself in a transcendental system of autofetishist conceptions, which presume that one can grasp the Real (“The Real is neither capable of being known or even ‘thought,’ but can be described in axioms. [...] Even ‘immanence’ only serves to name the Real which tolerates nothing but axiomatic descriptions or formulations.”) by a philosophical thought, or that the Real could be mediated only through human thought. Laruelle criticizes this tendency of philosophy, which is usually expressing itself through the structure of “philosophical Decision.” (“To philosophize is to decide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to be able to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason [Logos].”) Katerina Kolozova use Laruelle’s non-philosophy to explore more explicitly political topics. In the Cut Of Th e Real (2014), she criticized certain dogmatism of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist theory, namely their symptomatic rejection of the Real and the One. In Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism (2015) and The Lived Revolution (2016) Kolozova presented a rereading of Marx, whose work she found relevant for the critique of speculative philosophical dimension of the capitalist economy, embodied in the 2008 global finance crisis, and in the latter book, she explored the possibility of a new political solidarity, based on “bodies in pain.” Kolozova doesn’t call to philosophically reconstruct Marx’s thought for the current situation, but she goes back to Marx with the help of Laruelle’s non-Marxism, contrary to the usual approach of Marxist philosophers, who often try to create certain philosophical system of Marx’s work. Together with Eileen A. Joy, Kolozova edited the anthology After the “Speculative Turn” (2016), which addressed recent realist and materialist tendencies in feminist philosophy. In her most recent book, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019), Kolozova aimed to explore broader philosophical foundations of neoliberal capitalism, and its dealing with nonhuman animals and their suffering. According to Kolozova, “We have to start by coming to terms with what we did to the animals in the constitutive act of philosophy and via proxy to all those dehumanised that belong to the species of man ‘by courtesy’ only.” . (shrink)

Deux préjugés ont grevé la réception de l'œuvre d'Arendt, en particulier en France. L'un : que l'étude des " origines du totalitarisme " et de sa nature (comme modèle politique portant bien au-delà du prototype nazi) ne définirait pas seulement le point de départ de ses questions, mais en bornerait les enjeux. L'autre : qu'à travers les étapes et les détours d'une pensée de la politique et de l'histoire contemporaines, elle n'aurait tendu qu'à rejoindre la tradition philosophique (la méditation sur (...) " la vie de l'esprit "). Convoquant tour à tour l'analyse des révolutions, la critique du travail et du mouvement ouvrier, le questionnement sur la publicité, la société du spectacle et la capacité de juger, le présent ouvrage entend restituer ce qui fait l'originalité de la réflexion d'Arendt sur l'histoire et la politique. Il la replace dans la lignée de Machiavel, de Montesquieu et de Tocqueville, dans la confrontation déterminante avec Marx, dans l'opposition constante à la philosophie politique. Justifiant la posture non-philosophique qu'elle n'a cessé de revendiquer. Démontrant par là même quel bénéfice réel la philosophie peut tirer d'une provocation qui l'expose à la puissance sauvage de l'événement, et à l'étonnement qu'il doit susciter. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 1985, a collection titled Post-Analytic Philosophy appeared (Columbia University Press). Advertised with overly optimistic blurbs from Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, and featuring work by famous, pragmatically inclining, analytically trained philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Cornel West, Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Nagel, and John Rawls, the text announced the death of analytic philosophy at least thirty or forty years after the fact. But if Wittgenstein, Quine, and others had long ago (...) convincingly refuted many of the core doctrines of “analytic philosophy,” British empiricism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, many American philosophers continued…. (shrink)

The editorial aims to unveil the attracting force of Laruelle's non-philosophy for scholars from different disciplines and artists. It shows how a new "democratic order of thinking" permits non-philosophy to enclose domains that have long been considered as opposites: philosophy, science, religion and the arts. Conceived as parameters of thought of the same right and without privileges, these variables can be superposed in a process of creative invention. The performative force of non-standard thinking, which can take different (...) forms of philo-fiction, science fiction, art fiction, Christo-Fiction etc., dismantles the decisional gestures and the sufficiency claims of philosophy, science and religion, and thus permits a regeneration as well as a choral orchestration in a "minimalistic symphony". In this sense, non-philosophy invites us every day to the "movable feast", that it is. (shrink)

본 논문은 라뤼엘의 비-철학에 의한 철학 비판, 특히 차이의 철학의 철학적 이중성과 철학적 결정의 문제점을 살핀 후, 내재적 실재 일자로서 일원적 일자의 철저한 내재성에 근거하여 사유하는 비-철학이 일원적 인과관계를 통해 제시하는 학문방법론으로서 일원적 이원분석을 연구한다. 본 논문은 이 과정에서 철학을 포함한 모든 학문의 보편적 방법론이고자 하는 비-철학의 일원적 이원분석이 갖는 철학적 의의를 크게 두 가지 측면에서 살핀다. 첫째, 일원적 이원분석은 서양철학의 맥락에서 차이와 해체 철학이 형이상학을 비판한 후 미래 철학으로의 길을 열기 위해 직면한 무력감을 극복하는 강력한 방법으로서 뿐만 아니라, 보편적인 (...) 학문방법론이 될 수 있다는 점이다. 둘째, 일원적 이원분석이, 동양 전통사유의 한 축인 중도의 논리를 현대의 학문방법론으로 계승하고 발전시키려는 사유작업 ― 중도학 ― 에 결정적인 실마리로서 하는 역할이다. (shrink)

"François Laruelle is one of the most important French philosophers of the last 20 years, and as his texts have become available in English there has been a rising tide of interest in his work, particularly on the concept of 'Non-Philosophy'. Non-philosophy radically rethinks many of the most cutting-edge concepts such as immanence, pluralism, resistance, science, democracy, decisionism, Marxism, theology and materialism. It also expands our view of what counts as philosophical thought, through art, science and politics, and (...) beyond to fields as varied as film, animality and material objects. Key features: Provides an overview of Laruelle's thought and an understanding of his contemporary relevance to contextualise his work for new readers ; Contains an exclusive interview with Laruelle and a new essay written by Laruelle himself ; Includes a bibliography of Laruelle's work and secondary literature."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

François Laruelle has been developing his project of non-philosophy since the 1970s. Throughout this time he has aimed at nothing less than the discovery and development of a new form of thinking that draws its material from philosophy and related disciplines, but uses them in inventive new ways that are seen as heretical by standard philosophical approaches. The contributions to this volume highlight Laruelle’s own distinctive approach to the history of thought and bring together researchers in the Anglophone (...) and Francophone world who have taken up the project of non-philosophy in their own way, developing new heresies, sometimes even in relation to non-philosophy itself. The contributions here show the scope of non-philosophy with essays on gender, science, religion, politics, animals, and the history of philosophy. They are all brought together, not in a city of intellectuals bound together by law, but within a city of heretics bound together only by their status as stranger. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki. _. (shrink)

In the first English translation of his work, Laruelle explores the major European thinkers from Nietzsche to Derrida to define his own 'non-philosophical' ...

Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating (...) and self-reproducing structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such. (shrink)

This essay considers the spectacle of slavery that is death, and death only which continually persists as slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation or otherwise understood as a system of white-over-black. By observing the motionless movement of death perfecting itself (neither as life nor as historical time, progress, the human, or development), I argue that law makes death sovereign. The essay pursues this line of inquiry by considering a. capitalism as a system of spectacular relationships, a system of legal relationships, that places death atop everything (...) and as a faith expressed in the gospel of legal method and its false promise of perpetual progress. And b. law as a structure analogous to the unconscious since it exists outside of time. In placing these two concerns together, it considers a sort of magical thinking of law—a make-believe realm in which rules appear to somehow govern themselves and an ‘us’ that seemingly masks over and absolves the system of white-over-black. Such banishment, whereby the system of white-over-black banished from the realm of the spectacle, is by that act repatriated to and given sovereignty over the world of the real, the world of historical time. (shrink)

Beginning with the assumption that the normative conception of Zen that Dōgen expounded and practiced constitutes at its heart a religio-philosophical practice, I focus on Dōgen’s zazen-only as its primary locus. Specifying the nature of zazen-only on and off the cushion, I seek to foreground the ways in which the transformation of apparent dualities into non-dual dualities is key to understanding Dōgen’s Zen as a religio-philosophical practice. Since this activity implicates more than experience, e.g., valuations, desires, goals, actions, reactions, etc., (...) i.e., the entire psycho-physical existence of the practitioner, it is itself philosophical in the demands it makes on practitioners in the “nitty gritty” of life. Further, the activity of transforming apparent dualities into non-dual dualities relies on two other important concepts that Dōgen utilizes, those of “weighing emptiness” and non-thinking. I, thus, focus on expounding the manner in which grappling with non-dual duality, weighing emptiness, and non-thinking should be seen as loci of Dōgen’s religio-philosophical activities. Lastly, I note that the extent to which someone can engage the philosophical dimensions will depend on the person, their motivations, and that of their teachers. Yet, the more deeply one can penetrate the various issues, ideas, and concepts at stake, the deeper one’s practice-realization.Yet, following Hee-Jin Kim’s treatment of it, weighing emptiness is vital to the dynamicity of practice-realization in the world. This is because weighing emptiness is a way to describe the transformation and engagement with a non-dual duality in the world. While not denying the idea of “equality in emptiness,” it insists that differences must be taken into consideration in realizing the fairness, reasonableness, and justness of the practitioner acting in the world. (shrink)

François Laruelle emerged from the hallowed generation of French postwar philosophers that included luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Jean Baudrillard, yet his thinking differs radically from that of his better-known contemporaries. In Laruelle and Art, Jonathan Fardy provides the first academic monograph dedicated solely to Laruelle's unique contribution to aesthetic theory and specifically the 'non-philosophical' project he terms 'non-aesthetics'. This undertaking allows Laruelle to think about art outside the boundaries of standard philosophy, an approach (...) that Fardy explicates through a series of case studies. By analysing the art of figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Anish Kapoor, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell as well as the drama of Michael Frayn, Fardy's new book enables new and experienced readers of Laruelle to understand how the philosopher's thinking can open up new vistas of art and criticism. (shrink)