François Laruelle, on Non-Philosophy

François Laruelle is a French philosopher who was born in Chavelot, France. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, and he completed his doctoral dissertation on the general economy of hermeneutics at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre) under the direction of Paul Ricoeur. He taught at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre) from 1967-2006 and was a program director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1986-1989. He is the author of many books, including Une Biographie de l'Homme Ordinaire (A Biography of the Ordinary Man, 1985), Philosophie et Non-Philosophie (Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, 1989), Théorie des Étrangers (Theory of Strangers, 1995), Principes de la Non-Philosophie (Principles of Non-Philosophy, 1996), Dictionnnaire de la Non-Philosophie (Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, 1998), La Lutte et l'Utopie à la Fin des Temps Philosophiques (Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, 2004), Les Philosophies de la Différence (Philosophies of Difference, 2010), Philosophie Non-Standard (Non-Standard Philosophy, 2010), and Théorie des Identités (Theory of Identities, 2016)
      According to Laruelle, non-philosophy is viewed by philosophy as the judgments of common sense, or as whatever is other than philosophy and remains to be thought, or as the presuppositions of philosophy itself, which are themselves philosophizable.¹ But philosophy is, or has become, a utopia of the past. "It is impossible to elaborate a new practice of the future without dealing with philosophy as a whole as a failed or worldly utopia," he says. "Philosophical practice has become the archaeology of its own ruins, an archaeology of utopias without a future."² Why is this? Because philosophy is governed by a principle superior even to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Principle of Sufficient Philosophizability.³ This principle expresses the pretense of philosophy to occupy a position of absolute autonomy in deciding and determining the real. Non-philosophy, on the other hand, interrupts the philosophical trajectory of the real (identified as Being, substance, unity, multiplicity, etc.),⁴ because the faith-in-the-real of philosophy is in fact merely the philosophical hallucination of the Real.⁵
      Non-philosophy is undecidable by philosophy. It "possesses a 'radical,' albeit relative, autonomy of thought," says Laruelle, "that it receives from the non-sufficiency of its cause"⁶ (because it isn't governed by the Principle of Sufficient Philosophizability). "Vision-in-One" is what makes this suspension of philosophical sufficiency possible.⁷
      Some axioms of non-philosophy include (1) the One is radical (but not absolute) immanence, not associated with a transcendence or a division between immanence and transcendence, (2) the One is in-One, or in vision-in-One, but not in Being, or in Difference, and (3) "the One is the Real, insofar as it is foreclosed to all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc.)."⁸
      Non-philosophy, according to Laruelle, is "the style of radicality enacted against the absolute...the style of uni-laterality against convertibility, the style of heresy against conformity."⁹ It is neither philosophy's negation, nor an attempt to deconstruct philosophy. It is rather a pragmatics that ensues from the One.¹⁰ It is, by its very essence, Vision-in-One.¹¹
      Laruelle argues that the transcendental Unity proper to philosophical decision is a unity associated with a prior division between the immanent and the transcendent. In non-philosophy, on the other hand, the transcendental is pure transcendental identity, an undivided identity.¹² Thus, "non-philosophy does not go from the transcendental to the Real...like philosophy, but from the Real to the transcendental."¹³
      The Real is immanence-without-transcendence, and is simple identity, says Laruelle.¹⁴ The Real is radically immanent, the One, neither capable of being known nor capable of being thought.¹⁵ It is non-conceptual and radically immanent, regardless of any possible conditions of thought. "The essence of the Real, resides neither in Being nor in the Other, but in the One."¹⁶
      The One is indefinable and undecidable, and has no ontic or ontological content. It neither is nor is not, because it is not One-Being, it is One-in-One.  "Insofar as its essence saves it from philosophical decision," says Laruelle, "it is not Difference and has no need of [Difference]." Difference, on the other hand, is a philosophical interpretation of the One, and has need of the One.¹⁷
      "The One is not 'transcendental Unity,'" he says. "It has no specific essence of Unity, which is always a blend of immanence and transcendence."¹⁸ Thus, non-philosophy is a practice that's no longer founded on philosophical faith, but "is established within the limits of the bracketing of this faith."¹⁹ Its goal is to save the human from the superhuman. Humanity, the One-in-person, then becomes the radical subject of non-philosophy.²⁰
      The style of non-philosophy is uni-laterality, says Laruelle. "Uni-laterality is the essence of the One-in-One that, separated from philosophy by its own immanence, is Other-than it."²¹ Thus non-One and non-uni-laterality are not modes or accidents of the One in relation to Being, but rather the essence of immanence separated from the One.²²
      Two basic problems with which non-philosophy is concerned are (1) "the limitotrophic status of the One that, whether explicitly or not, associates by proximity with Being and the Other without either being able to grant it radical autonomy," and (2) the theoretical status of philosophy, "which is a theoreticist impulse without being a theory, which has practical aspects...without being a practice."²³ The limitotrophic status of the One in philosophy renders the One just as much Other as One, and just as much divisible as indivisible. But non-philosophy is a practice of thinking according to the One, rather than thinking of the One (as a final object related to Being or the Other).²⁴ The theory and practice of non-philosophy are derived from Vision-in-One, which is uni-versal in the sense that the One is foreclosed to division by philosophical world-thought.²⁵
     

FOOTNOTES

¹François Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, translated by Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), p. 99.
²Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), p. 12.
³Ibid., p. 28.
⁴Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, p. 127.
⁵Ibid., p. 39.
⁶Ibid., p. 56.
⁷Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy,  translated by Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, Univocal, 2013), p. 4.
⁸Ibid., p. 166.
⁹Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia, p. 13.
¹⁰Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, p. 4. 
¹¹Ibid., p. 31.
¹²Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, p. 148.
¹³Struggle and Utopia, p. 38.
¹⁴Ibid., p. 29
¹⁵Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, p.125.
¹⁶Laruelle, Theory of Identities, translated by Alyosha Edlebi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 80.
¹⁷Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, translated by Rocco Gangle (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 22.
¹⁸Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, p. 43. 
¹⁹Ibid., p. 10.
²⁰Ibid., p. 30.
²¹Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia, p. 29. 
²²Ibid. p. 33.
²³Ibid., p. 27.
²⁴Ibid., p. 28.
²⁵Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, p.167.