LARUELLE'S ESCAPE FROM THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE REAL

2019

This article presents an overview of Ernesto Laclau's theory of hegemony from his first work as co-author with Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (1985) to his last work On Populist reason (2005). To that end, this corpus is analyzed with theoretical tools from Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to locate the implicit postulates in Laclau's work and to organize his work into three main moments. We propose an interpretation of such theory from a psychoanalytic perspective through three key concepts: antagonism, dislocation and heterogeneity.

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Vol 21, No 2 (2013), 105-117

In recent years, in the field of philosophy of religion, François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” has opened up a path out of the battles between secularist philosophies and resurging Christian theologies. It has done so by theorizing the radical immanence of the Human (or, as he writes, Man-in-person) separated from and foreclosed to simultaneously the (philosophical) enclosure of the World and the (theological) transcendence of God. This paper explores the way Laruelle’s 2007 work Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains further articulates radical immanence by engaging with materials from the traditions of mysticism and mystical theology. Mystique non-philosophique diagnoses the ways traditional mysticism remains complicit with philoso- phical operations by enchaining the radical immanence of Man-in-person or the One, making it desire, need and work for divine transcendence. In contrast, it proposes the practice of “future mysticism”, which seeks to subvert all conceptual mechanisms that subjugate the Human and render it servile to operations such as dialectical synthesis, conversion or desire for the Other. This approach underwrites Laruelle’s critique of Meister Eckhart’s thought for its enclosure of the Human within the Neo-platonic grammar of procession, conversion and return, and for the way it retains an emphasis on transcendent super-essentiality in its discourse of the God(head) beyond God. The paper suggests, however, that Eckhart’s sermons, despite deploying such inherited philosophical vocabularies, already articulate radical immanence that undermines the necessity of mediation and work, through mystical topoi such as poverty, humility and “without a why”. In so doing, the paper not only proposes the necessity of a more generous hermeneutic framework for non-philosophy, but also offers the possibility of de- emphasizing the name of “Man” in the theorization of radical immanence. As the paper shows, Eckhart’s conceptuality of poverty, humility and “without a why” points not only to the capacity to subvert transcendence, but additionally to articulate radical immanence decoupled from any Human figure. The radical immanence of the One, however, is not just foreclosed to the World, but, as Mystique non-philosophique makes clear, also entails a messianic dimension: the text repeatedly proposes cloning “Christ-subjects” or “Future Christs” who are not of the World but “for the World”. The final part of this paper argues that it is necessary to read such messianic concepts or “first names” without reverting to economic thinking, without, that is, re-introducing the mechanism of transcendence and specular enclosure. The real subversion of the World lies not in the affirmation of divine transcendence, nor in the nihilism of the desert, but in an immanent One, which is foreclosed to the World but nevertheless messianically displays its insufficiency. Finally, the paper suggests interpreting the radical immanence of the One as an undercommons of the World and (eschatological or divine) transcendence taken together, an undercommons that indexes the mobile lives, generic uncountable forms of living and anonymous forces that pose a perpetual danger to the order enforced by the World and its Gods. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

This is a first draft for an overview of Laruelle's development, all comments are welcome.In this text am trying to see non-philosophy as a path rather than as an illuminated state attained by conversion to a set of principles. The non-philosophical conversion is not an all-or-none once-and-for-all event. It comes in degrees and flashes, or in successive waves, and may well be different for each individual. The non-philosopher is not at the end of his or her journey, but is on the way to immanence, under the condition of immanence itself.

This article gives a comparative analysis of the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis and Alain Badiou's mathematical ontology understand the category of the real, respectively, as the foundation of individual subjectivity or the name of being-as-being. A number of shifts in focus arise from the fundamental difference in the location of the void: from the individual act to the collective event; from death drive to immortal truth; from subjective destitution and cathartic purification to transformative interventions and constitutive thought. These shifts are exemplified, elaborated and analysed through a close reading of the thinkers' respective commentaries on Sophocles' Antigone. Foregrounding what is philosophically at stake in these differences, the article defends Badiou against Lacanian critics (most notably Slavoj Žižek and Eleanor Kaufman) by examining the ethical and political force of his innovation.

Radical Philosophy 175, 2012

Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice, 2019

As one of the seminal theorists further developing François Laruelle’s politically-poised “non-standard philosophy,” Katerina Kolozova’s approach to animality and feminism is part of a particular post-humanist Marxist continuum (which includes Rosi Braidotti, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles). Nonetheless, Kolozova distinguishes herself from this lineage by adhering to Laruelle’s method, liquidating philosophy of its anthropomorphic nexus. Thus, Kolozova also belongs to a more recently inaugurated and nascent tradition, working in tandem with post-Laruellean philosophers of media, technology, aesthetics and feminist critique, such as Bogna Konior, Yvette Granata, Jonathan Fardy and John Ó Maoilearca. Within this variegated assemblage, Kolozova’s most recent project, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019), saliently reconciles and radicalizes Haraway’s epochal dyad of the “inhuman”—a bifurcation riven by technology on one node and the animal on the other—by a resolution of superlative unity. This methodology, adhering to Laruelle’s system of “synthesis-without-synthesizing” attempts to dissolve the spectral chimeras that have haunted philosophy’s metaphysical heredity, proffering a generic identity.

Oraxiom, 2020

A radical vision of the end times requires an equally radical mode of expression to transmit it, one that tears language from convention and renders it capable of visionary communication. This effort is palpable in non-philosophy's oraxiomatic method as well as in Paul Celan's poetic works. What use of language can induce an "eschatological comportment"? How does one voice a subjectivity "of-the-last-instance"? In this paper, I advance the idea that eschatological imagination and utopic expressivity are two sides of the same messianic activity of vision-creation. My principal goal is to explain and explore this thesis and these concepts through an encounter between Laruelle and Celan. To set the ground for this, I begin with Henry Corbin's theory that the active imagination produces imaginal worlds (mundus imaginalis) which are invisible to mundane perception because they exist "nowhere." Such worlds are accessed by creative acts that leap outside the world and open a space for the unlocalizable, or utopia. My proposition is to treat Laruelle's philo-fictions and Celan's poetry as imaginal worlds and to collide them to produce a new understanding of messianic vision-creation. To achieve this, I first examine Vision-in-One and the oraxiom as a discursive method, as well as the rationale behind non-philosophy's claim to produce a final ultimatum. I then challenge Laruelle's claim that only this method is suited for the purpose. After reconstructing Celan's vision of poetry from his 1960 Meridian speech and drawing inspiration from his poems, I contrast and synthesize these two radical modes of expression. Poetry is idiomatic and testamentary, not oraxiomatic and generic. Nonetheless, the two modes share many features, including: a critique of "sufficient" interpretations; a move beyond metaphor and meaning; a "use-of-silence" aware of how silence impacts speech; an orientation of the written work as "last-thingly" [letztdinglich]; and regarding the messianic dimension, a desire for person and language to form an indissoluble unity which is forever loyal to the human quest for utopia. I also argue that the oraxiom addresses a "You-of-the-last-instance" which Celan makes explicit; his work thus helps us understand non-philosophy's own operations and, more importantly, the relational dynamic at play in all messianic and visionary works. By weaving together these manifestations of utopic expressivity and exploring their divergences and parallels, I offer a unique vision of how language can foster an end-times subjectivity and produce works that catalyze the eschaton.

Laclau: A Critical Reader, 2004

We've plugged our 'lacanometer' inco Emesto Laclau's theoretical corpus. Eyes raised in expectation, we wait to see where on its scale the pointer will come to rest. Just how far is Laclau willing to go in appropriating Lacanian categories in the service of his hegemonic approach to discourse analysis? Or, to put it in Freudian terms, what measure of truth shall we attribute to the tapsus haunting a recent publication: a textual condensation of the two authors' names ('Laclan')?l Framing our essay in this way, the question clearly takes for granted a certain reading ofLaclau's theoretical trajectory, namely, his increasing readiness to take on board many crucial Lacanian insights. Theoretical affinities with Lacanian thought are evident from at least the time of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, if not earlier. Since then, such affinities have been subject to further exploitation (mainly in NR and E). There is often a straightforward terminological cross~over. Think, for example, of terms like suture, identity, identification, and the subject· as-lack. But there is also an apparently close conceptual affinity, even when the names of terms are not shared. Think, for example, of the nodal point, the empty signifier, the radically excluded, the impossibility of society, or the notion of an outside that is constitutive of the inside (roughly corresponding to the Lacanian concepts of the point·de·capiton, the master signifier, the objet perit a, the impossibility of the sexual relation, and extimacy). Indeed, conceptual affinities such as these make up a fairly extensive reservoir, from which Laclau does not hesitate to draw in elaborating further his discourse theoretic approach to political analysis.