The Project of Non-Marxism: Arguing for “Monstrously” Radical Concepts

2019

2013

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.

CONTRADICTIONS 2020 /2 A Journal for Critical Thought, 2021

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.”

Performance Philosophy, 2017

François Laruelle's non-philosophy aspires to bring democracy into thought. As a philosopher of ' radical immanence' everything is equal or equalized-no thing or thought transcends the rest. But of course all things do not appear equal. And Laruelle argues that philosophy is the discipline that posits itself as the power to think at the highest level-the utmost unequal thought. Despite appearances to the contrary, philosophy remains our dominant form of knowledge, according to Laruelle. Or rather, it is the very form of domination within knowledge. Adopting many positions, or 'decisions' as he puts it (empiricism, rationalism, idealism, materialism, scientism, even antiphilosophy), its fundamental pose is as a form of exemplary thinking. It is the model for all foundational thought, even when those foundations are differential or anti-foundational (multiplicity, alterity, differance, etc.). As Laruelle sees it, "philosophy is not 'first' for nothing; it is that which declares itself first and possessor […]" (Laruelle 2013c, 110). Even in our contemporary scientistic era, in epistemic relations… [p]hilosophy holds the dominant place, science the dominated place. In positivism or scientism, the hierarchy is reversed or inverted; but it is still philosophy that dominates in anti-philosophy. The superior or dominant place is in effect always occupied by philosophy […]. (Laruelle 2013b, 43) So even scientism is a philosophy too (albeit a self-hating one). Laruelle, on the other hand, believes that philosophy does not have a monopoly on (philosophical) thinking. In non-philosophy, all thoughts are equalized in value. However, this

Radical Philosophy 175, 2012

Philosophy and Literature, 1984

Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2019

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital.

Radical Philosophy, 30, Spring 1982, 1982

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.