First and Second Academic Presentations
François Laruelle
In En tant qu’un (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 17-21, 22-28
Translated by Jeremy R. Smith[1]
Three invariant objectives organize our work and lead to the concept of “non-philosophy.”
1) A thought of the individual; not only a philosophy of difference and singularity in the way of the French tradition to which we remain very attached, but a thought which would be by and for man as an individual; the grounds of the real being strictly individual.
2) The transcendental method, only rigorous through immanence and the reality that it guarantees thought; the consequent distinction of a simply logical transcendental and a real transcendental. How can one be a “transcendental realist” without falling under the classical objections of Transcendental Idealism?[2]
3) The need of a theoretical, quasi-scientific domination of philosophy. Beyond monographic study, the systematic research of irreducible invariants and structures which allow oneself to speak of Philosophy-with-a-capital-P [la philosophie]. Here’s the problem: by what right can one speak of Philosophy-with-a-capital-P without having to carry out an induction over the historical diversity of philosophers? Therefore, on this point, there’s a certain proximity with the Guéroult-Vuillemin-Granger tradition,[3] even when it would no longer be a question of making an epistemology or a philosophy of philosophy or the history of philosophy; but something which would resemble a science of philosophy or for it.
These three givens were crystallized for a first time over the name Nietzsche – wrongly or with reason. From there results a thesis which tries to “transvaluate” phenomenological ontology from Husserl to Heidegger; two books which displace textualism and deconstruction; and two books which thematize the problems of the meaning of power and the power of meaning – of interpretation.[4]
The rupture came with the sentiment that this type of thought had precisely failed on the problem of the individual and real identity, confounded with that of difference; that it gave the individual or supposed them without elucidating them in their essence and by always coupling the individual with a universal instance. Le principe de minorité records – laboriously – on this break, and attempts to elucidate the One as the “forgotten” requisite of all philosophical thought.[5]
A Biography of Ordinary Man then crystallized these exigencies within a wholly other economy. The book systematically elucidated the essence of the One, what we also call the Vision-in-One, and its relation to Being and the World.[6]
Philosophies of Difference marks and explains the definitive rupture with dominant contemporary philosophies and criticize the two traditions of Difference (Nietzsche and Heidegger) in the name of the vision-in-One. It is an application of the vision-in-One towards the critique of the philosophical tradition that we previously nourished.[7]
The most positive book, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, redescribes the vision-in-One, both the One and the noetic and noematic structures by which it is prolonged; it is a description made in view of grounding a new practice of philosophy, a practice that we call “non-philosophy.”[8]
Some words – very brief and schematic – on the One such that we understand it since it is the concept which sustains the whole of the new enterprise:
1) Ontology uses the One or requisitions it in company with Being and in view of Being without elucidating the One within its essence – its reality – and without further elucidating its internal relation to man. From there, a generally negative and aporetic discourse on the One. There is a forgetting not of the One but of the essence of the One which is more profound than the forgetting of Being.
2) The One is not convertible with Being and must be described for itself outside of any functional requisition; it must be described within its reality before being so [l’être] within its use: the One qua One, the object of non-philosophy.
3) The essence or reality of the One is radical immanence deprived of all transcendence (nothingness, scission, desire). It is an immanence lived before all representation, an internal transcendental experience where the transcendental finally precedes the a priori and the metaphysical – saying that, we think to the problems of Kantianism and Post-Kantianism. There is a Real Identity which precedes logical identity and therefore also the logos or Being.
4) Vision-in-One signifies that man – who is the secret of this One without transcendence – sees, imagines, feels and thinks from his own grounds, from his own “individual” [individuale] reality yet anterior to his ideas and their objective content. Man thinks outside of representation which is only for him an “occasion.” Ontology always contains an idealization of transcendent experience, not the Vision-in-One which is in a certain way the “contrary” to vision-in-God. It is nevertheless an “occasionalist” conception of representation and language.
5) Philosophy like ontology refuses the possibility – for philosophy, it is contradictory – of this description of the One qua One. The solution to this contradiction is within the One itself, for vision-in-One contains a new practice of philosophy itself, which therefore no longer has its first validity and implies its transformation into a simple occasion. A philosophy – subject to [sous reserve] an always possible supplementary interpretation – is the reciprocal determination of the real and language, this is so even in the case of the apparent reciprocal exclusion: the frequent necessity of a supplementary interpretation makes this reciprocity or this more or less specular circle appear. Restored within its essence, the One, to the contrary, non-reciprocally, unilaterally determines the use of language. Better yet: it is a new use of philosophy. From the One to Being or logos, the consequence is good. Or again: granting [soit] the One without Being, what then results for Being and language in general?
6) “Non-Philosophy” is this new, unilateralized use of philosophy, a use inferred through the One. Non-Philosophy is not the absence or negation of philosophy, it is, to the contrary, philosophy’s generalization or its opening as a correlate of the One rather than a correlate of Being. Non-Philosophy is philosophy’s generalization: its reduction from its identity (Philosophy-with-a-capital-P) and its invariances, a reduction which can alone redeploy philosophy within a more universal space.
What do we call this space or project? A thought which is grounded only on one Identity and extricated from the invariancies of structure; a thought which otherwise is delivered from naïve intuition or transcendence just as from any vicious circle and in particular the philosophical circle, to the benefit of an inference with a unique meaning, what must be called a science and, in particular, an axiomatics. Our goal – in a later work – is to ground non-philosophy as a science that is both experimental and axiomatized (a real or transcendental axiomatic and not, obviously, a logical and formalized one). This project is not absurd: it is evoked by Husserl from sections 71-75 of Ideas I where he asks if a geometry of lived experience, a mathesis of transcendental phenomenology, and so on, are possible. He evidently responds in the negative. Husserl, with his residual and antithetical psychologism and logicism, did not have the means to reconcile mathesis and the transcendental within the radicality of the One. Vision-in-One allows this and must be able to ground a real – not logical – science of philosophical systems. It is in this way that the project of a science of philosophy must be realized: among other things as a transcendental axiomatic rather than as a transcendental logic. Non-Philosophy is therefore distinguished from four other projects. Non-Philosophy is:
1) Neither the application of an already existent empirical science onto philosophy, which is an impossible project; non-philosophy is an aprioritic science and, in particular, an axiomatic;
2) Nor is it a philosophy of the History of Philosophy (à la M. Guéroult); Non-Philosophy is not a philosophy and it does not pass through the forced [obligé] medium of history;
3) Nor is it a logicization of philosophical systems; non-philosophy is not the introduction of logical methods within the field of philosophical decision;
4) Nor, lastly, is a philosophical logic: either Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Husserl’s transcendental logic or a dialectical logic – that is, philosophy as a science of itself.
We do not ignore the resistance that the Idea of a science of philosophy – even if this word science is here understood in a very broad sense, as a mathesis – must necessarily arise from within [chez] the philosophers. Yet, one such axiomatic respects the “transcendental” (in the broad sense) dimension of thought and must therefore spark less resistance than the three possibilities that make a part of this science that we will however not confuse with a psychoanalysis of philosophy.
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I retain from the previous exposition two points by way of introduction: the continuity of problems and the discontinuity of solutions.
The continuity of problems: what assures the coherence of the two parts of my work, there are three imbricated projects:
1) A specific thought of the individual, adequate to identity qua identity: is this possible? What kind of meaning does a thought of the One qua One or the One autonomous in relation to the “science of Being” have?
2) How does one assure the rigor and reality of thought if not through the recourse to a transcendental instance? It takes the development of a concept of the transcendental which was strictly immanent (for the rigor of description) and real rather than logical or even logico-real as it is in Kant. I had to move myself away from Kant, Fichte and Husserl, too, who could not push the reduction of the logical organon far enough, and I had to substitute the transcendental logic of these authors with a transcendental realism which, however, must not fall under their critique, one that is precisely transcendental idealism. The real of the last instance must therefore be radically immanent and deprived of any form of transcendence, worldly or even ontological. To think the One outside of its convertibility with Being.
3) How does one theoretically dominate philosophy, which is not a theory and always holds something of a “stretched out” hermeneutic circularity in some sort? From there, the posterior theme of a “science-of-philosophy,” a theme that is obviously astray and incomprehensible if one interprets it as a simple reversal of “philosophy-as-science” (we shall return to this).
The discontinuity of solutions: it is through this that I could have given the impression of hesitating, indeed, retracting myself. I first believed that the unique key of problems are found in the contemporary philosophy under the form of the concept “difference.” I renounced that since difference does not give the One but rather the Dyad, an ontological concept or one that is peripheral to ontology. The solution consisted 1) in giving the One itself as the element of thought in the place of Being or even the Other 2) but without reconstituting the One from the exterior with Being, the Other, the Dyad, i.e., with transcendence; it is on the consequently imperative condition that the concept of the One be reworked and torn from its traditional ontological horizon. Through its essence, the One is not necessarily reabsorbed within the function of unification or synthesis that it has always played for ontology and the deconstructions of ontology. The most profound axiom, and the most imperceptible one of philosophy, what conditions the very convertibility of the One with Being, is perhaps this, which is on several sides a tautology: the One unifies. What would the One be if it did not unify? And what would the One be if it was elucidated for itself? Therefore, to reprise the old Greek project, what would a science of the One-qua-One be, this time independent from the science of Being? It is necessary to recognize for it a mode of manifestation or phenomenality of the third type, if I may say, distinct, to say it very schematically, from both Being or Consciousness (of the object) and that of the Unconscious or the Other qua Other. From there, these undoubtedly ontological concepts, but which I make a use on which I will return to, a descriptive and provisional use, and that I utilize o characterize the non-unifying and absolutely immanent essence of the One: radical immanence; an identity that is non-decisional and non-positional (of) oneself; a One-in-One or “vision-in-One; a One-without-Being (if Being always implies transcendence), etc. Of course, through its essence, the One excludes all totalization; it is as much pure multiplicity, an original [originaire] multiplicity since it is not the result of an operation of division. Under this form, the One resolves the problems posed previously and gives its true, nonpositivist, meaning to the concept of a “science of philosophy.” It is a purely immanent instance [or authority, instance][9] that is without transcendence in it, without scission, nothingness or exteriority; perhaps what we have called an “internal transcendental experience” where the internal does not return to any psychology. Taken as a guiding thread, the One thus assures its rigor towards thought. It is moreover a solely real and not logical instance: we access to a thought which is no longer a transcendental logic, we access a phenomenon without phenomenology. Finally, with the One which is not a thing or a res[10] which is not given in an intellectual intuition, we escape from the favourite objection from the idealists!
Only this solution starts up in its turn under the form of new problems, those to which I currently work on. By what right is the One given independently of Being? Is a thought of this One possible which would not still be an ontology – a philosophy – but a true science? I have been constrained, through this theme, to repose the problem, in general assumed resolved within its great strokes, of the relations of science and philosophy, and in asking myself what the most general presuppositions of epistemology were. Having seriously taken the problem of a “science of the One” which would be a rigorous science, and having admitted with everyone that the science of Being had failed as a science, I should turn myself towards the “effective” sciences and try to dissolve the amphibology which affects this word: science.
I had to make the following general hypothesis: if the “science of Being” of the metaphysicians fails as a science and if, inversely, the attempts of the ontological or idealist foundation of science do not render justice to it, even when it would perhaps be necessary for philosophy (which is another question), it is perhaps science and ontology are strangers to one another. And if the concept of reality that science postulates is not Being, if the objects of scientific thought are not objectivated in the sense that philosophy understands it in general, perhaps it is precisely the point of the One, which would be the element or cause of any science. I experiment with this hypothesis of a science – effective and rigorous, and not a metaphysical one – of the One and which would therefore also be, by virtue of what comes to be said, a science of the essence of science. It is a science of the One or a first science which could show that the One or Identity, a non-unifying identity, is the essence or the ground of the real, and it is this real, rather than Being, that the sciences, all sciences, postulate. I therefore now strive to describe the imbrication of the radical immanence of the real and the phenomenal characters of scientific thought. I speak of this: the phenomenal or descriptive characters of scientific thought and not of its local objects or knowledges that it produces. Indeed, so that this project would not be absurd or philosophically contradictory, it must fulfill precise conditions touching on the description that one claims to make of science:
1) Science is irreducible to the objects of knowledge that it produces, irreducible to their local theoretical and experimental content, and above all irreducible to the philosophical position of these objects like the rational fact or faktum; science is first a way of thinking or a process characterized by the immanence with which theory relates itself to the real-One and, from there, to experience, its data, and the immanence of its theoretical and experimental criteria;
2) Science is an opaque, unreflected [or uncontemplated, irréfléchie], deaf and blind thought stripped of reflexive thickness or ontological depth, it is a sort of theoretical “comportment,” and yet science is consistent; it knows itself without being reflected, it is non-positional (of) itself; and science escapes from the disjunction of knowledge and thought;
3) Science is objective – of course – but without objects in the philosophical sense – idealist or ontological – of objectivation. The theoretical field is an absolutely full objectivity, a horizontality but without horizon; an infinite opening which is not a closing of a project or a philosophical teleology. In brief: science is not a completed fact or an object of the philosophical type, nor is it the autoposition of an objectivation. There is an amphibology of the word “object”: the objects of science and the objects of philosophy are not of the same nature.
With the unreflected One taken as a guiding thread, it becomes possible to make a “phenomenology” of science, a description which makes right [fasse droit], without reducing it, to the traits which are those of a radical unreflected, to this opaque and deaf phenomenality which is nevertheless a thought; and to recognize towards this thought a distinct reality from that of Consciousness or Being on one hand, and the Unconscious or the Other on the other hand. Therefore, it is no longer an epistemology strictly speaking. The project described rather belongs to the old tradition of the theory of science – from Fichte to Husserl – but the basis or the foundation has changed: science is no longer bound to Consciousness or to Being, but to the One that is non-positional (of) oneself; science is no longer a transcendental logic, it is however a “transcendental mathesis.”
Here I cannot continue this description. I have tried to suggest the constraining and noncontradictory character of this project. To conclude: there is a redistribution of the relations of science and philosophy. Philosophy is undoubtedly reduced in its claims as to the real (we generalize the Kantian idea of a transcendental illusion of metaphysics), but it is conserved within other functions.
1) Science has no need of a philosophical foundation. It is without foundation because it has a cause: the One, the real-as-Identity; not only is the One an immanent cause, but a cause-through-immanence, the causality of radical immanence itself.
2) Science does not think like philosophy undoubtedly, but uniquely so because it thinks in its own way and it is not deprived of thought; the One, more than Being, liberates the gaze over science.
3) What is thought of the real is written by science, undoubtedly; but through science as it is [en tant que telle] or through its essence, and it is not solely consigned in a local theory with exception to others (Newton or Cantor). Philosophy reduces science to a theory or to a particular sequence of knowing; to the contrary, I postulate that it has its own, internal, consistent essence susceptible to being described.
4) There are two sources of thought: philosophy which develops in priority, but not only, the side of the Dyad by brushing up against [en effleurant] the One in which it gives a nonscientific image; and science, which develops the side of the One, but of the One as a non-unifying Identity that is this time independent of the Dyad. Of course, science has its own conception of the Dyad. On the one hand, the Dyad derives from the priority of the One and is no longer circular or contemporary with it; and on the other hand, the Dyad takes the form of a duality that I call “uni-lateral” or “unequal” without reciprocity, which is reduced to the state of symbolic support of the theory. Thus, science is not a simple logical calculation over symbols. There exists an autonomous sphere of the theoretical, a theoretical a priori which guides experimental labour. Therefore, science is a true thought, even if it is the blind or automatic thought immanent to calculation. On the other hand, science always has need of a symbolic support and the two form this unequal or unilateral duality that I have spoken of.
5) In science in general, language – in particular philosophy’s language – ceases from being logos, the mixture of the signifier and meaning of Being, to become a symbolic support of representations: it is a quasi-signifier without a linguistic [langagier] use, void of meaning and in particular philosophy, yet it is necessary for theory. In the science of the One, the philosophical quasi-signifier is deprived of philosophical use and is ordered to the theoretical representation of the One.
6) The formula, a “science of philosophy,” does not imply a positivist project of the reduction of philosophy, but only that philosophy – its statements, its terminology, its texts of ontology – is the indispensable material, in some sort the “objective givens” or the phenomena on which a science works over, a science rather that of the One, and in view of producing an adequate representation of the One. The science that I speak of is that of the One through the means of philosophy, which implies a theoretical or scientific and no longer philosophical use of philosophy itself. Generally, I develop the following axiom: a science does not know its objects or “phenomena,” a science knows the real – their Identity – through the means of objects. Here applied, the axiom is formulated thus: the science of philosophy does not know philosophy, a science of philosophy knows the One – the real – through the means of philosophy. Ontology is henceforth the set of “phenomena” through the means of which an adequate theory of the One becomes possible.
These two sources of thought do not reform a philosophical hierarchy, but philosophy is now imbricated in the science of the One as the necessary material of this science and plays the role as this symbolic support that I spoke of.
[1] Any and all translation errors, and all footnotes are my own unless otherwise noted. – TN.
[2] This is similar to a remark made by Laruelle in Machines Textuelles (Paris: Seuil, 1976), writing “how can one draw from the transcendental some new effects without oneself being ‘ein tranzendentaler Philosophe’…? (10). – TN
[3] Martial Guéroult (1891-1976), Jules Vuillemin (1920-2001), and Gilles-Gaston Granger (1920-2016). – TN
[4] Laruelle is speaking here about his works from Philosophy I. Most of them in turn dealt with Nietzsche in some capacity. The ‘transvaluation’ of phenomenological ontology may be related to the unpublished doctoral thesis entitled «Economie générale des effets d’être» under supervision of Paul Ricœur, Michel Henry, and Clémence Ramnoux in 1975. The two books on textualism and deconstruction refer to both Machines Textuelles and Le déclin de l’écriture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977). The last two are Laruelle’s books on political and machinic materialism proper, two post-Marxist, Nietzschean perspectives, from Nietzsche contre Heidegger (Paris: Payot, 1977) and Au-delà du principe de pouvoir (Paris: Payot, 1978). – TN.
[5] François Laruelle, Le principe de minorité (Paris: Aubier, 1981). – TN
[6] François Laruelle, A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities, trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2018; Paris: Aubier, 1985). – TN.
[7] François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Paris: PUF, 1986). – TN.
[8] François Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013; Paris: Pierre Mardaga, 1989). – Tn.
[9] I would like to highlight the ambiguity of the French «instance» as both an instance qua occasion but also an authority that is no longer of authority in terms of transcendence, that the One be a judge or tribunal of a transcendental perspective. – TN.
[10] As in substance in Descartes. – TN.
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