Heresy: An Interview with Jean-Didier Wagneur
In François Laruelle, En tant qu’un: la «non-philosophie» expliquée aux philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p.207-225
Jean-Didier Wagneur: A Biography of Ordinary Man is your eighth book, and in your bibliography, your works are divided into two sets: “Philosophy I” and “Philosophy II.” How is A Biography situated in your own research?
François Laruelle: There was a break, but there was also a continuity with what preceded, it is why I have called them “Philosophy I” and “Philosophy II.” First, the continuity: the individual. How can we think the individual and the multiplicity which is attached to him? I believe that it’s there that the directing obsession of the whole of my research starts off. One can situate the break at the level of Le principe de minorité[1]. Before this book, in the first five works, I essentially used Nietzschean means, namely synthetic means, to try to think what the individual was and his multiplicity. So I hoped to reach the most radical individuality, the most ultimate one, by helping myself with traditional means of philosophy such that they end by being condensed and consigned in Nietzsche’s thought. It is why I would work within the interior of a kind of “quadrangle” if one wants: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida.
Le principe de minorité breaks with this way of doing [philosophy]. There was there a breakthrough, albeit imperfect and hesitant, and I utilized other means there. I realized that with philosophy, one can never think the individual except in relation with a universal, submitted to a universal: the State, Nature, Being, Religion. Now to the contrary, I try to think the individual directly from himself, and I asked myself to what conditions one can think the individual in this way. Thus, it is what I succeeded by necessity in elaborating this concept, surely traditional in philosophy, but to which it has never done justice: the One. I therefore reinserted the thought of the individual in a thought of the One, rather than Being. In other words, I passed, with Le principe de minorité, from a thought of Being, which is carried out through displacements, breaks, through alterity and synthesis, to a thought of the One. The very fact of saying “I passed” proves how it is way of still doing philosophy: I part from philosophical presupposeds, I make a critique of it and I show that they postulate something like the One, the radical and irreducible reality of the individual. With A Biography of Ordinary Man, I took a new step within the interior of the field previously opened and I carried out a sort of reversal [or overthrow, renversement]. I understood that it wasn’t any longer necessary to seek out [chercher] the individual – for this investigation [recherche] is necessarily vain and lost by the very fact that it is a quest [recherche] – but that it was necessary to suppose that the individual is already given and to remodel the whole of philosophical thought in accordance with this primitive, original givenness of the individual. Obviously, we must know what we can understand by the givenness concerning the individual: it is probably that philosophy is no longer armed here with thinking this irreducible and primitive presence of the most individual. I will say that we can only think the individual from this point of view through their effects, by supposing the individual given. I also discovered – a yet more recent discovery – that this way of doing is even closer to the scientific way of thinking than the philosophical way. It was a deep wound to discover that our relation to the individual as the irreducible reality is necessarily of an even closer type of relation of science to the real than the relation of philosophy to its traditional object, Being. To complete this journey, I orientated myself towards a radical critique of philosophy and a defense both of science and technology insofar as the image that philosophies have given them traditionally, at least since Plato, is probably a falsification of their essence. My goal is therefore to reconcile, beyond philosophy which separated them, the individual and science. To be a thinker of my time, but by being philosophically irrelevant.
J.-D. W.: The title of your work, A Biography of Ordinary Man, poses two questions: in what sense do we understand “biography,” and what [or who, qui] is an “ordinary man”?
F.L.: The term “biography” is rare if not inexistent in philosophy. I utilized it to oppose myself to what I think feels like a certain traditional philosophical contempt with regard to man. “Biography” designates here the most fundamental, essential events which make an individual, or through which an individual necessarily passes not to become an individual but quite simply to continue to be one. The association of “biography” and “ordinary man” seems to designate a very antiphilosophical project: we can ask ourselves if this is not a return to psychology, to anthropology, but I tried to suggest that anthropology is a falsifying and a recuperative image of man, a sort of detachment of philosophy towards the individual to try to reinsert them under the law of great universals: the State, Society…Above all, the point is not to return to psychology, to the contrary I try to make a return to what belongs to the essence of man, to still employ this term essence which signifies the minimal condition so that there is an individual thinkable as an individual. It seems to me that philosophy has always served as an intermediary between empirical men or what I call vulgar, quotidian men, and then a limit that philosophy calls, for example in Nietzsche, the Superhuman. Man, as Nietzsche said, is a bridge between the animal and the superhuman, between the inhuman and the superhuman, and this works for all philosophy. Philosophy therefore has always wanted to supersede [dépasser], exceed man, not only to legislate over him but to open in some sort the human to the non-human, to an other-than man, not even to the other man à la Lévinas, but to an exteriority and a transcendence which are inhuman or at least superhuman, for example divine. To the contrary, I proposed returning in a strict, rigorous way to the immanence of the individual. The general thesis that I support here is that there is a specific and positive essence of man as individual. Philosophy refuses this thesis for it only thinks the individual as a blend with another thing: with History, the individual is a historical being, with the World, the individual is an empirical, worldly being with language…I strove to liberate the individual outside of the subjection where philosophy placed him, a subjection under the universal or even, in the best of cases – Nietzsche – subjection as universal. I would say in a general way that philosophy cannot think the individual, that man is in fact distinct from the superhuman. Obviously, this leads to a sort of “dualist” thesis: there is man and there is the World with all of its attributes, its great characteristics: Language, Sex, etc. This “dualist” thesis is profoundly contrary to all of philosophy.
J.-D. W.: The subtitle to A Biography is “On Authorities and Minorities.” But it does not seem to be a question here of “minorities” such that we understand them in the discourse of the “Philosophies of Difference”: you give to these concepts another content.
F.L.: I had to forge a vocabulary to make this thought of the individual. First, “individual” and not “individuel.” The term “individual,” which does not exist in language except under the form of “individuality,” indicates that the individual, without constituting himself – this would be a philosophical thesis still – is only what he is insofar as he enjoys [jouit] non-decisionally (of) himself. I don’t want to designate through this a sensible jouissance, or in such a way that psychoanalysis could think it, but that there is an irreducible structure of the individual which resides in this absolute, immediate coincidence with himself: a coincidence that he lives as inherence (to) oneself or wherein he is the lived experience. It is not a coincidence exterior to himself. I call this coincidence (with) oneself, with a Sartrian term, the non-thetic experience (of) oneself since what makes the individual is not at all a consciousness but the fact that at a certain point from himself – from where he is nothing but individual – man “receives” himself as man and does not belong to a universal other than him. These structures of non-thetic experience (of) oneself mean that the subject does not exit from themselves to be themselves, the subject does not have to alienate themselves in a Becoming, in a History, in the World…in order to be what they are. To think this non-alienation of man, I had to refer myself to this concept, to this experience that philosophy has always claimed but to which it has never done justice: the One. I therefore reintroduced, against the philosophical primacy of Being, a thought of the One. The One is indeed this structure of non-thetic experience (of) oneself, “unreflected” experience, for it has no need of reflection, it has no need of distancing in relation to oneself to be what it is. “Minoritarian” is the second term that I had to introduce. The point was to recast this concept against its recent uses which are always, as the tradition wants, the correlation or even the opposition to the majoritarian. I take “minoritarian” in an absolutely positive sense, the very possibility that the individual exists as an individual, and that the multiplicities of individuals only exist in the state of multiplicities which are no longer thinkable through a horizon of universality.
The third term, one that is more curious, is “statist-minoritarian.” I distinguished strictly-speaking minorities and statist minorities. By “statist-minoritarian” I designate the philosophical and contemporary concept of minorities. For me, the concept restrains minorities, what we find for example in Deleuze. I wanted to indicate by this that these minorities such that philosophy could, in the best of cases, conceive them are not as radical as they could be, but form “mixtures” with the State and should not only diverge but fuse, converge along with the State or with Society. Here, such that I understand the concept, minoritarians exist from themselves or by themselves before the State does not come, in some sort, to legislate over them and to reinsert them into the process of power, while philosophical minorities are minorities of the State (this formula is so curious and paradoxical) in this sense that their ultimate horizon is to fuse with it or to replace it. Of course, they cannot replace the State or fuse with it only on condition of transforming it, but the auto-positional instance [or authority, instance] of the State, Universality, and Unity despite everything and definitively subsists.
Finally, the last term: “Authorities.” It is an old concept from the political and moral tradition which has been forgotten by philosophy. I take it up here to designate the universal structures under which philosophy has always replaced man. It interested me by the accent that it would allow to place onto an active, author, agent subject. The individuals, such that I conceive them, are not “agents” in the modern sense of the term, in this sense that their goal is not of becoming oneself by acting on the State, Sexuality, Language, and the World; their essence is rigorously passive although there is still a lot to speak on the nature of this passivity which is radically deprived of activity.
J.-D. W: You speak of science, and a “rigorous science of man,” against the human sciences.
F.L.: The philosophers have a beautiful game of denouncing the poverty of the “human sciences,” you know that it is an interminable combat and, I fear, a fratricidal combat. Philosophers do not see that this poverty of the human sciences is sometimes theirs and that the philosophical poverty of Western man has delivered him to this activity of butchering that characterizes the human sciences. I care deeply for a formula from which Biography elsewhere begins and says: “The sciences of man are not of the sciences and do not have man for an object.” I oppose to them two things simultaneously: on the one hand, they are deprived of theoretical rigor, and on the other hand, deprived of humanity. At bottom, the interest of this objection is that we must find the same reason in the absence of theoretical rigor and humanity. For reasons in which we spoke of earlier, I identify “man” and “cause (of) science.” This means that man is himself only when he is reduced to the most immanent givens which are the heart, the kernel of all science. The conditions so that there would be an individual are the same as those for there to be a possible science. I had not seen the identity of these conditions for reasons of philosophical context and it is the movement which I had to carry out: to pass from an impossible philosophy of the individual to a science of man as individual. Inversely, a science theoretically grounded on man is possible, and I will add a science which accepts conserving, preserving, really postulating man without destroying him, without wanting to transform him in the very operation of knowing him. It is absolutely characteristic of philosophical knowing that every knowledge of an object would be at the same time a transformation of the object. This is a nearly invariant trait for all philosophy, but not for science: science’s problem is to know a real that it does not transform in the very operation of transforming the objects of knowledge. It is possible on this basis to give the individual as the real object to a science and to ground it in this object. A science of man will have for an object an individual who will be real since they are posed as an irreducible reality, while the human sciences are not interested in man himself, but interested in man under his attributes which divide him: man as a speaking being, a sexed being, a social being, an economic being…The project of this rigorous science of man is only interested in what makes an individual as an individual. It will describe the relations of man and the World (History, Economy, Language…) by taking as a guiding thread the autonomy of the individual, the fact that he would be “undivided” quite simply. I only did that to return not to language but to what is suggested, by the language, of the individual, namely that the individual is a reality absolutely indivisible by all operations of philosophy.
The rigor of this science will be grounded in the very reality of its object which is not a psychological reality, for the interiority which appears characteristic to me of man is not psychological and utterly exterior. Rather, we must call it “transcendental.” All will discover the reality of this starting point: what I call Ordinary “Mysticism” and “Practice” are simply the great possible descriptions of man to the World: in accordance with this starting point and this presupposed that the individual exists and that he is distinct from the World. From there results certain characteristics of the individual that we are obligated to describe scientifically.
J.-D. W: For some time now theory seems to be more than compromised?
F.L.: Theory is only compromised in those who immediately and without knowing it, in even believing the contrary, were already foreign to theory: I mean the philosophers. Philosophy is a practical activity which certainly aims for the essence of practice – not practice in the very obvious ordinary sense of the term – but a practical activity with some theoretical sides or aspects. I believe that, for substantive reasons, philosophy ignores the reality of “theoria” even though it has spoken about “theoria” a lot, and in particular in the Greeks, of “theoria” and contemplation.
Ignoring the reality of “theoria,” philosophy ignores the possibility of describing phenomena, the absolutely immanent givens, which we can seize in a perfectly rigorous way and which are contained in the essence of the individual. Theory is not compromised today particularly. Realistically, it has always been since there’s been philosophy. Theory and science are imposed against each other in the latter and against its Samaritan care. For example, the “Nietzscheans” believed they could pose the equation “theory-terrorism,” indeed “theorrorism” and could only do it through philosophical terrorism, its lack of theory.
J.-D. W.: You spoke earlier of “humanity.” One can reproach you for being a “theologian,” what about being a “humanist”?
F.L.: In other words, because I return to the subject, I reinstall the subject in his rights after the undertow that seemed to have brought in the wake of structuralism? No, if the subject must be installed or posed again. The subject can only be one by philosophy, and this is not my object. The point is not to return to ontology, to the position of the subject, for I take for granted the struggle of contemporary philosophers against the ontology of subjectivity. Yes, the point is to return to the subject if precisely he has been lacked, and I will say systematically falsified, by philosophy, to return to the essence of the subject insofar as it implies that man or the individual has never been “posed.” It is why I say that the “subject” has a non-positional or non-thetic structure (of) oneself. He does not appear in the horizon of a universal, in the same way that the authentic subject escapes from philosophy. What I describe is a subject-without-philosophy, a man-without-anthropology and without-humanism. Philosophy, anthropology, humanism – the latter two being by-products of philosophy – are universal attributes which do not allow, once and for all, to seize the subject themselves. Consequently, the subject is not at the center of themselves. One cannot say that it would be a question of a return to a sort of “centrality,” a psychological or philosophical interiority of man. I try to think outside of all centrality and all logocentrism; the subject is not a center, he is not even at the center of the World, I refuse the Copernican Revolution. The Kantian version of subjectivity, which says that man would only be himself by being at the center of the World and by constituting all of his periphery, must be abandoned with philosophy. The subject such that I imagine it cannot turn the things around him, in particular the objects: the subject is a subject-without-object, and I speak of human solitudes. The subject certainly has an encounter with the World, but the World does not constitute the influencing sphere of the subject. That said, it is rather something exteriorly like a rehabilitation of man, an effort to struggle against his denigration by philosophy, against the anthropological and recuperative solutions, etc. But when one has torn the individual from the authority of philosophy, one is obligated to tear from philosophy all of the activities which belong to man, and in particular science and technology, but also experiences of the “mystical” type. It is to in over in some sort the philosophical ocean which we must rather call new earths: they are human earths, but not anthropological ones.
J.-D. W.: So, what remains of philosophy?
F.L.: Philosophy remains an enormous, a genial power of speculation and fiction. The other component of this research is, once that we have denied philosophy the right to legislate over the real and to know the individual, the exploitation of its fictional possibilities.
J.-D. W.: Let’s return to terminology. You reintroduce a Marxist concept, “the determination in the last instance,” and you create another, “unilateralization.” What are their relations?
F.L.: Once we have acquired a new object, we must elaborate a method of a new thought conforming to the object. This concept “determination in the last instance” or “unilateralization” immediately results from the nature of the individual such that I suppose it. Thereby a rapid parallel with philosophy: how can one think in general when one is a philosopher? Above all, one thinks through a unity of contraries, and it is not necessary to be a Hegelian for this. All philosophers always work within “dualities” and contrary couplets by imagining a reciprocity or a reversibility from one contrary to the other, by variating it more or less. One can take, for example, outside of the Hegelian dialectic, the unity of the day and night in Heraclitus: what one must think is not the day, not the night, nor even their simple opposition, contradiction, or exclusion, but one must think the day-night. In Nietzsche or Heidegger, one must think being and appearing together, being and the having-to-be, the signified and the signifier, but never thinking a term separated from the other. I call this method, which always has two terms but only in view of their unity, “unitary.” Therefore, I oppose the concept of the unitary [unitaire] to the minoritarian [or minoritary, minoritaire]. In opposition to the unitary, the other method is a method of the “dualyzation” of contraries. In every coupling of philosophical terms, I try to accentuate the dissociation, dehiscence of one term in relation to the other, but without resorting to the motif, classical in philosophy and above all contemporary, of alterity, for in alterity you have two terms, A and B: B represents every possible alterity in relation to A, but B still has need of A in a certain way, and A above all in any case has need of B. Rather, my problem was of finding a way of thinking such that we can uniquely think terms outside of their very relation, outside of their unity and utterly their totality, by placing between them a sort of “relation” of causality but one that does not any longer go from A towards B, then from B towards A, but which uniquely goes from A towards B; to discover a form of nonreversible and nevertheless nonmechanical causality, a form of order which would be rigorously irreversible, a relation of unilateralization or yet a determination in the last instance. I had to indeed reprise, to my great surprise, this concept. It seems to me that Marxism had a very profound intuition, but to which materialism did not allow to give its full meaning. Determination in the last instance means that a certain instance which determines another is not in its turn determined by it. I do not believe that one can combine determination in the last instance and dialectical reaction. This global way of thinking other than the philosophical is, I believe, science. What I strive to now show is that science’s most general way of thinking is the determination in the last instance. It is not the dialectic proper to philosophy. This unilateralization is hardly a method, it is the very order that introduces the individual into the World and in relation to him by the sole fact of his existence. Thus, it is the order which immediately results from the real in the rigorous sense I intend for it: transcendental or immanent.
J.-D. W.: You wrote that by essence man is a “mystic” doomed to practice. What must we understand by this term, “mystic”?
F.L.: Yet here, the point is to save this experience of mysticism from its philosophical interpretation. Like science, but on one condition: in the same way that the point is to modify the image that the philosophers have given of science, the point is to modify the image that the theologians and the philosophers have given to this irreducible residue, to this mystical kernel that is not an extra-ordinary experience, but which, to the contrary, is confounded with the very reality of every individual insofar as an individual is rigorously interior (to) themselves or is the One. It is why I dissociated the mystical [le mystique] from mysticism [la mystique], returning mysticism to its religious and onto-theo-logical context, and minding the mystical to designate this non-decisional structure (of) oneself which characterizes the individual. From this point of view, the mystical is all at once the essence of the individual and the essence of science. Science is grounded on a non-decisional relation (to) the real which is what allows it to then assemble [agencer] representations (i.e., the abstract and the concrete, concepts and experimentations) in full certitude and full naivety.
J.-D. W.: Is science a mysticism?
F.L.: Of course, science is not a mysticism. Don’t make me say what I don’t want to say. But science can only work standing in some way against a mystical ground that philosophy hasn’t ceased from denying or denigrating in saying that science is a blind, deaf or mute thought: science does not speak, it dreams and does not think, as Plato and Heidegger say; or one says that science is an operative, technicist, naïve thought, see Husserl. This mystical kernel of reality that I call the One is both the foundation of the existence of the individual and science and explains the type of thought of this foundation.
Now there is another aspect of mysticism: the effect of the sufficiency of the individual or the One over the World. Necessarily, it is a question here of a sort of indifference, but in this way, I retrieve a very characteristic affect of mystical experience. The individual, taken as such of course, indifferenciates [indifférencie] his environment. Since, by definition, he exists in his essence without having need of these great attributes like sex, language…he will necessarily “swerve” [écarter] the world. Because of his very existence, he keeps the world away irreversibly or “unilaterally.” Having no need of them, he keeps them at a distance by this very fact. I call this swerving of everything the (non-)One – the parentheses are there to suggest that it is no longer the nothingness that the philosophers think with and from Being, but a subdued nothingness, the abyss which the absolute sufficiency of the individual is capable of indifference. The philosophers who have meditated too much on nothingness and non-being have barely meditated on this (non-)One and indifference, the fact that, for the individual, the World and all that it contains would be contingent or does not determine the individual in return.
Of course, there is something in the World which he experiences, I don’t deny that, but firstly we must – to think rigorously, by following a certain order of reasons or an order of thoughts rather – pose a sort of radical suspension of the World and all of its attributes, which equals to putting-the-World-in-place or making it appear in its first possible place. Through their indifference, the individual determines a place, the primitive or original place on the grounds of which something other can appear. The World can appear within the interior of this abyss of the (non-)One.
This is the first topos, what I call “the emplacement”: the first possible place, which puts it in place, and at the same time what puts it back in its place.
J.-D. W.: This mysticism is therefore damned to action, hence the second component: pragmatics.
F.L.: From the grounds of his solitude, since what makes the ground of the individual is his solitude and utterly his indifference to the World, the individual does not maintain but relations of indifference, an absence of a relation to the World which solicits him. Precisely, the World continues to solicit and wants to affect him. In the measure where the individual responds and where he intervenes consequently in the World, it is first to act on the World. Once we have posed the foundation of the autonomous individual, the One then the (non-)One, the only relation which subsists of man to the World is a relation of action [agir]. We must of course remodel this concept of acting [agir] and action [action]. Therefore, I have reprised here the motif of pragmatics, I have attempted to extract it from its linguistic enclosure and to generalize it for all of existence without falling into an attitude which would be that of pragmatism or even philosophical pragmatism. On the other hand, I attempted to ground pragmatics rigorously on “ordinary man.” The concept of the “ordinary” interests me partially not only because of its Anglo-Saxion use (a use partially turned against philosophy), but because it allows me to describe the essence of any possible man. I distinguish the mundane man [l’homme quelconque] and the ordinary man [l’homme ordinaire]: the mundane man is still an empirical determination of man, the ordinary man, as for him, returns to the essence of the individual insofar as it does not belong to the World. It is on the grounds of this indifference and as within the interior of what I have called the (non-)One that the individual acts on the World which, on its side, insists. For this insistence of the World, I forged the concept the non(-One), the parentheses here indicating that the World, vis-à-vis the One or the individual, is first held in a posture of denegation, repression, and that the “non” [or “no”], the ressentiment against the individual, is the first characteristic of the World and philosophy. It took a whole labour of elaboration, transformation and foundation to liberate the structures of this original and ordinary practice. It seems to me that for this acting, like the rest, philosophy has perhaps falsified some of the immediate givens that a rigorous description must retrieve. Indeed, I have resorted to describe this practice with two or three known notions, but by always seeking to transform them, to interpret them according to this non-thetic or unreflected essence of the individual.
For acting, it is a question of an activity which exercised not over such or such sector of experience or an object – this would belong to a description of the “human sciences” type – but on the World as such in its auto-position, on this exteriority or alterity which is announced under a violent form to man: denegation, a constraint exercised with the encounter of man. This acting is manifested under the form of a surge, a drive-over…, which consists in keeping the World at a distance. This drive records [enregistre] the existence of the World, while earlier in the mystical relation, there is even no recording of this existence, it is immediately rejected and “emplaced,” it floats in some sort in an abyss, while here man is damned to act because the World insists against him when encountering him: it is a struggle in which man can only attempt to drive back [repousser] the World in a principial [principielle] way. This “drive” has two very precise characteristics. It is not a “drive” in the psychoanalytic or unconscious sense of the term. The psychoanalytic drive is a drive which leaves itself, which is self-separated, that’s why it is unconscious, while the unconscious never acts at a distance from itself, it remains always near itself, it has the structure of the non-thetic; in other words, it is not alienated in the World. What’s more, it will never act on the World by objectivating or posing it. At the interior of the everyday experience of the World, when we act on things, most of the time we end by objectivating them, by posing them at a distance. Here, I call this drive transcendental because it comes from the very ground of the “subject” contenting themselves with driving back the World, from preventing the World from encroaching on the individual, but without placing it at the end of a distance in the interior of which one will see it appear. Action is not an alienation. It is very important when we describe, for example, technology or practice, that man is not alienated in acting: this is a thesis fundamentally contrary to philosophy and in particular Hegel’s philosophy. Therefore, I globally renounce this philosophical motif of scission, loss, to all of this miserabilism which wants man to be alienated in the World. Man is not alienated: he struggles against the World without leaving himself.
This action has a correlate, a finished product also strange to it.
J.-D. W.: What does this drive or original practice produce?
F.L.: It does not produce such or such particular work that’s not what I describe. It will produce a form of what I have called Transcendence-Non-Thetic (TNT, to abbreviate).[2] It liberates or makes an element surge outside of the blends or syntheses of the World which we have hitherto not perceived, the element of alterity. Yet this element of alterity here is pure, it is not blended with identity and with being. To have an idea of this Transcendence in general, we must – I say – “evoke” Lévinas, even there there is a difference between this Transcendence-Non-Thetic and the Other as the “Other-Man” [l’Autre comme «Autrui»]. By thinking how Levinas has described the Other, we can nevertheless get some idea. We make the experience of a simple, “in-itself” Other which is liberated in some way from the surface of the World, an experience which is not inserted into an identity, into a being or a horizon, and which does not form a blend, a “mixture” with them, even “wearing through” them: the Other itself. Philosophy has not succeeded in thinking more of the Other than the One precisely because it thought Being, the blend of the One and the Other. Philosophy is the art of mélange.
I believe that the discovery of a Non-Thetic Other in general, but itself given (to) the One, has great consequences for the theory of the philosophical decision, to know that it is precisely this blend par excellence, the philosophical decision, this game of contraries, but also has consequences for the theory of literature. Without being able to demonstrate it here, this TNT is a dimension of absolute alterity which, I believe, allows to take account of the very possibility of science-fiction. On the horizon of all of these investigations, there is the idea that the fictional and speculative potentialities of philosophy must be developed, that it is perhaps possible, not to negate philosophy, that’s not what I wanted to do, but to multiply in some sort its fictional power thanks to this TNT. The point is to attempt a new synthesis of this radical alterity with some procedures or schemata of philosophy. I cannot describe the thing, but I have named it to designate the concept of the thing. I call it “hyper-speculation,” or even “non-philosophy.”
It is a kind of philosophy-fiction which therefore consists in surmounting, one by the other, philosophical speculation and science-fiction, towards a form of speculation which would be capable of capitalizing in some sort the effects of the two. I think that we must remember that, for example in Kant, metaphysics is described as an illusion – in a certain way as a fiction. The project I develop here consists in radicalizing this Kantian critique and making philosophy, and not only metaphysics, appear this time as an activity of fiction. This would be the object of posterior investigations, and I hope not only to better comprehend how philosophy is possible for man as finite but what the intrinsically finite individual can do with philosophy once the individual has discovered that philosophy was nothing of a determinant for him, for his essence at least. This would be possible if one discovers the irreducibility, the positivity of this dimension of absolute alterity on which science-fiction constantly traffics [tire…une traite] but in naively utilizing, filling it with machines, monsters…
J.-D. W.: What about Alien!
F.L.: TNT is an “Alien,” a monster which absolutely has no face, an alterity rigorously without a face. However, my project is not summed up in enriching science-fiction through metaphysical speculation and reciprocally. This has begun to be attempted in the USA through what one calls “Speculative Fiction” …
J.-D. W.: Can ordinary man be caught in the game, even if it means giving rise to an “extra-ordinary man” following him at some time? Isn’t ordinary man on the way to becoming an “authority”?
F.L.: Obviously, but everything depends on the type of reading that one makes. For philosophy, there is no doubt that I am in the posture of an “authority.” It’s a necessary image for philosophy to only imagine you in this posture: “its business,” not mine. But if one reads me like I describe, in the point of view in which I set out to describe…Apparently, I seek an “unthinkable” for philosophy. This unthinkable is the One and then the duality of the One and the World which ensues: unilateralization. Nevertheless, this way of presenting things is not the right one, I do not seek an “unthinkable” for philosophy, which would be a philosophical posture, but I install myself from the outset in the interior of a certain given, under certain conditions which seem to be conditions more specific for science than philosophy and I describe when ensues for philosophy. Generally, my way of doing is not at all the “revolution,” the “revolutionary style,” for “revolution” is a philosophical object, it is an overthrow [renversement], sometimes a displacement. I prefer Heresy. Heresy is the radical break but insofar as it emanates multiple individuals. There are multiple individuals on one side, there are the “Churches” and the “States” on the other. And yet this formula is still insufficient, barely heretical and too philosophical. Multiple individuals are not on one side and the World on the other, the individuals do not form a side: there is only one side, the World. This is precisely another meaning, a more subtle one for the term “unilaterality”: there is only one side. Philosophy always thinks with two sides, I have tried to simplify the way of thinking by thinking with only one side.
My project is not to introduce “heretical” experience into philosophy, but to introduce philosophy to heretical experience. From there, an interest as well which I do not at all hide for the Gnostics, the dualists, the heretics, the millenarians, the “fanatics,” all of those individuals who fundamentally protest from their individuality against philosophy, rather than on philosophy’s margins.
[1] Aubier. [All notes are Laruelle’s if otherwise noted. – TN]
[2] In other texts, this would be translated properly as non-thetic transcendence, but I have tried to retain the destructive force of what follows with the development of this TNT. – TN
en-demic 
2 Comments