Translation of François Laruelle, “Theses on the Philosopher Without Qualities,” from Pourquoi pas la philosophie 4 (1984)

“Theses on the Philosopher Without Qualities”
François Laruelle
From Pourquoi pas la philosophie 4 (1984), “Le philosophe sans qualités,” p.82-85 [NB: Originally titled “Thèses d’ensemble”]

1) The People, genuine Minorities, do not let themselves be located on the surface of society or history, neither in their margins nor interstices. They are immediate givens, not philosophical constructions. The People are the real itself in the name of whom one must lead the critique of philosophy.

2) This is finally an entirely positive and sufficient concept of people or Minorities who are no longer a by-product of Philosophy or the Nation, the State, Culture, Language, Sex: the great universals.

3) The People are the real before philosophy, Minorities are the real before the State. We must no longer think the People in the mesh of philosophy, but philosophy as integrally determined by the People, nor to think Minorities as taken in exchanges with the State, as integrated in a unitary economy, but the State as determined by Minorities.

4) Above all, the point is not to introduce the concept of the People (that’s already done) or minority (that’s already done) into philosophy, nor of mutually introducing philosophy and the people to each other, but only to introduce philosophy to minoritarian experience.

5) The People thus experienced have no need of philosophy to be real, nor have no need of pedagogy to be introduced to philosophy and to negotiate this introduction. The blend of “popular philosophy” or demo-logical difference is dissolved. There is only popular philosophy, even as sought, in the unitary model of philosophizing, but not in the minoritarian model…There is no conversion of the People towards philosophy, nor otherwise the conversion of philosophy towards the People.

6) The real critique of philosophy is not done by philosophy, and it is not even a “critique,” or it is one solely because it is first another thing: the real itself, rather than another thing.

7) Rather than a popular philosopher, the philosopher who is determined by the People thus defined is a “philosopher without qualities.” There is no “plebeian philosopher”: this term is bound to the complex and unitary horizon (Ballanche, Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault).

8) Philosophy has hitherto claimed to determine – either by interpreting them or by transforming them – the World and, hence, the Individual. Philosophy must now accept distinguishing the World and the Individual, to determine the World but to let itself be determined by the Individual.

9) The “Minoritarian” Multitudes, the People in their real transcendental essence, are the determination in the last instance of the Philosophical Decision.

10) As Determination in the last instance, the People do not have “to make philosophy.” They have to determine it, to be its real condition (of possibility) but in the last instance alone, or to produce the radical contingency of the Philosophical Decision as the (non-)One.

11) Philosophy must be made by all but precisely not made by the People. This paradox is explained if the People are seized in their essence as the “beyond” of “all,” “beyond” the “whole,” the “beyond” of unitary totalities in general. It is even because the People do not make philosophy that philosophy can be made by “all.”

12) Plato was right: never will the multitude be philosophers. But he was right without knowing it and for a bad reason: because of Reason. The multitude are not philosophers because the philosophers could exclude them from philosophy (to include them, to pedagogically negotiate this inclusion, etc. …), but because they have no need in their essence for philosophy. It is not philosophy which is at the heart of man (the natural interest of Reason for itself, etc. …), it is man who is at the heart of philosophy.

13) It is not the philosophers who determine philosophy in the last instance – as the unitary paradigm would accept with rigor – it is the pre-philosophical individual who determines the philosophizing-philosophized or lived-categorial blends. The Multitude is the real condition (of possibility) of philosophy, not its condition of “real possibility.”

14) The People, experienced on a minoritarian mode [minoritairement], are at the heart of philosophy, but this does not – contrarily – mean that they would be a “stake” for philosophy or that they would be the “stake” of the conflicts of philosophy with the philosophers.

15) There is a radical or finite humanity of philosophy in each of us, but philosophy does not inversely belong to the definition of the essence of humanity. Philosophy is radically subjective, but it is unimportant for subjectivity.

16) The scandal of a “minoritarian” philosophy holds everything together in the fact that the People do not fall under philosophy and that, for this reason, the People are capable of determining – but in the last instance alone – the Philosophical Decision. Philosophy is “minoritarian” because there is no “philosophy of Minorities.”

17) All of these previous theses give the meaning of this one: philosophy is the child of man.