Why Not Philosophy?
François Laruelle
In “Théorie de la Décision philosophique,” Pourquoi pas la philosophie 3 (February 1984), p.32-35.
What we call the theory of the Philosophical Decision is the order of thoughts which relates it to its transcendental truth, namely to its ultimate condition in the One and, hence, its other conditions which are those of the dual, then of dualism. To find something like a Philosophical Decision, we must first have renounced philosophically deciding on philosophy and to make of philosophy an act of self-mastery-of-the-real, the original legislating principle over-itself-over-the-real. Philosophy is not at the beginning. It is not an initial beginning (Beginn) nor is it called a commencement (An-fang), namely what would leap in the leap (Satz) from a principle (Grundsatz): philosophy is rather “at the end,” if one can still express it in this way, because the irreversible order of the dualist economy excludes any unitary, teleological and recurrent process. Philosophy supposes before it the real of the One and the effectivity of the events of the world, sciences, and technics, etc. … Philosophy has ceased from being first (prima philosophia) and ceases from inhibiting itself in what succeeds it and what it contributes in producing. Because it is a consequence or an effect (but a necessary, structural effect), philosophy is henceforth not only an activity of the production of possibles, a philosophy-fiction in the radical sense of the word, but a definitive, ultimate activity after which there is no longer anything to come recover, capture and limit it: probably a simulation (of the real) which suffices as a simulation for itself.
For us, the unitary knot of the One and philosophy therefore seems possible to cut. Philosophy is determined, it does not determine itself and therefore does not determine the real. This is the condition so that the Philosophical Decision ceases from being under-determined and compensates this insufficiency by its overdetermination and activism, so that it would be finally fully and through-and-through determined: to give place to the real to also give place to philosophy.
A “determination in the last instance” allows one to liberate the Philosophical Decision which is also real and also undecidable, but not in a relation from oneself to another, from itself to itself, from one blend of itself and its essence. One such blend with the Undecidable is what would lead the unitary paradigm to its double inhibition. We open philosophy to a specific space where it is free, but where it is limited, too, but without being impeded by these limits, without impeding itself in itself, since these two limits (otherwise very heterogeneous ones: the real and effectivity) precede it. It is perhaps better to walk straight against the winds of the future [futur] than it is to go backwards from what’s to come [entrer à reculons dans l’avenir] or only going straight into the past. The real is no longer limited by the possibilities of philosophy, nor otherwise by effectivity (we will never say enough how, under pretext of “critique,” philosophy is a simple braking operation that is quite reactionary and suicidal; each pull of the philosophical brake over the sciences, technics, etc. … is also for each of them an accelerative blow: it is how philosophy stays put). Correlatively, the Philosophical Decision is no longer hindered by its effects or works. Instead of a simple critical distinction of domains, à la Kantian distinction, which implies reciprocal delimitations, a whole economy which turns to exchanges, negotiations, and soon enough to interminable conflicting relations of mutual debtors and creditors – here, we place between the real and philosophy a rigorously unilateral, and not solely semi-unilateral and reversible, distinction: a dualization, a “dualysis” of philosophy.
The Philosophical Decision is just undecidable by its essence: for what remains, it does not inhibit itself in its own products nor in this produce par excellence which is the absence of any product, the work = 0 as tendency of a lower yield. It is the possible free from any effectivity and, as much as possible, it knows itself in a sense or in its order to be as real as science, technology, politics, etc. … By no longer claiming to legislate on the real, philosophy makes itself free for other more inventive tasks. This divorce, de jure anterior to its coupling with the real and the world too, no doubt deprives it from its favorite operations: critique, superseding and surmounting, interiorizing, turning, destruction and deconstruction, therapeutics, care and concern. Yet, it is in this way that it becomes “real” as much as it can be in its order. By being half-samaritan, half-pharisee, unitary philosophy has distilled the pharmakon of auto-and-hetero-critique without being able nor wanting to go towards the only positive critique: a derealization of the Philosophical Decision, its absolute dependency with regard to an unreflected or undecidable lived experience. Derealization is not nihilism by which the unitary Philosophical Decision is infected (of) itself. The One “in itself” or the unreflected One did not draw itself out from bloodless philosophy, abandoned by the shores of the world; the One did not produce the possible or non-thetic Transcendence by withdrawing in itself. This operation is excluded by its essence, and the possible, on its side, is sufficient, absolute in its order, such that it is “deprived” of any power of position, unification, synthesis, etc. … where it would come to re-inscribe itself.
“Why not philosophy?”: philosophy is not, no longer, has never perhaps been really necessary; not so for our experience of the world, history, the sciences, where philosophy is co-constituent, and where it massively intervenes. Yet does the real exhaust itself in philosophical work and operation, or is the Philosophical Decision immediately de-classed, dis-placed, rendered without pertinence, by an authority [instance] that it would have denied to establish itself under its unitary, operative, agnostic form? “Why not philosophy?” means that the passage to philosophy is always undoubtedly possible, even necessary from history, the sciences, the world, but that it is no longer necessary “in itself,” that the passage takes place on the grounds of a radical contingency of the Philosophical Decision in relation to the genuine real. One such question assumes that we have abandoned philosophy’s perspective over itself, that we renounce, for example, a decision of this type, “no to philosophy!”, which is always somewhat voluntaristic, dominative, affirmative, very unitary and very classical, and that one will strive to judge philosophy heteronomously (the true critique) but, simultaneously, immanently (the true affirmation: the affirmation of the real, not of effectivity) – and the latter is not opposed to the former…
The expression “minoritarian philosophy” is therefore ambiguous and must be rigorously challenged. It leaves one thinking that minorities crept into where unity reigned, that one has introduced the concept of minority into philosophy in the (hardly displaced and interrogated) place of unity. Minorities are no more the object (there will be a philosophy of minorities as there is a philosophy of language, a philosophy of the sciences, a philosophy of technics, etc. …) than they are the subject of another way of philosophizing. We are not sure that it needs to be first and over all another way of philosophizing, a minoritarian style rather than a unitary style. There is rather a minoritarian paradigm of philosophy, but there is no minoritarian philosophy. There is an absolute displacement of the philosophical operation, literally an irreversible de-duction and derivation of it. At such a point that this project is not to retrieve dualism in philosophy (unitary philosophy: dualism exists in Plato, Kant, etc. …), but, rather, philosophy as dualism, the Philosophical Decision as the proof of dualism, the proof of the duality of the “real.”
For the same reason, the point is not of a philosophy of the One, indeed a “first philosophy,” since the One is what displaces, it is the very dis-placement of philosophy or, more exactly, the One is what, through its own existence, condemns philosophy to being displaced. The One is the real condition of philosophy, but not reciprocally so. Philosophy acts in/as the world and history, but we here refuse to conclude with it from its effectivity towards its real essence, its real condition (the One) of possibility (non-thetic Decision, the possible that is non-positional (of) itself).
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