Philosophy, the Child of Man
François Laruelle
In Pourquoi pas la philosophie 3 (February 1984), p.68-70.
No more than a god can a philosophy save us. The real alone can save philosophy from its bogging down within effectivity. Only a philosophy without transcendence – at least in the “first principle” or within its real foundation – can save us from these dominant philosophies which only or principally use transcendence without thinking its real essence. The point is not to “exit” from the circle or the mixture of Difference-as-decision. The point is that we’ve never entered the circle. There is no refusal or a priori defense from entering – even before the circle and its mitigation in difference not presenting itself. The point is to be a philosopher before the Greeks, to be a philosopher not since the Greek beginning or opening.
The minoritarian and dualist paradigm (and: there was a dominant non-minoritarian dualism of the religious gnoses) authorizes us – without fear, without having to render interminable accounts to the “unitary” philosophers who want to prevent us from speaking and thinking, whose first gesture is to inhibit and limit – to dissociate the Philosophical Decision from all of its effective conditions, to radically distinguish the orders of the real: the One (as “unary” or “minoritarian” rather than as Unity or “unitary”); the possible (the Decision without project, opening-without-the-open, etc. …), and the effective. The Decision, since it is grounded in the last instance in the One, is no longer confounded with the decisional, the decisive, the voluntary, which form a system with the institutional and the effective. We cannot conclude from the mixture on the One, from effectivity on reality, from existence on essence. What we must “oppose” to the Heideggerian style of withdrawal, the retroceding step and to any “operation” of a relative-absolute regress, is an immediately absolute resistance. The Philosophical Decision draws its reality in the last instance in an unreflected lived experience which, on its side, is not confounded with it but gives the Philosophical Decision (which gives to the possible) this rigor of a priori resistance or defense which would precede against what it would have to defend itself from. This is the only means to cease from making philosophy a simple reaction of defense relative to what it defends itself against – this is still the case for Heidegger and even, though in a lesser degree, for Nietzsche – against Science, Technics, and Politics. It is to cease from making a critique or a mitigated and deferred form of the critique, a mode of vigilance, a step backwards, retrocession in relation to… – all of the modes of a defensive which forms a vicious circle, compromising with effectivity. As the possible determined in the last instance by the One, Decision is an absolute a priori which no longer owes anything – in its essence at least – to the effectivity of the History of Philosophy that, therefore, is no longer appropriate to treat here as an adversary in a “critical” will.
The Philosophical Decision cannot resolve the paradox of being an a priori or absolute defense, even before what contaminates or poisons it, only if it obviously grounds itself in the real as One. The determination in the last instance of philosophy by the non-effective real is the same thing as its absolute withdrawal not “in the face of” but “before” its history, a withdrawal grounded in a separation specific to the One, and which holds it separated in its turn from its history where it has movement, but no life or existence. This absolute – unilateral, but not abstract – separation of the One is the “dual” moment in “dualism.” It does not suffice in exhausting the determinations of the Decision, but it is its “principal” determination, what renders philosophy anew as “possible” – rather, real – against its bogging down in its historico-systematic conditions.
We finally know why we philosophize. We know it perhaps in a simply unreflected, un-objective way, but we know it from a knowledge or a gnosis which is our very life, our most intimate subjectivity as man rather than as a philosopher. Every philosophy – the dominant-unitary, for example – is not “human” in an absolutely subjective sense, in the sense of Decision as unreflected affect, but it is perhaps now a “task” to render philosophy subjective and to do so as “man.”[1] Even if otherwise – henceforth the otherwise or transcendence also has a rigorously grounded status “in the face” of the One – the Philosophical Decision is massively invested with political, sexual, religious, juridical determinations, etc. … the Philosophical Decision remains foreign by its essence to this “scene,” these “scenes” – the societal or familial theatre: the child of Man – who is foreign to the scenes of the family. Philosophy knows (itself) in the form of a knowledge (of) itself which is never separated from itself, and which, consequently, is separated from everything else. It is a separated knowledge, yes, but separated from any separation from itself, from any alienation. Philosophy is the child of Man, and like Man (though on another mode), philosophy is unengendered.
[1] Cf. the next issue: The Philosopher Without Qualities.
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