Opening Address
François Laruelle
In En tant qu’un: la «non-philosophie» expliquée aux philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p.9-13.
It’s customary for philosophers to address themselves to all men. Here, it’s through a reversal, whose meanings and limits we shall explain: men, every man, addresses themselves to philosophers in the hope of making them understand another posture of thought. We must explain these two points.
Philosophers are thus accustomed to speak to men and put themselves in their place: at least their discourse is punctuated by these universal “indicators.” The texts gathered here explain – after some other texts but with new reasons – why we no longer believe in these declarations of universality. Rather, we believe that their declarations only address the philosophers themselves. We don’t talk about their “jargon” and private language – this argument belongs to the philistines or the lazy, although perhaps it’s a symptom of philosopher’s fundamental self-care – but rather this self-care which makes up the whole of philosophy, what we call “philo-centrism” or “sufficient philosophy.” We don’t believe in this universal interest because the philosophers have the strange habit and authoritarian claim to ask men to change themselves and to only become what they are [devenir hommes], as much as they become philosophers in their turn.
It is with this unitary claim that we oppose another way of thinking called “non-philosophy,” a way that we suggest belongs to every man insofar as philosophy no longer defines them, that man no longer has to become a philosopher, but that man experiences themselves [s’éprouve] in their ultimate and radical humanity, lived on a mode where their humanity is absolutely given: where man is nothing-but-man. From our perspective, this posture makes man the cause of science rather than the subject of philosophy. “Ordinary man” is certainly not this every day or common being of a bad sociology or “existential” philosophy. Ordinary man is man reduced to their essence, through which they make science possible rather than letting themselves be determined and subjugated by philosophy. This explains why the texts published here borrow the path inverse to the philosophers’ and are addressed to them and, secondarily, to scientists: the texts are already compromised by a more or less spontaneous philosophy, or, contrarily, they have a first awareness of the impossible dialogue between the sciences and philosophy and find themselves affected by it.
The philosophers’ principal objection to non-philosophy is not of a theoretical nature – rarely reaching this level – but pedagogical: the access to this way of thinking would be difficult, its comprehension impossible. Their objection isn’t concerned with a deficient argument but of the claim to replace the only universal, philosophy, with a precisely “non-philosophical” and, so they say, unintelligible thought. In a sense, we couldn’t be fairer – in the way in which it’s just a symptom: the philosophers haven’t yet perceived the reason behind the resistance that mobilizes them, for it is this resistance that concerns us. In their defense, it’s certainly one thing to want, like Husserl for example, to introduce philosophy and science to each other, to bring the latter into the former, but by utterly conserving the dominant means of philosophy, its operations (reduction, analytic, etc.) and its essential claims over the real. And it’s certainly an entirely other thing than wanting, as it is here, to construct a transcendental science which would be a true science and no longer a philosophy-as-science, which therefore claims to substitute itself for philosophy, using other operations, strictly scientific ones (induction and experimentation, deduction and axiomatics) over philosophical concepts and natural language – to make a non-philosophical use of philosophy. It’s inevitable that philosophers no longer recognize themselves here, that they’ll protest and say that all of this is simply incomprehensible or, for the most “textual” among them, “unreadable.” They’ll recognize that this concept of science is either unbelievable or untraceable on the map of the “institutional” sciences employed by the State, etc.
Obviously, there’s no misunderstanding on one precise point. The philosophers have perfectly understood what interests them first and foremost in this project: the end of their claims over the real – the unity of man and science – and the reduction of the philosophical bricolage to the state of simple material for a more rigorous, more overt thought. The philosophers have understood so well what it means for them that, all by protesting their incapacity to enter this way of thinking, condemn non-philosophy by using the panoply of ordinary falsifications: non-philosophy would be about a new positivism, a new dogmatism, a new scientism, a new Marxism, a new “death of philosophy,” etc. We know well enough that this word “new” means “old” and “return to…” in the philosophers’ mouths, and it is through this that they try to make everything that claims to free themselves from philosophy fall back in line because like any other order, the philosophical order is decidedly not good to want to escape from, to go out and breathe a less confined air…
It is through another way that we have no reason to complain about this resistance which has its sufficient and well-founded reasons. We impose upon Philosophy-with-a-capital-P [la philosophie] – not only one determined philosophical position – a “crucial experimentation,” a test that pushes it towards its last entrenchments, put to the test of a scientific “falsification,” but one which, far from being local, is here done by “science as such” or “science itself.” What we have called a “science of philosophy” or, more precisely, a “science of the One by the means of philosophy,” or again a “non-philosophy,” is a sheer power of thought that is more universal and theoretically more rigorous than philosophy, a sheer power of thought that the philosophers can neither perceive nor correctly identify but what they can at most repress. It’s why their protestations are important to us as a very particular possession [titre]: we are not concerned with the conflict of philosophical positions, nor even a problem of rigor in argumentation, but the affect, the wound and denial, as if philosophy would seriously encounter for the first time something like its psychoanalysis, or as the equivalent of its “analysis” and should invent other forms of eschewal. The conflict of philosophy with psychoanalysis, and even further its conflict with Judaism, is the secret spring of the whole history of 20th century philosophy. However, this conflict could have ended or could have been superseded on the theoretical plane through a conflict of a more crucial, more-than-conflictual conflict, marked by the fundamental inequality of two adversaries. It is an inequality of philosophy with a science which makes it unequal in combat precisely because science unbinds the love for combat and the desire to institute its relation with science as conflictual within philosophy. A science does not fight with its object and we maintain no conflict of positions with philosophy-as-the-conflict-of-positions. It is with a non-philosophical intellect that we treat philosophy with the same “indifference” that any such science treats phenomena through the means that it knows the real. In a sense, we also let the philosophical objections go towards their fate without worrying about these effects of resistance that we don’t claim to eliminate, no more in others than in ourselves where they have necessarily lived a long time.
However, the same reason that produces these effects forces us to try to destroy them in a specific sense of this word: not in the head of the philosopher as such where they are reborn without fail, but in the head of man who is necessarily first the philosopher – this is our “Rousseauism.” The reason is the following: philosophy here subsists at any rate as our “simple object,” and it represents our “phenomena,” the “objective givens” or the data of the region of the real that we study. And even if a resistance is de jure included within the relation of this science to philosophy and here makes a part of the relation of knowledge, the establishment and development of this relation implies that it is defeated and, at the very least, limited. To be more exact: the relation is isolated and quartered [cantonnée] in the only philosophical position that any man is virtually obligated to assume but which now no longer occupies man entirely, henceforth deprived of its spontaneous claim over man and affected by contingency. Here, the gathered texts of presentation, explanation or defense don’t claim more than this localization of philosophical resistance…the resistance of philosophy alone. The texts do not claim to integrally “conquer” the philosophers as if in a new school or “position,” but helps put them also in a scientific and new relation or posture to their own philosophy, a posture through which they would perhaps better get a hold of their necessary resistance over themselves.
en-demic 