The Evil-of-Philosophizing [Le mal-philosopher]
François Laruelle
From Pourquoi pas la philosophie? 2 (October 1983), p.53-54.
We know the symptoms of the internal evil that destroys dominant philosophy and its unitary will bit by bit: the growing primacy of the historicity of philosophy over the Philosophical Decision itself and, hence, the rise in power of the institutional constraints within the very interior of philosophy. The History of Philosophy [HP] is henceforth the unique legislative authority [instance] that provides the codes of receivability of philosophical statements. Not only has the HP become a basic philosophy for the use of the mundane student, a democratically distributed cultural alphabet, but it is also what induces a growing philosophical illiteracy. The HP has become the tribunal of philosophy. This hegemony of the HP is the symptom and expression as much as the cause of a general evil-of-philosophizing. By this, we understand the conjunction of a growing indifferentism in terms [en matière] of philosophy with an unbridled and complementary consumption of this matter [de cette matière]: a “whole-philosophy.”
Concerning this evil-of-philosophizing, it is useless to accuse the precise institutional forms of teaching and the seeking out of palliatives in new more open and mobile institutions: evil is the essence and in the long range, beyond the opposed political uses of philosophy. This is why it begins to merely become visible. Evil makes a system with the mode of dominant philosophizing in the West and whose essential trait is to be unitary.
For the last time, do you want an example – just an example – of this unitary or dominant style? For the individual, they don’t get their essence from themselves. They get it from philosophy, from its intellectual and transcendent operations, as much as from themselves. This means that the individual does not at all get their essence from themselves – the individual is torn up, animated by a rabid [farrouche] will to unity, self-domination and violence and the individual is someone who uses philosophy like a weapon. Man is the supposedly philosophizing animal: man is not an autonomous individual before philosophy, one who draws their life from themselves without needing the good services of the divine matchmaker. No: man is a mixture, a blend who can only get to their essence from what they are supposed to be alienated through a process of continuous identification with it and, consequently, with philosophy who alone can teach man what the essence is. Philosophy, as the pedagogy of the essence that I am without yet being it, is the abduction and violation of individuals to which Greco-unitary thought has been engaged in for 25 centuries, inculcating individuals with the interested and subjugating belief that man is the mixture of the animal-philosopher, impelling the individual to entirely undergo a series of horrible metamorphoses that philosophy calls “history” and whose “History of Philosophy” is but one mediocre symptom. Between the “rational animal,” the owl, the snake, the eagles and the lambs, philosophy has become a bestiary, a spiritual zoology, and it is thus that the philosopher has become a wolf for man. Let’s state the great axioms of the unitary style, respecting its logic, but concerning it whose case we make an example of:
1) A man represents a philosopher for another man; a philosopher represents a man for another philosopher;
2) A philosopher represents a wolf (and) a lamb for another man; a wolf (and) a lamb represent a man for another wolf (and) lamb. These are irrefutable conclusions, included within the premises of Greco-unitary thinking.
Against the nihilist self-devaluing of dominant thought, which is a self-destruction, we need a refutation of the Greek style within philosophy, a radical cure. This cure is neither a devaluing nor overvaluing complementary to the Nietzschean cure. Rather, the cure is a derealization of philosophy, precisely its devaluing through the History of Philosophy was also a loss of reality identical to its very “realization,” because the real was confounded with the possible and became a value. Hence, two complementary imperatives:
1) limit philosophy to make way for the “real”;
2) limit effectivity to make way for the possible – for philosophy.
It’s possible that the first gesture may not be or may no longer be philosophical. To tear philosophy from its devaluing and its bogging down in effectivity, perhaps we must begin by tearing the real from philosophy…
This redistribution of the cards is the object of a non-unitary theory of the Philosophical Decision.
en-demic 