fragilekeys

The Specter of Non-Philosophy, by François Laruelle

What will we bring to the light of day? Between eternal thinkers and armchair philosophers, between an announced death and an excess of communication, between a permanent coup d’Etat and democratic chattering and gossip, we know the song. It is useless to join the choir once one has understood that we philosophers are cyclothymic, bipolar. At least beyond our personal taste for opera and philosophical variety, there is no choice to be made between a defense of ancient figures and the vanity satisfied by opinions, where the academic repetition that occupies the middle-ground only functions to assure its economic survival. The refoundation of philosophy reminds us of capitalism’s, its defense lets us believe it’s under threat, its scholarly embalming makes us believe it was living.

Move, philosophy! Like the gnostics, and before being crushed by the cynicism of the State, the lies of the Church, the necessity of Survival, it is perhaps again time to invent our more rigorous mythology! Why is philosophy, which verges on madness and invents such beautiful, ambitious systems, finally so sage, if not because it has prudently come to a stop mid-way? It invents inside its own codes; there are constantly even new “great” thinkers. Yet it seems fascinated by its own movement, siderailed by its own greatness, sunk in contemplation of its monuments, which is mirrored in its Ideal of the ego, which it calls Absolute. It has everything of the premature and incomplete individual who must try several times to be born, who continues to reject its placenta but without reaching itself, and decides suddenly to affirm itself once and for all. Yet it has neither the controlled surety of science nor the pig-like certitude of opinions. Science without being science, poetry without being poem, political without real power, its permanent hesitation induces the coup de force of the Impossible.

Faced with this situation without exit, one of non-philosophy’s objectives is to attempt to formalize the rules of an ultra-philosophical invention, starting from the philosophical model. What we call following others a generic gesture, thinking as “radical” but not absolute, is a type of inventive “forcing” opposed to the permanent coup de force of philosophy. Why would it be necessary to philosophize without the received and verified codes? We don’t want to add one philosophy to the others, nor to simply withdraw or retreat, but to produce “from” the quasi-philosophical, be it in bits, pieces or fragments, or like a new spectrality instead of the left-over stench of the old spectacle. The radiating specter of philosophy is already narrow enough, perhaps it is possible to spread its spectrality, to vary its nuances. What is a fiction in the neighborhood of philosophy, a philo-fiction? One of non-philosophy’s ambitions would be to create a new theoretical genre, philo-fiction with its political, ethical, and artistic affects pertaining. Another combination of science and fiction, less literary perhaps, more conceptual, less naively technological and more theoretical, coming to “accomplish” the ancient Law of philosophy rather than deny it…

Still it would have to possess the key of spectral invention and look toward science. The difficulty with the non-philosophical imperative is evident, how to get past the Platonic aporias of philosophical knowledge? Why not go to a certain limit already practiced elsewhere, up to those philosophers “without” a work [oeuvre], that is, the works [uvre] of a certain non-action. Can we imagine non-philosophers who would put their energy into inventing their powerlessness to invent? After all, why not make of our powerlessness a work or a doctrine? By definition, it does not belong to us to simply formulate a generic imperative, or even recipes, but we also do not want to dishearten rebellious wills; this would be a political ideal. One must seek out models in other practices, sciences, literature, and science-fiction; there is a minimum of procedures and means to get us on our way, faults or interstices of the earlier philosophy, actual excesses, ludic aspects, bricolages, parallel philosophies today. The idea is obviously to introduce a certain rigor of rules, and to prove an example of reflection on the conditions of invention. But perhaps if the term non-philosophy poses too many problems, produces too much fear or too many smiles, then “non-standard philosophy” would be just as meaningful and more open, but always on the base of a closure or a “non” that is decidedly inevitable.

François Laruelle, May 17, 2009
Trans. Timothy Lavenz, Oct 4, 2016
http://www.onphi.net/accueil/

Immanence is im-mediate in the sense that it is not mediated by language, trace, notation, history. This is a strong claim, but it’s purpose is to discover a stance that can defend humans against the harassment (often violent) of all these mediations (this is the salvific intent of non-philosophy). Laruelle is trying to show up the “weak power” of an indifference to all those mediations, a non-acting with regard to them as ‘sufficient’, an indifference that is immanent in ‘silent simple human/generic presence’.

However, if I could put it this way, all those things just named (which all ‘transcend’ in some fashion) are “caught up in” or “fall into” immanence (obviously, otherwise we’d have no presentation of them, they would be transcendences beyond our access).

The immediate of immanence would not be an absolute negation of mediation (as if it could be done away with, by magic or fiat or theory), nor of its relative power in the world wherever it functions. But it would/could/does undermine and *under-determine* mediation. It robs it of its power over the lived experience of a subject, robs it of its priority. The idea is to access an “immediate human immanence” that could serve as an ‘a priori’ resistance to the violence of all these mediations (see General Theory of the Victim).

One precaution to raise here: immanence is not the “immediate” consciousness of a self or whatever, definitely not to be confused with sense-certainty. One of Laruelle’s way to say this is that radical immanence “pre-empts” the lived of the subject. It is come before anything (any X) comes, it is “defined” only by this pre-emption. It is generic instead of individual or subjective. It comes underneath existence or under-comes, and is never reducible to the movement of being, to a localization in beings, not reducible also to an atomistic and/or corpuscular model of the universe, nor to “philosophy” with its circles of transcendence (world, history, being, etc.) and all that they imply in terms of mediations (identities, individualities, histories, languages, etc.). Thus the need eventually to discuss immanent fluxes, waves of virtuality, etc. in order to get at the indeterminate nature of what is “immediate” (and again, not immediate like an object or a thing, but immediate like the crest and trough of a wave– not the wave crashing against something, but the form-movement that it is).

I think we know this experience of an immanence outside the world or outside time (sometimes we feel this when we fall in love or have a flash of insight). Put stupidly, I’d say Laruelle is trying to get at a theory of this split-second surprise happening (“the Last Instance”) that always in one way or another escapes the encapusulating and capturing mechanism of exterior mediation.

This is where the logical tools like “unilateral duality” come in handy. Immediate immanence is not mediated and yet it is capable of “mediating” mediations (not just interpreting, but debasing, deprioritizing). For Laruelle immanence can transform/determine transcendences but transcendences do not determine immanence. It’s one-directional from immanence to transcendence, and this comes as a message of salvation. The composite in theory thus ends up having to be called a “mediate-without-mediation” (the Messiah) : immanence can mediate all this, but in its immediacy nothing mediates it, it “escapes” every capture by transcendence and keeps ascending.

A short programming note for coming philosophers: when reading a text, listening to a lecture, or engaging a friend in conversation, instead of asking “what’s the point?”, sense out “what’s the wave?”

If one searches for positions, one will only ever get positions–data points on your radar screen, itself informed by other known positions, opinions, concerns, rumors and tidbits, ready to inform new navigation schedules and trajectories through the rough seas of discourse and its institutions, where all the buoys float melancholically and the beacons are overcharged with meanings too intimidating to deal with without being blinded by the anxiety of too much work–too many coasts to reach and record, too many entries in the logbook, too many worlds and too much boredom.