In his 1974 “social sculpture” I Like America and America Likes Me, the artist Jospeh Beuys spent three days locked in a gallery with a wild coyote. I often think of Beuys when I think of François Laruelle, the enormously important French thinker who died Monday morning at age 87, and who spent his entire career locked in a similarly intimate and dramatic confrontation with philosophy.

Why would such a confrontation be necessary? Consider Friedrich Engels’s famous quip that, in what would become The German Ideology, he and Marx intended to “settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience,” thus clearing the way for their departure from a post-Hegelian “utopian” socialism to a more “scientific” kind anchored in the critique of political economy. The possibility of this move—from something called philosophy to something more scientific—is the all-consuming theme considered by Laruelle over six decades and countless books since completing his dissertation at the École Normale Supérieure under Paul Ricœur. This is his immense project of “non-philosophy,” which, in a kind of everlasting dance of participation and description, seeks not so much to transcend or escape philosophy as to show what such an exit strategy might require. “Non-philosophy,” Laruelle writes, “entails putting an end to the spontaneous and naïve practice of philosophy, incapable of a real critique of itself.”

It would be a mistake to label Laruelle a Marxist, but I maintain that he is easiest to understand from a Marxist perspective. A comparison can be made with the work of John Maynard Keynes: recall that Keynes builds his General Theory on the axiom that “wages are sticky”—that is, wages do not respond to changes in supply and demand the way other prices do, but instead have a tendency to “stick” to their previously established levels in the midst of a crisis or political-economic shift. This is, of course, a more or less direct transcription of Marx’s orienting insight: that the difference between labor and labor-power means that labor-power is not a commodity like any other. This peculiarity of the labor commodity has led some post-Keynesian Marxist economists, Suzanne de Brunhoff in particular, to describe labor-power—along with money and land—as non-commodities, a coinage that parallels Laruelle’s articulation of non-philosophy. Like Keynesian economics, Laruellian non-philosophy distills and applies something essential in the Marxist tradition without claiming the mantle of Marxist, building an entire general theory of philosophy out of Engels’s claim that, in terms of the respective social significance of politics and economics, it is the economy that is “determinate in the last instance.” In Laruelle’s work, “determination-in-the-last instance”—what he calls simply the DLI—is the “central concept of non-philosophy that distinguishes it from all philosophies.” Although “Marxist [in] origin” it is “extracted from historical Materialism, transferred and radicalized.” The DLI “is not simply an immanent causality but radical immanence itself. [It] is the causality of philosophically unforeseeable (non-definable and non-demonstrable) theoretical and pragmatic emergence.”

In other words, Engels’s was not only a claim about the importance of capital movements but also, on a much more fundamental level, a claim about theoretical practice, which is never closed because “the economy” is always in some sense outside of it. (This is, to be sure, a very 19th-century conflation of the economic with something like the Freudian unconscious!) Laruelle, by contrast, recognizes that it does not so much matter what is determinate in the last instance so long as we understand that something unthought is. It is precisely this outside-thought that, in Laruelle’s account, philosophy seeks to absorb, in one way or another, into a hierarchy. Either philosophy is perpetually humiliated by what it cannot comprehend (which Laruelle calls, somewhat unhelpfully, The One) or it perpetually aspires to “requisition” it into the service of some kind of philosophical program. It is not so much that there are concepts and problems that philosophy cannot solve as that there will always already remain the radical immanence of what is otherwise than philosophy. A passage from his Philosophies of Difference, translated by Rocco Gangle, shows Laurelle articulating a version of this claim in his uniquely intense theoretical style. Note in particular his description of philosophy as a functional practice of willful decisionism without any authentic theoretical or scientific content:

A concrete philosophical decision is each time the totality, the unity of the co-belonging and co-penetration of a syntax and an experience of what it calls “the real.” Syntax and experience reciprocally determine one another and thus individuate each other to the point of being rendered undecidable. Yet specific to philosophical decision, precisely in distinction from a thinking of the One that would be not a decision but a science, is to distinguish, no doubt locally and provisionally but necessarily, between opposites; it is to tolerate, even if only to suppress it, the distinction, for example, of a syntax and a reality, before the re-unification in this functional synthesis that is every philosophical system. Just as the scientific thinking of the One excludes its dismembering into a syntactical side and a real side, so philosophy, which is a functional rather than theoretical activity, demands it and, like every practice stripped of genuine scientificity, founds itself upon the practical moment of scission.

In Laruelle’s understanding then, “non-philosophy” enables a scientific theory of the practice of philosophy itself. As with any object under scientific investigation, theorizing philosophy scientifically requires locating its borders, which can only be accomplished by recognizing what is beyond and outside it—that is, what is non-philosophy and thus determinate-in-the-last-instance.

Laurelle’s concepts are designed to foster familiarity with this strange relationship between philosophy and the DLI. Let’s consider two: radical immanence and unilateral duality. At first glance these sound almost like satire. Radical immanence is hardly new, and UNIlateral DUALity? Well, which is it, uni or duo? For Laruelle, however, the point is that the world as we encounter it is never less than two, insofar as it is always already divided between philosophy, with its allocation of sub-distinctions like the one sketched above between experience and syntax, and the radical immanence that takes place outside or beyond it. This outside or beyond philosophy requires new terminologies—“radical immanence,” “the One”—precisely to avoid surreptitiously extending any philosophically authored dichotomy to that which is constitutively beyond these. Whether we want to call what is inside thought “politics” as Engels does, or “philosophy” as Laurelle does, and what is outside it “the economy” or “the One,” the crucial insight is that no system of thought is capable of reducing a unilateral duality to some instance of unity.

Two examples from science help us to understand what Laruelle is pursuing here.

First we can think of quantum mechanics, and in particular the difference between Niels Bohr’s indeterminacy principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty. For Bohr, the fact that we can never know the position and momentum of certain subatomic particles at the same time—because our observing them impacts either their position or their momentum—is nothing uncertain. On the contrary: these data points are certainly indeterminate, and this certain indeterminacy is what guarantees their unilateral duality. And more: this certainty is also what keeps us from taking quantum physics as an excuse to slip backwards into a neo-Romantic ecstasy of anti-scientific reaction of the kind exemplified by Heisenberg’s Nazi masters.

For Laruelle, philosophy and a radically immanent One exist alongside one another in a similar relation of certain indeterminacy. Or as Robin McKay translates Laurelle:

Non-philosophy has always wanted to place philosophy under a scientific condition that is determining in-the-last-instance, so as to make it a problem rather than a question itself, and above all to make it an inventive rather than an historical method. . . . The two principles of non-philosophy have an affinity with the two main principles of quantum physics: radical immanence with what is called “superposition” and unilateral duality with what is called “non-commutativity” (or indeterminacy).

If we can read Plato as theorizing the scientific practice of mathematics into his account of the Forms, we can see Laurelle’s theory of radical immanence and unilateral duality as doing something similar, or trying to, for quantum mechanics.

A second example, from biology, is the clone. Laurelle describes non-philosophy departing from philosophy the way a clone departs from the otherwise inevitable reproduction of familial and genetic hierarchy. The clone is not a sibling, a parent, or child. It does not even have the small sequencing proper to identical twins who are born one after another. Instead, it involves a kind of doubling that is the more different for being radically the same. And so it is with philosophy and non-philosophy, which relate to one another as clones do. McKay’s translation, again:

Cloning is a biotechnological procedure that seems to threaten human identity but really threatens only the difference, particularly (but not only) sexual difference, that is supposed to define the essence of man. It could be that non-philosophical cloning, although extremely different, is also entirely prohibited by philosophy, i.e. by the supposed “difference” of the essence of man. . . . Cloning is the surest destruction of the image of thought, of the procedures of projection and reflection at the heart of “representation,” processes from which philosophy has never been able to release itself, captivated, as it is, by the transcendental imagination even once it has escaped from the empirical image.

Iconoclastic passages like this, of course, read alongside Laruelle’s concern with “ordinary” man and his valorization of hearsay, certainly make it possible to see him as a kind of latter-day Huguenot—he was raised in a strict protestant household, and railed against a consolidated, imagistic and centralized Church he calls Philosophy. But sustaining this reading requires ignoring his relentless claims on behalf of science and theory. Although his vocabulary—not to say syntax—often gave him a patina of populist irrationalism, in practice Laruelle was relentlessly, even marvelously, rational.

Of course, Laruelle was not alone in trying to articulate a theory of what is not- or outside philosophy. Alain Badiou, in many ways Laruelle’s perfect foil, proposes “antiphilosophy” as any system which posits the existence of the One. (Of course, for Laruelle, predicating the One as existing is already to betray its radical immanence.) For the good Heideggerian Badiou, science is merely one of four “truth procedures” alongside politics, art, and love, the results of which it falls to philosophy to evaluate. For Laurelle, it is philosophy itself that must be considered scientifically, and in a way that preserves and elevates science as the only true theoretical practice. If at times his efforts in this direction led him to present philosophy as something almost supernatural in its omnivorous insidiousness, certainly he can be forgiven, considering how long he spent locked in a delicate tango of caution and respect with that oldest and hungriest of human animals.

---

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.