Here. Damned straight. Ben WoodARD conducts the interview here (sorry for mangling your name in the past Ben!). In my view, Badiou’s remarks about Laruelle are most interesting. I think he’s absolutely right: Laruelle is a dead end, a regressive move, a fall back into the project of endless critique, rather than a new opening. Time will tell. I also think Badiou is right with respect to his observations about the absence of a theory of the event among the speculative realists, though I’ll hold this thesis close to my vest for the time being. Now why the hell did he pull out of contributing to The Speculative Turn? No explanation was ever given, nor any formal withdrawal, just an end to communication. For the theorist of truth-procedures…
UPDATE [3:37 PM, 9 September 2009]: Since I have received some rather outraged responses to my suggestion that Laruelle is a regressive move for SR, I suppose I should clarify why I believe this. The last forty or fifty years of Continental philosophy, especially in the English speaking world, have been dominated by philosophy as textual analysis. Philosophy has been practiced as the analysis of texts. Whether we are talking about the predominance of hermeneutics in the reading of philosophical texts, or the reign of deconstruction as textual analysis, philosophy has not been dominated by theory building, but rather the analysis of already existing texts. And if one wants to argue that Laruelle is not doing textual analysis, the point stands simply in that he makes philosophies the object of his analysis. If non-philosophy is a regressive move, then this is because it has every likelihood of repeating this institutional structure as the primary mode of philosophical practice. Philosophical practice becomes trapped in the rut of being about philosophies, rather than engaging in theory building. Insofar as Laruelle’s non-philosophy takes philosophy as its object of analysis, it promises to continue this rut of looking backwards towards the philosophical tradition, continuing engagement with the texts of that tradition, and discouraging active theory building for its own sake. This is an institutional structure I would like to see pass. The point is not that we shouldn’t talk about other philosophers, that we shouldn’t write monographs on other philosophers, etc. All of that will remain and should remain. The hope is that we’ll see the passing of the day where philosophy is seen primarily as talk about texts, rather than as an attempt to comprehend the world. One of the most promising things about SR is that it marks the return of genuine metaphysics and a movement beyond the practice of endless commentary.
I look forward to the day when it is exceedingly rare for graduate students in Continental programs to write dissertations about another philosopher. To be sure, work will continue to draw substantially on other thinkers, to engage with other thinkers, and all the rest. But what will have passed, what will have become rare, will be the idea that work should be about another thinker rather than an issue, a question, or a problem.
September 5, 2009 at 7:05 am
arrogance?
September 5, 2009 at 11:15 am
Levi, have you read much Laruelle? I get the impression from what you’ve written here, in typical blue fishman style, that you have only gleaned from blogs and Brassier’s work that he is critical of structure he thinks is invariant in philosophy. That is true, but it’s not the end of his work and, if anything, is an attempt to get past endless critique by getting to the root of the problem so that one can be productive.
September 5, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Anthony,
No, I haven’t read a whole lot of Laurelle. Just a few essays and what I’ve gleaned from Brassier, Mullarkey’s post-continental philosophy, and the blog enthusiasts of his work. So far I haven’t been able to get a clear, jargon free, account of his work that doesn’t fall back on to the convenient argument that “of course you don’t understand because philosophy cannot understand non-philosophy.” Perhaps this will change in the future.
September 5, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Paul,
I don’t suspect it’s a matter of arrogance. He’s at the height of his career right now and, as such, is extremely busy. We caught him for the anthology right as he was heading off to EGS to teach for the Summer. English isn’t his first language and he only taught himself spoken English in the last few years, so this is a very hectic time for him. I suspect he simply lost track of things.
September 5, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Come on now. You’re seasoned enough to tell the difference between jargon and technical language. I mean, for one, you make up enough words for your own work that if I was a cynical man I could label as jargon.
Just seems a bit arrogant to write off so strongly a philosopher you have not read on the basis of his technical vocabulary. I mean, ANT has plenty of jargon associated with it and from my experience of it I’m not too interested in it as a theory, but I wouldn’t post on my blog that it is a regressive move having not read it and knowing that readers of my blog have found Latour and ANT incredibly productive for their own work.
As for the “philosophy cannot understand non-philosophy”, that’s not quite what his point it. It is that you can’t understand non-philosophy as such on philosophical grounds. That’s not really a controversial claim if Laruelle is correct that non-philosophy constitutes something different from philosophy as such (in the same way you can’t understand biology as such on philosophical grounds). And it isn’t as if those interested in non-philosophy have not thought of this problem, Brassier himself has a piece on the ONPhl site about criticizing the supposed self-supremacy of non-philosophy.
Stop being a Red Ate.
September 5, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Anthony,
You’re not making a very good case for yourself here. I honestly and genuinely mean that I can make neither heads nor tails of the Laruelle that I’ve read and why it is significant or valuable. Yes, I know all about jargon. I find his impenetrable, that’s all. It’s not jargon that’s the problem, it’s his jargon. Certainly I’m not alone in experiencing Laruelle in this way. Badiou himself says as much, as, I believe, did Derrida. And from what I’ve seen so far, there seems very little payoff in penetrating that mist beyond coming to speak Laruelle’s language. I could be wrong, but so far I haven’t seen anything to convince me otherwise beyond what strikes me as a sort of hyper-Kantianism.
September 5, 2009 at 8:14 pm
And, of course, why wouldn’t I post on my blog that something is a regressive move or a dead end if that’s what I genuinely think from what I’ve seen so far? Do we really want a repeat of deconstruction with a bunch of non-philosophers running around engaged in the academic exercise of repeating the master’s gesture of doing a non-philosophical analysis of all the philosophies of history just like we got endless deconstructions of every text under the sun? If SR is about anything it is about building and not the endless project of critique or the fetishization of a particular sexy vocabulary like we saw during the 90s. I suspect that’s exactly where Laruelle will ultimately lead. Haven’t we seen enough philosophy as textual analysis to last us a few lifetimes? Yet if philosophy is the object of non-philosophy, this is exactly what we’ll get and that is a move that I strongly believe to be regressive and to be avoided. Good for countless CVs, not particularly good for philosophy IMO. Yawn!
September 5, 2009 at 8:24 pm
And the point is very simple. If an orientation cannot tell me what it allows me to do, if it doesn’t enhance my understanding of the world, if it doesn’t allow me to do interesting things outside the academic analysis of the text, then I think I’m more than justified in dismissing it as uninteresting. When someone can explain what it can do in these terms then my view might change. I have found Brassier’s two commentaries completely incomprehensible. The explanations Reid Kotlas and Nick Srnicek have provided– both of whom strive for great clarity in everything –have left me nonplussed and still without any sense of what might be of value or interest in Laruelle’s thought. And, of course, the various articles I’ve read by Laruelle and the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy have been completely opaque to me. I took the time to learn how to read Hegel, Deleuze, Kant, the various phenomenologists, the semioticians, Lacan, etc., because I had a clear sense of what the payoff would be and what this effort would allow me to do. Nothing that I’ve read by or about Laruelle has so far given me a clear sense of what the payoff would be. The non-philosophical analysis of philosophy, with its distinction between the faktum and datum and its talk of decision just strikes me as warmed over deconstruction, while all the talk of the “real in the last instance”, the one without duality, etc., sounds like so much gesturing without any real content. Now you’re free to mock me for not making a greater effort to penetrate Laruelle, etc., but if Laruelle and his enthusiasts can’t make a good pitch for the importance of what they’re doing, if they can’t provide a way in that’s their failing, not mine, and no one is under any obligation to take their work seriously when it requires a substantial contribution of time and effort without giving any clear indication of what that time and effort is for or what it does.
September 5, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Now you’re just being a dick. No need to stick a mythological nerd name on it.
Nowhere did I say that you had any kind of obligation to learn Laruelle. Just that if you’re going to be so bold you should, you know, have read him. If you don’t understand it, that’s fine, or from the bits you read you think it isn’t worth your time to read more, that’s also fine. I’m not really worried about convincing you of all people that Laruelle is worth your time, for your project he may not be, but calling it regressive is, well, arrogant to say the least.
You really think your work isn’t academic? Interesting.
September 5, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I’m being a dick? Do you read yourself Anthony?
September 5, 2009 at 9:00 pm
And Anthony, I have read quite a bit of Laruelle and about Laruelle. I just can’t say that I’ve read his entire body of work. There’s nothing arrogant at all in being suspicious of a theoretical orientation that makes the textual analysis of other philosophies its primary objective. We’ve already had that rut with deconstruction, we don’t need more of it. It is regressive. Perhaps if you’re going to have hysterical outbursts on blogs where you mock others you should be able to at least explain why you believe such and such a thing is valuable and important, rather than simply throwing infantile fits about how someone must not have read much by such and such. After all, if I had a nickel for every time you spouted off about some thinker or movement that you have only the vaguest conception of, I’d be able to retire and devote myself completely to writing. I get it, you have an erection for Laruelle. However, as is usual for you, you are unable to articulate why you have an erection but simply bluster and sputter whenever anyone does not share your latest fetish.
September 5, 2009 at 10:56 pm
For what it’s worth, even as an admirer of Laruelle, I’m not sure what to do with him, and I say as much in my Pli article. I think Laruelle can open up philosophy, and counter any claims to self-sufficiency, but beyond this I just don’t know. I’d be honestly happy to hear anyone tell me what can be done with him beyond what I cited.
And as a caveat, I haven’t read his latest work, and knowing how often he changes his positions, he may very well have moved beyond this sort of negative operation in his newest stuff. I think you’d know best, Anthony, but I should ask Taylor about it too. A selection of his newest work will be translated for The Speculative Turn, but I haven’t yet had a chance to read it.
September 5, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Nick,
One of the things I wonder is where this claim to self-sufficiency is coming from? It seems to me that with some notable exceptions such as Hegel and Husserl, philosophy is pretty cognizant of its pragmatic limitations. What I, above all, don’t want to see a repeat of is endless deconstructive papers at SPEP where Derrida is applied and where grad students exist in the tyranny of a textual tradition where their work is deemed illegitimate if it is not textually engaging with the tradition in a sustained fashion. In debates surrounding SR we’ve already seen this temperament in spades. People have actually said “why do they presume to have anything philosophical to say” to Harman, Grant, Meillassoux, and Brassier. This reflects an entire institutional system so nicely described by Bourdieu and how it functions to maintain the status quo. It seems to me that non-philosophy very much risks reinforcing this by treating philosophy as its objects. At any rate, I suppose it is the absence of a “what can be done?” answer or a “what does it explain?” answer that always leaves me shrugging when Laruelle comes up. “Okay, so what? Who ever said otherwise?”
September 5, 2009 at 11:23 pm
And, I think, you bring up a good point about The Speculative Turn publishing one of his pieces. Who was it who suggested that we get a contribution from Laruelle again? Oh yeah, that’s right, it was me! The fact that I think the non-philosophical turn is wrong-headed doesn’t entail somehow that I’m going to try to banish it. My antipathy towards non-philosophy also makes more sense when situated in the context of the fact that my ontology has quite often been the object of non-philosophical critique or analysis in a way where I find it very difficult to determine precisely what claim is being made or what the issue is, and where my suggestion that onticology is already a post-non-philosophical ontology (i.e., one that integrates the critique of non-philosophy from the outset) are responded to with the thesis that of course I can’t understand the criticism as I’m working within the orbit of philosophy (i.e., that I “just don’t get it or haven’t been converted”). Well, with rhetorical moves like these it’s difficult to know how to respond or why one should bother responding at all.
September 5, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Not sure if this one is going to get past.
Nick,
It may be that nothing can be done with him in the sense that you want to do things with philosophers. There is probably a difference of perspective there. I think he opens up philosophy to do things with it in an occasional way, rather than providing a TOE, which you may be looking for in ANT or eliminativism.
Levi,
We’ve emailed a few times and I don’t know if I’ve made it clear that Laruelle is not going to create a commentary industry where you apply him to philosophical texts. If anything, he’ll probably be applied to problems arising out of philosophers (which seems to be what you want). I very much doubt you’re going to see a Laruelle take over of SPEP.
I don’t know about these criticism of your ontology from a non-philosophical perspective. If they are saying you don’t understand the critique cause you’re stuck inside the circle of non-philosophy, well, I can see how that can be annoying. At the same time it is possible that their critique is correct and without knowing what you’re talking about I don’t have the material to make a judgment from. It may be that your ontology is post-non-philosophical, I don’t really know, my point has always just been that on this issue, the one about whether or not non-philosophy is just warmed over hermeneutics or deconstruction, you are misunderstanding Laruelle. Philosophy is, in your terms, one object amongst many that is given attention in non-philosophy.
September 5, 2009 at 11:55 pm
It’s hard to say whether the first paragraph of your remark is directed entirely at Nick or not, but you have made a number of references to ANT and materialism at this point. For the record, I am neither an ANT theorist nor a materialist. Latour is an important thinker for me because he is one of the few social theorists not to reduce the social to the discursive level of signs, social forces, and norms but to make room for all sorts of non-discursive elements outside of the human while nonetheless retaining a place for the discursive, but I certainly don’t see him as a panacea. Given that I think one of the central problems with contemporary social and political philosophy is the absence of anything like an ecological conception of the social, Latour becomes a valuable resource. In contrast to eliminative materialism, I’m a realist which is a far more promiscuous ontology position that allows for a wide variety of real beings in addition to strictly material beings. In other words, while there was a period where I flirted with the eliminative position, I think a good deal is lost whenever a theory strives to trace everything back to one type of being. We’ve seen a lot of nonsense that arises from this eliminative position around these parts lately with questions like “what makes you think trees are real?” premised on the idea that quantum phenomena are the only really real phenomena. I think this is one of the major problems with those trends of SR that treat the “smallest level” as the really real and think everything else is to be treated in terms of those phenomena or as mere human epiphenomena arising from how “humans cut up the world” (as if we’re free to cut it up however we like and are somehow exempt from this same line of critique).
September 6, 2009 at 12:02 am
I’m not, in this way, shit talking ANT or Eliminativism (materialist or otherise, I take Brassier’s work to be eliminativist without being materialist). I’m just pointing out that these are more like TOE than non-philosophy is attempting to be and that they therefore do different things. If what you want to do is something like ANT or ANT-influenced than using non-philosophy is probably not going to work. Different tools. That’s all, no offense intended to you or Nick (though the comment was directed to Nick because, from past conversations, I know he’s interested in these lines of thought and has found them productive).
September 6, 2009 at 12:05 am
Levi,
The self-sufficiency need not be in the content of the philosopher – Laruelle’s point is that the very form of philosophizing makes it self-sufficient. Hegel is definitely the archetypal figure here, but Laruelle would argue all post-Kantian philosophy partakes of the same form. That being said, Brassier critiques Laruelle for this (and I agree), and points out that obviously not all post-Kantian philosophy has taken the same invariant form. But, both Brassier and Meillassoux acknowledge that the form of philosophy that Laruelle highlights can be considered equivalent to correlationism – so whatever correlationism covers, arguably so does non-philosophy.
Anthony,
I think you may be right in my search for a TOE, and non-philosophy isn’t going to help there. I agree that non-philosophy can open up philosophy (and this is what I like about it), but this ‘opening’ is too general for my tastes – what precisely does it mean? And I think that can only be answered by actually doing non-philosophical philosophy (or less paradoxically, non-Decisional philosophy). So I see non-philosophy ‘opening’ up philosophy, but this is mostly a negative gesture, rather than a positive new philosophy. Though feel free to disagree with that!
Anyways, I’m out for the night, so I won’t be responding anymore tonight.
September 6, 2009 at 12:30 am
Nick,
I don’t think I agree with Brassier (he’s trying, I think, to protect eliminativism from a non-philosophical critique) or Meillassoux (who is actually a prefect example of someone everyone seems to like, but whose work is so far exactly just this “negative gesture” you mention). That said, I think one could do a critique of Brassier along non-philosophical grounds (confusing the Real with extinction), but M hasn’t yet published a positive philosophy (maybe those two articles in Collapse count). Still, that’s not what I find interesting in non-philosophy and so I wouldn’t spend my time focusing on that.
I see the work he’s done in Principes as largely a positive philosophy, and I think his book on heresy and mysticism make interesting head way into questions in religion. Again, these are occasions rather than a TOE, but his work is clearly attempting to do something positive. Though, it would be helpful for me if it was explained what a positive philosophy would be as we may be working under different presuppositions.
September 6, 2009 at 2:18 am
I take it that a positive philosophy develops some theory of the world, society, or some aspect of the world. Deleuze, Heidegger, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Dewey, Peirce, Whitehead, etc., all develop what I’d call positive philosophies. They give us theories of some aspect of being. Derrida’s philosophy is not a positive philosophy in that it gives us no direct theory of anything, but restricts itself to a parasitic engagement with texts. I would also say that Gadamer’s philosophy is not a positive philosophy as it is an interpretation of texts rather than a theory of some aspect of the world. This distinction between positive philosophies is not a distinction between “good” and “bad”. Clearly a lot of what Gadamer and Derrida write is important and of interest. However, in my view thought such as this does not count as philosophy as it is not a theory of being, a theory of knowledge, a direct ethics or politics or aesthetics. Now before you come back swinging saying but Derrida says all sorts of things about ethics, politics, and being, that’s not the point.
The point is that he does not directly develop such accounts of his own, but only does so through commentary on another text. The distinction is a fuzzy one to be sure. I can’t define the difference in the way that I can define the difference between triangles and circles. However, I think if you compare Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition with Derrida’s Of Grammatology, or Badiou’s Being and Event with Derrida’s Specters of Marx or Levinas’ Totality and Infinity or Otherwise Than Being with Derrida’s Given Time or Gift of Death you get a nice sense of what a positive philosophy is in comparison with a negative philosophy. Yes, Derrida is trying to “do something positive” in all these works, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a theory in any of these instances. And again, the call for a theory or a positive philosophy is not a call for a ToE. A positive philosophy can take up no more than twenty pages and deal with some very small and specialized problem or question pertaining to, say, rigid designators. All that is required for something to count as a positive philosophy is for it to propose a theory explaining some phenomenon or other. Perhaps this is one reason Laruelle, as does Derrida, gives me an allergic reaction. I am interested in explanations and theories, not critiques or how some body of thought is organized around a decision that divides the world into faktum or datum or where we are shown that the conditions of possibility are also the conditions of impossibility, etc. Neither of these things strike me as particularly interesting or valuable. But that’s me. I’d rather understand the world than a text.
In taking the time to outline what I take a positive philosophy to be, I hope you’ll read my remarks charitably. I feel as if I’ve had to add a thousand qualifications to what should be a rather straightforward distinction, even if its a difficult distinction to define using the criteria of clear and distinct ideas (no doubt because unlike triangles and circles there’s no hard and fast rule for distinguishing these things). Hopefully you’ll resist your urge to respond by saying “but hasn’t Derrida made a number of important contributions” or “aren’t commentaries often valuable?” I’ll save you the suspense: Yes Derrida has made a number of valuable contributions. No I’m not suggesting that people should cease reading Derrida or using techniques of deconstruction. Yes commentaries are often valuable. No I’m not suggesting people should cease doing commentaries. These are all things that should go without saying and that should be obvious. It just so happens that something like what deconstruction does or what hermeneutics does is not what I am looking for when I look to philosophy. I want explanations of the world around me, not texts or philosophers. I turn to explanations of philosophers only when I believe that a particular philosopher will assist me in understanding the world about me but am finding such a difficult time penetrating his work that I require a secondary source to help me gain some access to his thought. I have little patience for those philosophical discourses that become philosophies about philosophy, self-reflexive analyses of philosophy, rather than proposing theories or explanations about various aspects of the world. And again, that’s just me, so resist that urge to type “but x is valuable!”
September 6, 2009 at 2:26 am
And to avoid any more confusion, by a “positive philosophy” I do not mean an “affirmative philosophy”. I’d count Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory as “positive philosophies”, but they’re both far from being affirmative. A positive philosophy is a theory that proposes a theory or account. Among the list of thinkers I gave above, I guess I’d just prefer to read the person proposing a theory or explanation any day, over the person writing about and through another text.
September 6, 2009 at 4:17 am
I think you’re making it more complicated than it is. I’ve always understood „positive philosophy“ to refer to system building and new concepts, and Badiou would be the perfect example in recent years. On the other hand, Zizek would be an example of negative philosophy: even though he’s engaged in system building, every concept and structure he’s mobilized is taken from someone else (e.g., Lacan, Hegel, Badiou, Deleuze, etc. Also, you credit him in your „Universes of Discourse“ article as having coined the concept of „interpassivity“, when in fact it’s actually Robert Pfaller’s idea—just covering myself so no contention on this point.)
Anyhow, I’m not the biggest Derrida fan and can’t stand the comp. lit. obsession with deconstruction. But beyond it being passé to engage in that sort of critical mode, I think it may just be even more passé to dislike Derrida these days, and Derrida himself does have certain interesting concepts that he brings to the table (arché, trace, différance, etc., which all seem like rich ideas that could be just as well applied to ontology as text—no need to blame Derrida for this, necessarily). Anyhow, the word „parasitic“ in relation to Derrida definitely seems a bit overblown. It might be worth some reconsideration.
September 6, 2009 at 7:33 am
Damn. I love you guys. Seriously.
This is neither here nor there as I’m not a dog in this fight but I can never seem to stop from sticking my oar in (nor from mixing my metaphors)… A lot of really smart folk online are into this Laruelle guy and I can’t tell why. That’s fair, the stuff online seems to more like working things out among people who are into him rather than demonstrating to non-involved folk why they should get involved (my stuff on Marx is like that, if someone’s not already interested then my Marx posts at mine are going to miss the boat for them). I have this experience with nearly all non-Marxist 20th century thinkers referenced on blogs except some analytic philosophers of language and some Italian political philosophers, for the life of me I can’t get why anyone cares about Lacan, Deleuze, Zizek, Derrida… I sort of shrug and assume it’s just a matter different starting assumptions and problem-arcs that people are tracing. What’d be awesome is if more people wrote works explicitly aimed at translating figures into other idioms – Rorty used to say he wanted someone to write a book called “Derrida for Davidsonians,” then somebody basically wrote it (Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). Andrew Bowie’s book on Schelling’s another example of that sort of intellectual tesseract, folding together conversations that didn’t previously appear capable of intersecting. Even when I’m not interested in the individual figures I think the intellectual moves needed in that bridge building and code switching are important, it’s one the two main reasons why I read theory blogs actually. (The other’s love, as I said. ;))
September 6, 2009 at 7:40 am
Anthony Paul, literally every post I ahve ever seen from you is an attempt either to put someone on the defensive or to belittle their qualifications to say what they are saying. Why not take a stand with a positive theory of your own? It will be of more benefit to everyone.
September 6, 2009 at 8:24 am
A small and tangential point to the discussion about Laruelle. I think we’ve all got to be very careful not to conflate materialism and physicalism. Physicalism is the theory which is _exclusively_ phrased in terms of their being some fundamental level of reality, either in terms of their being some fundamental set of entities (e.g., the fundamental particles of physics) or some fundamental set of facts (i.e., the facts of physics), which all other entities/facts supervene upon, or are reducible to.
Materialism _sometimes_ gets phrased in this way, but insofar as it’s only sometimes I think that we should collapse these phrasings into some form of physicalism, or at least call it something like naive materialism.
Properly ontological materialism says something more like ‘to be is to be material’, and then attempts to provide some positive account of materiality which is distinct from the kind of supervenience or reduction that physicalism posits. Even if this is specified in some truly minimal way like Zizek or Badiou (the minimality of which I find positively anemic).
Materialism proper does not _index_ reality to some specific grouping of natural sciences, that’s what physicalism and similar forms of philosophical naturalism do.
September 6, 2009 at 10:06 am
First, I recognize that in these comments you are focusing very much on a personal preference. This would suggest that the rest of us should be unconcerned with your preferences and that they are therefore not up for discussion. That would be fine, yet I’m finding that hard to square with the global pronouncements. The ones where you are defining what gets to count as philosophy. Surely you recognize that this will upset people and they will want to respond.
That said, I am going to try and go with the first part and remain unconcerned with your delimiting of the borders. Mostly because, as you admit, I find your stated difference too fuzzy to do much work and because there is no theory from nowhere. Theories are part of the world and the world has itself been shaped by theory. A promiscuous ontology would accept that it seems.
Still, and I don’t want to keep saying this over and over, so this will be the last time. Even by your own criteria Laruelle fits in the positive philosophy camp. You keep repeating the Brassier summary of the theory of philosophical decision, which is a major aspect of non-philosophy, but it is not the end all of the work. He has developed theories of aspects of the world. He has a theory of subjectivity, of ethics, of religion, of science. These theories are not developed through other texts and if other philosophers are used they are just that used. He writers from the things themselves, not about texts. He’s not writing about interpretations of thinkers, he’s using the ideas of thinkers.
Before you start demanding I play with real money, that I tell you what Laruelle’s positions are on all these things, I’m going to have to say no. I don’t have the time and the law of diminishing returns would surely kick in for both of us. In your comment above you use the completely valid argument that I should just read and compare these books and I’ll see a difference. I agree that the evidence is there to show there is a difference in approach between Badiou and Derrida (though I respectfully disagree with how you then delimit the two into philosophy and not philosophy). If you read almost any of the works from Philosophy III and IV you’ll find your theories. You may still find them worthless, it has never been my intention to convince you that Laruelle is worth your time for your project, only trying to correct a misunderstanding about his work. Non-philosophy as Laruelle has practiced it is not about textual analysis, it has more objects than philosophy itself, it provides theories of the kind you talk about.
September 6, 2009 at 10:14 am
Because I recognize that misunderstanding could occur, let me be clear about that first paragraph. I really am having trouble squaring the way you put these as personal preferences and yet make the tone and style of your writing makes them global prescriptions. If you could explain that I would appreciate it. I’m also not sure how I should take this “not about or through philosophers” line with the published work of OOO philosophers. Or the mythological theory philosophical types, which also seems to be about philosophers (or if you want to deny them that name, others or thinkers or whatever, doesn’t matter for the sake of discussion). All of this seems to be of concern and I would guess you’d see them as theories of some kind, but I’m having trouble understanding how they are but differance isn’t. I’m not calling you to account or anything, just expressing confusion.
September 6, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Levi,
I understand your concerns about non-phi as textual analysis, and much of Laruelle’s work certainly plays into these concerns, but I think the point of non-phi’s appropriation of philosophy is being missed here. The whole point of non-phi is to break the circle of philosophy’s relentless and exclusive self-concern, which manifests not only as textual commentary and meta-philosophy, but also goes so far as to subordinate the world outside of thought to the concepts we impose upon it.
It does this by taking other philosophies as object, yes. But the intent there is to ruthlessly separate the conceptual constituents of that philosophy from their exclusive mobilization in the name of the correctness of that philosophical theory. It is like conceptual piracy, not unlike what you’ve been developing as historical reconstruction. The difference is that you and Laruelle diagnose very different malignant properties from which the concepts in question must be separated (although not entirely different).
Laruelle himself, as far as I know anyway, seems much to hung up on non-philosophy’s disciplinary autonomy, and neglects the work of conceptual pillaging and experimental re-engineering – this is why I like Brassier’s critique of Laruelle, which I think is closer to the spirit of non-phi than Laruelle’s own explication.
So rather than building up a new theory in opposition to all the incorrect theories of the past, non-phi depends on the notion that we can change what theory itself does, and thereby open the historical reservoir of theories to new, non-oppositional and experimental uses…that’s my understanding, anyway.
September 6, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Also, let me just say to both Anthony and Levi here that I think eliminativism is being misrepresented. Eliminativism DOES NOT EQUAL reductive materialism.
The Churchlands use eliminativism in the context of cognitive science and neurophilosophy, but they don’t give very much in the way of a generalization thereof. As far as I know, Brassier is the only one to do so at length. But eliminativism is not a position about the smallest and most fundamental level of reality. It is rather a meta-theory about theories: theories that have no basis in reality ought not be used. This is especially relevant vis a vis cognitive science, because we’ve retained these very bad and unfounded theories and now demand scientific research conform to them, rather than developing theories on the basis of that research alone. It’s really an attempt to get rid of bad science.
As a broader philosophical position however, eliminativism is the doctrine that the AUTHORITY of any given theory must be purged, whereas the content of that theory must be rigorously submitted to experimental testing. An ontology cannot simply be claimed to be correct on the basis of the brilliant intuition of the philosopher. It must rather be judged on the basis of the effects its employment produces.
Eliminativism eliminates bad theories, retaining from them only that which it can use (if anything). Yet it also must refuse to impose its own general and authoritative standards of proper use, hence its correlation with nihilism.
The suspension (or elimination) of authority and experimental appropriation of concepts obviously is related to non-phi’s project, which is why Brassier sees them as related (not without being critical of both in their orthodox forms). But there is really nothing to the conflation of eliminativism with reductive materialism, not in Brassier’s sense, because for Brassier even physical reality ought to be ‘reduced all the way to nothing’.
September 6, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Reid,
Don’t you think Brassier, however, ends up doing something very different than what he says his theory aims at? I mean, he really seems to have fallen into a sort of scientism. One of the reason I’ve taken the OOO route is precisely because there’s room in that ontology for things like signs, collective social structures, etc. I don’t see that in Brassier’s approach. It certainly hasn’t been and emphasis in anything of his I’ve read. Thus, while I get the point that his non-phi is striving to undermine the hegemony of particular theoretical approaches such as reductive materialism, it seems to do precisely the opposite. In your own non-phi analyses of my onticology I’ve never understood what the point is or what exactly is being claimed beyond simply translating my orientation into non-phi language. I say that genuinely and not as an attack on you. I really don’t get the point.
September 6, 2009 at 3:29 pm
doctorzamalek — Anthony has plenty of positive posts on our group blog. He’s very much engaged in a “project” as you guys put it. His CV is available at the site if you want to see what he’s up to.
September 6, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Anthony,
Well of course I want to see our institutions organized in different ways and emphasize different things. I’m not really sure how to express my point any better. I believe that Continental philosophy in the states is institutionally organized in a very specific way at the level of its graduate training, its journals, its conferences, and its presses. This organization is one that privileges commentary over all other forms of philosophical engagement. I think you need only open the pages of the proceedings of SPEP to see that this is the case. This is an issue of power in Foucault’s sense of the word. Although things are beginning to change, it’s very difficult to imagine a book like Badiou’s Being and Event, Levinas’ Otherwise than Being, or Heidegger’s Being and Time written in the United States. The reason for this has a lot to do with how our institutions are organized ranging from how we train our graduate students, to how our journals conferences and presses are set up, to how the market has to be strategized by those searching for positions. It is, of course, true that no philosophy occurs in a vacuum and that all philosophies have their influences. However, there is a big difference between acknowledging this and accepting the hermeneutic argument that philosophy ought to be a meditation on its history and that any philosophy that does not meditate in a sustained and exclusive fashion on its history is doomed to be dogmatic.
September 6, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Reid,
So Laruelle’s non-philosophy is a variant of A.J. Ayer’s verificationism? Effects with respect to what? Every philosophy more or less produces effects. Insofar as theories are themselves objects they produce all sorts of effects on other theories and discourse. I presume you’re talking about something more robust here than positivistic verificationism (I hope, anyway). I also wonder, can we anticipate the effects of something in advance? I certainly wouldn’t want scientific funding distributed according to this criteria, as we seldom know in advance whether or not a particular line of research in science or mathematics will lead anywhere. Finally, isn’t there something potentially paralyzing about this critique of “authority”? Doesn’t it all too easily become a form of engagement with theories others are building that pounds the table saying “no, no, no you’re proclaiming an absolute authority for your theory!” when in fact the researcher is focused in the way they’re focused because that’s what they happen to be working on at the time? This is a point about how rhetorics function, not about the content of theories. If non-phi is treated as a rhetoric– and everything has a rhetorical dimension –it seems to become a sort of prohibition against any positive theory building. For the non-phi this is a convenient advantage because they can show how any philosophy is guilty of its charges, while for the philosopher this creates a superego that forbids any theory building in much the same way that everyone during the 90s lived in terror of falling into ontotheology or “metaphysics” by proposing a positive theory. Again, this is an analysis of how a particular rhetoric functions and the effects it produces, not the content of the theory or its truth value. And if it is the effects that we’re supposed to focus on, why not simply side with American pragmatism that already evaluates propositions in terms of the effects or consequences that would follow from them? This is what Peirce’s pragmatic principle is all about.
September 6, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Levi,
In your last comment you’re confusing Reid’s defense of eliminativism with Laruelle’s non-philosophy. The two are the same thing, even if Brassier has put both to use in his own way. Arguably Alien Theory is an instance of non-philosophical eliminativism, but this shouldn’t be extended to Laruelle’s own understanding of non-philosophy.
An element in non-philosophy that is there and you will likely have a problem with is an allergy to making grand claims about the nature of reality or in his post-Lacanian sense “the Real”. I don’t see non-philosophy as caring out the meta-philosophical task of Ayers and he deals with the problem of authority at length in Future Christ. I’m weary to go on though because I don’t have a sense that the conversation has moved anywhere yet. In short, I think I’ve said a lot to answer your concerns, but I’m not getting feedback to that effect.
Graham,
I completely reject your charge of online bullying. I’ve never demanded to see credentials and I’m not sure who I’ve put on the defensive. If I’m not overly effervescent in my opening preambles that hardly seems a character flaw.
September 6, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Anthony,
I think you’re right about Meillassoux being mostly a negative philosopher. He has made some positive contributions (e.g. the necessity of contingency), but his primary contribution has definitely been to attack correlationism. And Levi pretty much gets at exactly what I meant by ‘positive philosophy’ – it’s not affirmationist necessarily, but it’s also not parasitical on another philosophy (deconstruction being the prime example there). Though as Bryan notes, Derrida need not be read this way, and Martin Hagglund has already worked out a realist reading of Derrida. But the standard interpretation of Derrida certainly sees him as being parasitical on philosophical texts. I don’t think the negative and positive aspects of philosophies are ever found in their pure forms, as each philosophy contains aspects of both. But I think for many cases (though not all), it’s fairly clear which way a philosophy leans.
September 6, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Anthony,
That’s too bad about you feeling as if discussion hasn’t moved forward at all. I get the sense that for you discussion will have only moved forward if I retract my criticism of Laruelle. But in order for me to do that you have to present specifics of his value. Moreover, I don’t feel that you’ve recognized the points I’m making about the institutional structuration of Continental philosophy in terms of a privilege on commentary and how a theoretical orientation that takes philosophy as its object reproduces that. Rather you just seem to wave your hands and cry that it’s not like that, despite the evidence of SPEP every year for the last twenty years. I am, of course, familiar with Laruelle’s vague rumblings about the “Real”, but this really gets to the point. All we get are gestures and hand waving about a “real” that we’re situated in from the outset, etc. This just isn’t very interesting. Of course, you could always take the trouble to show me why and how it’s interesting and what it allows me to say about the world and do. I suspect you’ll tell me to do my own homework and that you can’t be bothered as you’re already convinced it will be a waste of your time. Fine. But if you’re not prepared to do that work don’t respond to other people’s posts. Throughout this thread you’ve made a series of rhetorical moves known as “proof surrogates”. A proof surrogate consists in saying something like “it could be shown” or “scientists have shown” or “everybody knows” and treating these remarks as if they make a case when they’re simply evoking the possibility of a case. You do this all the time and then seem baffled when others don’t relinquish their position and simply accept what you’re claiming. You then go on to blame them for your own rhetorical hijinks. I get the sense, however, that this is the entire point. Like the goons in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange there is no aim in the discussion beyond stirring things up.
I don’t see where Graham used the word “bullying”. He said you engage in such a way that you perpetually put others on the defensive without it being clear what you’re claiming or getting worked up about. He’s right, you do this. But then for the fish that lives in water all its life I suppose it’s difficult to recognize that it lives in water. Likewise with your rhetorical mode of engagement. You were given every opportunity to concretely persuade me otherwise. I asked again and again for some concrete illustration. You didn’t give it and even told me it would be a waste of your time. Why then are you wasting my time on my blog by addressing me at all if you can’t extend the simple courtesy of outlining your position and not simply making vague assertions to the effect of “no it’s not true!” How you expect any discussion to be possible when the first thing out of your mouth is “you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” is beyond me. The silliest part is that you get all sulky when you’re called out on these things like somehow you’re a victim.
September 6, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Levi,
I’m on the way to a film so this won’t be very long. You are ascribing to Laruelle things that just aren’t true. Proving that to you by saying “look at these writings” is analogous to saying to someone who claims the sky is pink at noon to simply look at the sky at noon. I don’t disagree with you on the whole about the state of philosophy, just find the rhetoric over the top. I won’t respond to the anger baiting or your painting me as a goon. That’s just silly.
September 6, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Levi,
To be honest, I’m not sure why you’d think Brassier ‘falls into scientism’. He is very open about his affinity for Churchland’s work, but he breaks with Churchland precisely at the point of endorsing scientistic ’superempirical’ virtues that Chruchland thinks should replace other forms of normativity.
His point is that science helps us recognize that our phenomenological intuition is a radically restricted and impoverished reflection of the world it apprehends, and that through adopting the depersonalized cognition of scientific objectivity, we gain access to an almost kaleidoscopic plethora of cognitive avenues.
I just don’t see what is scientistic in any of this. Brassier may not have must time for questions of signs and culture and so on, but never does he make the crude gesture of claiming they are less real than physical reality.
My own attempts at non-philosophical readings of your work came in the infancy of both your theory and my own understanding of non-philosophy, and hence are really immature sketches. At the time, I was mostly trying to get some footing with non-phi, but not entirely certain of what to do with it or why. I have a much better idea now.
“So Laruelle’s non-philosophy is a variant of A.J. Ayer’s verificationism?”
No, I don’t think it could be further from verificationism which obviously lies on a correspondence relation. (Anthony was right to point out, I might add, that you seem to be confusing eliminativism and non-phi in this comment.) I can’t speak for Brassier or Laruelle, but as for my own understanding, I don’t think there is any good reason to treat concepts as pale ideal reflections that make reference with more or less accuracy to empirical phenomena. Concepts definitely add something to reality, they are real themselves and combine with material and social objects in ways that reorganize and reorient their relations. Concepts are real abstractions, in other words.
The effects I’m referring to are those that concepts exert when they are employed by cognitive systems, or information processors that achieve a certain level of reflexive self-modeling and self-selection. I know every philosophy produces effects; but philosophers seem far more concerned with whether their theories are right or wrong than with what those theories do when they are plugged into real cognition systems.
I’m not talking about scientific testing, at least not in the common sense. I’m talking about testing through use: what does seeing the world through onticological lenses do? Or eliminativist lenses? And so on. The theory is a real object, it lives in the real amongst other real objects, and depending upon the strength of its influence it will manifest a range of effects in relation to other objects. These effects are what I’m interested in, and I have no prejudice as to whether they are registered in textual or academic objects, or political and social objects, or artistic or scientific or religious or whatever other sort of object. The more contact with diverse regions of the real, the more we can learn about what concepts can do.
“Finally, isn’t there something potentially paralyzing about this critique of “authority”?”
Of course! I hope so, I hope it should be paralyzing – for those who rely on arguments from authority. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are folks who, compared to me, can speak authoritatively on their field. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the pretension that someone can say how things really are, that we should even care about how things really are, and finally, whether there is a way in which things ‘really are’ at all. Maybe this smells like anti-realism to you, but I’m not for a moment denying that things really are outside of thought and so on. If there is one thing I definitely take away from non-phi, though, it is the notion that the Real is indifferent to any specific theory we may develop about it, and while those theories are themselves real, given by the real, and produce real effects, there is no real value added in claiming one has the theory, or even that one can have such a theory. I think it would be far more powerful and beneficial if theorists were relentlessly speculative, not provisionally but essentially speculative.
“Doesn’t it all too easily become a form of engagement with theories others are building that pounds the table saying “no, no, no you’re proclaiming an absolute authority for your theory!” when in fact the researcher is focused in the way they’re focused because that’s what they happen to be working on at the time?”
No. If one denounces a theorist for attempting to claim sufficiency unto the real, that in no way undermines the content of the theory itself. Nor do I think such authoritative posturing is purely rhetorical. I think it is structural. For example, if you want me to subscribe to onticological philosophy, you have to convince me that there is a good reason to prefer it to other sorts of philosophy. But to persuade me on its usefulness or interest is not the same as to persuade me on its authority or correctness.
Working on a positive philosophical system should not require such recourse to authority, in my opinion. A theory is, as far as I’m concerned, more like a technology than the findings of a truth commission.
“For the non-phi this is a convenient advantage because they can show how any philosophy is guilty of its charges, while for the philosopher this creates a superego that forbids any theory building in much the same way that everyone during the 90s lived in terror of falling into ontotheology or “metaphysics” by proposing a positive theory.”
No one is prohibiting theory building – I’m building a theory or two myself. But the notion that a theory can more or less correspond to the way things really are implicitly supposes an understanding of the real that I simply cannot accept: namely, that there is an authoritative ‘way things really are’ at all.
I do have some interest in American pragmatism, but the problem is to what end does one employ concepts? Every use-value depends upon a project for which a given concept is more or less useful. I’m curious as to whether it is possible to use concepts (and other objects) without recourse to such an artificially imposed end… Such an endless and unsecured existence is what I’m after, and that precludes the pretense of an authoritative or intrinsically desirable theory/project.
September 6, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Hi Reid,
I’ve gotten distinctly the opposite impression from Brassier’s work. The sense I get is that the atomic level and the neuronal level are “true reality” and everything else is to be banished. I think this point has come out with special clarity among a number of his defenders who raise all sorts of questions as to whether trees are real. This, I believe, is scientism. The implicit subtext is that only particles and neurons are real. If the non-phi materialist were true to his word such a question could never arise for, as you say further down, there is no really real out there to begin with.
You write:
In many respects this is the OOO position. Concepts and theories are themselves objects or real things. However, when I made this point to you in the past, pointing out that OOO has already moved beyond the non-philosophical critique such that it is capable of developing a non-philosophical philosophy you told me that I simply couldn’t understand non-philosophy because I’m a philosopher and couldn’t grasp the more profound truth of non-philosophy, i.e., “you won’t understand until you convert.” So I get “cloned” and subject to all sorts of non-philosophical analysis, having all sorts of claims attributed to me that I do not even make and am told that because I am a philosopher I can’t even understand what is being claimed. Here your observations about correspondence truth are especially apropos. Who is making these correspondence claims about truth? Certainly not me! And this raises another point. In situating the philosophy as an object of non-philosophical analysis it seems that it has to be distorted in a variety of ways to fit the master-schema that allows the language game to be played.
You write:
Interesting, you make all these claims about cognitive systems and information processes while simultaneously claiming that you don’t adopt a correspondence theory of truth. On the one hand, you claim to reject the notion of “true reality” yet on the other hand you’re treating something in particular as true reality!
Once again this is the OOO theorist and I believe much more clearly stated and developed by OOO.
Um no, you should really try to avoid being cute, especially in your first sentence here. Read up a bit on Bateson’s theory of “double binds”. There are certain theoretical practices that are double binds or that have the form “are you still beating your wife?” Deconstruction was like this and I strongly suspect that non-phi is like this as well. Both of these theories purported to be fighting mastery. This is what they claimed at the level of their content. At the level of their form however, at the level of their practice, the former was the worst form of mastery and authoritarian discourse imaginable. Everything could be found guilty of ontotheology and everything got situated in this framework such that the only legitimate discourse became the repetition of the deconstructive gesture. Non-phi has all of exactly these sorts of resonances. I suspect that it is this hegemony and ability to master every other discourse is what unconsciously renders it attractive to some. By contrast, I think the real anti-authoritarian theoretical position consists in recognizing the provisionality of ones own discourse, the manner in which it is always “not-All”, while nonetheless speaking anyway. In other words, it is closer to Beckett than those “critical” theoretical stances that create an apparatus of capture that allows them to reveal what everyone always already knew anyway: the constitutive incompleteness of discourse. This is the Lacanian position: One continues to speak in the absence of a big Other that would guarantee their discourse. But perhaps to appease the deconstructivists and the non-phi folks we should institute a convention whereby every assertion has an asterisk beside it that functions as a proviso “this assertion is making no claim to being absolute, we readily recognize that an African tribe that has never encountered the modern world might believe a Coke bottle thrown from a plane is a gift/curse from the gods.”
Yet oddly in certain variants of materialist non-phi this assertion of an authoritative way in which things really are seems to be precisely what we’re getting. That’s my point. As an onticologist, I very much endorse treating theories at things and looking at what they do (though I see no reason to take the neurological leap you seem to take). However, in looking at what theories do, how they behave, it’s important not to take them at their word but look at what that rhetoric is authorizing for itself at the level of its actual practice. This is a good Zizekian point. Look not at how the ideology describes itself, but at what it actually does.
September 6, 2009 at 7:42 pm
But Anthony,
I have read a number of things by Laruelle! You seem to be under a mistaken impression of how dialogue works. It seems that you think you can just wave your hands and gesture wildly and this will get your point across. Also the imperative “read his work” is corrosive to discourse. First, the entire point of the discussion was “what makes it worth reading?” Second, it’s up to you to make the pitch. If you’re incapable of doing that– as it appears you are –fine. But don’t go shaking your first angrily at others when thinkers like Badiou and Derrida have themselves found Laruelle similarly mystifying and opaque. If you’re going to make a claim and advance a criticism it’s up to you to spell things out and explain to your interlocutor just what they’re missing. For example, it’s not enough to say that Laruelle says interesting things about science, mysticism, religion, and materialism. What are those things? Show me the money! Part of the problem here is that you begin from the projective a priori assumption that I’m unpersuadable and therefore there’s no point in spelling things out in all. This simply isn’t true at all. When Graham and I started talking we were diametrically opposed. I was the hardcore materialist arguing everything is relations and defending the Enlightenment project of critique. While I do not share his ontology, I did come to substantially change my views as a result of that discussion. Likewise, I was taking a hard materialist stance with respect to Meillassoux and the famous “correlationism debates”. Alexei, Mikhail and others led me to substantially revise my positions even if I don’t ultimately share their correlationist positions. N.Pepperell convinced me of the importance of reflexivity. It’s hard to know what you’re aiming at in your interventions or hoping to accomplish because you seem to just bluster and moan rather than spelling anything out.
September 6, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Reid,
I think this is ultimately the real problem with critique: it always claims to be preparatory, to be a precaution one undertakes to save philosophy from some imagined peril, and that once the critique is completed things will get underway. However, it never works this way. Critique becomes the aim itself and things never get underway. In this respect, critique is a bit like the reporting of Michael Jackson’s death. The problem isn’t that the news reports are false, but that they block everything else out on the airwaves. I do think, however, that there’s a bit of an illusion to critique. The critical project is based on an obsessional form of subjectivity that fantasizes about mastering all of the impediments that might occur along the way in advance. Here I think it is far healthier to think of philosophy as a conversation rather than a completed treatise. In evoking the figure of conversation I’m not talking about what good Mr. Rorty proposed and which Deleuze so rightly ridiculed with Guattari in What is Philosophy?. Rather I am talking of philosophy as a conversation in the sense of being always provisional, a bit wandering, uncertain in its formulations, subject to revision, and so on in much the same way that a conversation proceeds. To still speak in the face of uncertainty, without knowing what the outcome will be, and no longer imagining critical techniques that would free one from these uncertainties once and for all; which, incidentally, is exactly what the conclusion that there is no really real is: a form of mastery or knowing before one knows.
September 6, 2009 at 8:11 pm
“Who is making these correspondence claims about truth? Certainly not me!”
You are claiming that the world is made up of objects, and that hence your claim that ‘the world is made up of objects’ is correct, are you not?
“Interesting, you make all these claims about cognitive systems and information processes while simultaneously claiming that you don’t adopt a correspondence theory of truth. On the one hand, you claim to reject the notion of “true reality” yet on the other hand you’re treating something in particular as true reality!”
I’m not sure what you mean here. All I’m saying is that I can’t make an authoritative claim about the way things really are, not that I can’t make any claim at all. And as for there being no ‘true reality’, my point is that no way of giving reality itself can give it exhaustively – as in your barred object, which withdraws from every property and relation by which it is given.
“Non-phi has all of exactly these sorts of resonances. I suspect that it is this hegemony and ability to master every other discourse is what unconsciously renders it attractive to some.”
I really have to call bullshit here. If it seems that way to you, than I admit complete perplexity as to how such an understanding is possible. It sounds more like you’re pigeonholing it into your ready-made antithetical category without any regard for its actual traits.
“By contrast, I think the real anti-authoritarian theoretical position consists in recognizing the provisionality of ones own discourse, the manner in which it is always “not-All”, while nonetheless speaking anyway.”
This is what non-philosophy does – it is capable of making substantially identical claims to those of a given philosophical position, so long as these claims are transcendentally marked or registered as so ‘non-all’, or foreclosing the Real itself. For Laruelle (not for me or Brassier, however), philosophy essentially relies on this pretension to authority over the real, whereas non-phi can make the same claims so long as this pretension is actively recognized and suspended.
September 6, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Levi,
I can agree that the claim that ‘there is no really real’ is itself a claim which needs establishing, and thus if it it forced upon us as a condition of philosophical discourse it is a ‘form of mastery’.
However, I have a couple points to add with regard to your portrayal of critique. I will not dispute that some self-identified critical projects never get off the ground, and never get to carry out precisely what it is they are delimiting. This need not be determinative for the practice of critique as such however. It does not show us that we should not raise critical concerns, anymore than the various indiscretions of onto-theological metaphysics show that we should not do metaphysics.
The structure of discourse as such is one of constant revision: we put forward positions as true, reasons are demanded of them and given, criticisms are accepted and positions modified, alternative are posed, and the process begins over again. We should be wary of any position which attempts to undermine this process of revision, which seeks to make itself immune from the ordinary modes of criticism. This is the sense in which philosophy should be tentative, and like an ordinary conversation: it should not seek to undermine the ordinary structure of argument (Hegel is the paradigm example of a philosopher who fails on this account).
However, why can’t Critique abide by this maxim? Why must Critique be either all or nothing?
Critique has implications for philosophy, and this means that any revisions to it potentially force revisions in our philosophy. Why is this any different from the revision that such philosophy is open to anyway?
Yes we have to do critique before the rest of philosophy, but this is not an exclusively temporal sense of before, it rather indicates the direction of explanation. We can do critique and philosophy in parallel if we really like, we simply have to recognise that changes in critique can always result in changes in philosophy, if not vice versa.
September 6, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Why is there such a thoroughly aggressive and dismissive tone radiating from this discussion?
It seems that Anthony made a perfectly valid criticism about Levi’s generalization of Laruelle. Levi, it is not fair to for you to make a generalization about Laruelle and non-philosophy without any support, and then demand that Anthony provide support to prove his criticism is valid. There is enough truth to go around here. It is completely correct, it seems to me, to say that Laruelle is part of a line with Heidegger and Derrida, where philosophy claims that philosophy is at an end. However, it is unfair to claim that Laruelle is only a regressive textual analyst. A great deal could be gained from this discussion but it seems that Anthony is being personally attacked without cause. Levi, your tone as been dismissive from the start and this is only made worse by Graham’s useless attack from Manchester. A sort of philosophical/personal drive-by. Perhaps, we have reached the logical outcome of all the discourse whose only concern is to create different (and ridiculous) categories for all those we do not like (e.g. trolls, vampires, werewolves, smurfs, etc.) Beware when hunting monsters, I suppose.
September 6, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Levi,
Please stop with the insults and the insinuations. Taking this to the meta- level is neither helpful nor does it give a clear idea of what you want. An example is present in your recent comment where you bring in the ever shifting goal post for what would count as evidence or what would “show you the money” while seemingly holding yourself to different (I might add more reasonable standards when you tell me to read X and Y next to each other). I’ve stated repeatedly here and at AUFS what my goal has been. It was not to convince you that Laruelle has great theories, it was to say that Laruelle isn’t this thing that you are critiquing. I’ve responded to your accusation, an accusation you made without evidence or demonstration, and have tried, with the exception of some names that I have since apologized for, to be polite while having this conversation. Yet, even though you provided no evidence to refute, I’m the one who has to give you article length summaries of Laruelle’s work on ethics, religion, psychoanalysis, etc? Do you really think that’s reasonable? I expect you do see this, so can we drop this side of things?
My problem has been and continues to be that your are criticizing something that isn’t there. I don’t know what Laruelle you’ve read as you’ve told me, but obviously some of this misunderstanding (and that’s all I’ve ever called it, a misunderstanding is usually not a malicious charge) stems from the fact that most of his work isn’t translated and many of the French copies are hard to come by. This coupled with the fact that most of the English language work has been focused on his criticism of philosophy, well, yeah I get if that’s all you’ve come across you would think it’s a kind of philosophy-centric practice. Still, it’s wrong, and if you read Principes or the the Non-Marxisme book or his work on religion or his most recent book on generic science you’d see it isn’t that. Perhaps, as works begin to come out and if Laruelle is discussed then a common vocabulary will begin to form, this sort of thing will be less common. Still, I don’t think he’s going to be doing the kind of philosophy you want, but it is also not the kind you accuse it of being.
You can, of course, continue to perpetuate this misunderstanding if you want, but I’m going to continue say it is incorrect. If you want to continue to call me a goon or psychologize my positions, well, then it would suggest your commitment to dialogue is a overcome by your dislike of me.
September 6, 2009 at 11:21 pm
There appear to be a few contentions here, so if I may, I am going to try and sift them.
In the post itself, Levi claims that Laurelle is a dead end, regressive. This is later clarified: the problem is that, like so much of continental philosophy, his work is concerned with endless critique and endless textual analysis.
Anthony responds that in the first instance, Laurelle’s project does contain more than critique, and indeed, many positive theories. More vitally, non-philosophy is entirely different from the kind of textual analysis that characterises, for example, the work of Derrida.
With everything else removed this is the crux of the argument. Anthony, someone who has read a great deal of Laurelle’s corpus, believes this interpretation of his work is incorrect – indeed, it is not at all his philosophy. It is simply incorrect to ascribe ‘endless critique’. At the end of the day, this disagreement can only be settled properly with a reading of Laurelle himself. Is it not reasonable for someone to point out when something mistaken? Although at the high of the fighting here, APS might have been aggressive, how is the prescription to read a person more invalid? Lets imagine a situation where you yourself were being misunderstood – would not an acceptable remedy be to direct someone back to your texts? This isn’t corrosive to discourse – the evidence required to convince one of “what makes it worth reading?” should be in the fact that sufficient people find it interesting who you respect in our corner of the blogosphere.
September 7, 2009 at 12:18 am
Alex/Stellar Cartographies,
I suggest you examine the initial posts in this thread before you condemn me for my tone. Setting all that aside, the issue here is whether or not a particular philosophical orientation tends to obscure a number of other things. Think of a rhetoric as being like a flashlight in a dark cave. A certain area will be illuminated and brought into relief, other things will be plunged into darkness. Laruelle’s non-philosophy takes philosophies as its object, flashing the light on them, repeating the rut of the practice of philosophy being the self-absorbed analysis of various philosophies. I’m not making things up here. This is precisely how Laruelle outlines his non-philosophy. That is a move I object to. I do not believe the aim of philosophy should be the analysis of philosophies and I have a problem with any philosophical approach that tends to make philosophy primarily about other philosophies. It might be difficult to understand some of the tone in this discussion because I did not post a few of Anthony’s posts. Somehow I don’t think that being called a dick or the things that were said that weren’t posted are exactly conducive to friendly discussion, nor do I think it’s particularly conducive to friendly discussion to turn another person’s observations into straw men such as the claim that I’m simply objecting to jargon, or that somehow any reference to other philosophers is equivalent philosophical practice that is dominated by the analysis of other philosophers.
Reid,
I think you miss my point about discourses like non-phi and deconstruction being forms of mastery. Here I think Zizek’s critique of deconstruction completely hits the mark. Deconstruction claims to show how every discourse fails in its pretension of producing a metalanguage. The ironic thing is that in its philosophic practice it proceeds as if it has a metalanguage. This is precisely the problem with non-phi as well. What takes place in a non-phi analysis is a demonstration that every philosophy is based on a decision that divides the world into factum and datum. It formulates a metalanguage that allows it to situate any philosophy a priori, allows us to know at the outset what we’re always going to find. Again, go back to the flashlight metaphor above. Non-phi says, of course, that it won’t object to theory building, but this never takes place because non-phi is so busily situating every philosophy within its framework. In an earlier post you made a plea to treat theories as things that do things in the world, yet you seem to wish to avoid looking at the concrete things your own theory does in the world. You can’t have it both ways. The issue is whether or not a particular theoretical edifice practically prevents other forms of analysis from taking place. I believe that non-phi does.
As for your question about my ontology, yes I make the claim that the world is composed of objects. I suppose that within your framework that makes me guilty of some sort of theoretical authoritarianism. This is a perfect illustration of my criticism. Within the framework of your non-phi any affirmative or positive claim is immediately questionable as it is situated as being “authoritarian”. The implicit prohibition becomes “let no one make a claim about the world!” Now you will come back and say “but that’s not what non-phi is saying at all!!!” Such a rejoinder, however, would fail to distinguish between what a position says its it is doing and how it actually functions in the world as a theoretical practice. Look at how your statement rhetorically functions in our discussion here. I am now occupied with responding to that statement, with having to point out that a) my ontology is based on difference, and therefore b) there is nothing reductive or homogeneous about my objects, but rather they come in as many flavors as you might want. As a consequence of this style of critique, discussion has shifted, like the turn of a flashlight in a cave, to all of these meta issues and defenses against charges of authoritarianism, rather than the actual work of building. This is why I call critical techniques like deconstruction and non-phi particular sorts of rhetorical parlor tricks that allow one to master everything about them. For any positive claim anyone else makes, the non-philosopher can now say “ah ha! you’re making a positive claim and are thus guilty of hegemony!”
Deon,
I agree with everything you say in your post, but what you’re describing is different than the project of critique, no? I take it that “critique” has a far more robust sense than showing where there seems to be an inconsistency in an argument or where a concept fails to hold up. Rather, by critique I have in mind something like Heidegger’s destruction of the history of philosophy as a task that must be completed before one can engage in ontology or Derrida’s deconstruction of the entire Western tradition of ontotheology as a necessary condition for moving beyond that tradition. The sort of process you describe, as you note, is part and parcel of any conversation (“this isn’t quite working for reason x, y, and z, so let’s see if this other things would work.”)
Anthony,
Enough with the straw men. I am not asking you for dissertation length rejoinders or anything of the sort, simply a brief discussion of what it is that you’re talking about. It sounds to me that we’re both right here. My only experience with Laruelle so far is through his non-phi. At the outset of the discussion it seemed to me that you were suggesting that somehow I’m making things up when I say that Laruelle’s non-phi makes philosophy its object. But that is at the very heart of the non-phi project. This is what I’m objecting to. You are correct that I haven’t read any Laruelle in the French. All I’ve read are the pieces translated into English and Brassier and Mullarkey’s work on Laruelle, coupled with the stuff over at Speculative Heresy, Reid’s outstanding blog, etc. All of this has focused on the critical project of non-phi, which does sound like more of the same to me. When I say “more of the same” I don’t mean Laruelle is doing deconstruction, but that it’s the same exhausting focus on philosophical texts rather than theory building. Reid’s clarifications, no matter how much I admire his other work, in this thread and elsewhere haven’t done a lot to inspire confidence that I’m mistaken in my initial impression and that it is regressive and a dead end. Hopefully the positive projects you’re talking about will become available in English soon. I suspect that my French would have a hard time making it through Laruelle in the original.
September 7, 2009 at 12:41 am
I’ll just say that I don’t find you guilty of anything, I just think that you have produced some great concepts that do not require the restrictive theoretical form in which they are situated. If you like that form, good, go for it. I’m not trying to condemn you or your work, I’m not trying to critique it or denounce it, nor am I (or, I think, are Laruelle or Brassier) trying to denounce all positive philosophical work.
The point about authority is not the catch-all condemnation you seem to think it is, its simply a matter of oppositional posturing as an restrictive and limiting way of doing philosophy. On the contrary to the sort of negative critical position you seem to see in me, I’m far more interested in one which would be uninterested in opposing itself to any concrete positions, all the better to infiltrate and pilfer from them. If Brassier, for example, has a distaste for phenomenology or humanistic philosophies (and I don’t pretend to speak for him, this is my opinion), it is more a matter of a particularly useless set of concepts than an outright incorrect position.
September 7, 2009 at 12:51 am
Reid,
When you talk about what you see non-phi as doing I find its proximity to onticology uncanny. When I talk about a ToE or a GUT I’m talking about exactly the sort of pilfering you’re talking about and one that would allow one to use a variety of theoretical techniques without having to draw oppositional lines. However, whereas you talk about this in terms of authority, I talk about it in terms of hegemony. It’s a bit difficult, however, to see how the term “authority” couldn’t have negative connotations. I certainly would never describe phenomenology as containing a set of useless concepts. Rather, I think the problem with phenomenology is the manner in which it reterritorializes everything on the ego, consciousness, lived experience, and the human. The “de-hegemonization” of phenomenology then consists in liberating it from that reterritorialization so that all those fruitful concepts can be used without falling into the rut of its humanism or anthropocentric methodological way of proceeding.
September 7, 2009 at 1:22 am
Reid,
And I suppose I should clarify– though I’ve probably made the point already –one of the reasons that I’ve been hostile to the Brassier-Laruelle route is it seems to fall into the trap of treating scientific objects as the only real objects. I think we’ve already seen a lot of this in subsequent discussions online, where we see physics hegemonizing what counts and does not count as an object. I am not suggesting you’re guilty of this as you seem to be working with a very different set of issues. Nonetheless, I think this is a central problem with the Meillassoux-Brassier-Laruelle machine. Where it should be, as you’re suggesting, that we’re situated in the real from the outset (what I call “flat ontology”), instead we get scientificity hegemonizing all other discourses. What I want, by contrast, is an ontology robust enough to both make room for all these neat scientific objects and talk about things like signs, cultural phenomena, etc., without falling into the rut of sociobiology or neurocentrism.
September 7, 2009 at 2:22 am
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. How did this post, of all posts, hit fifty comments? This just goes to demonstrate Luhmann’s thesis that controversies, far from undermining social systems, are the very fabric through which social systems are communicatively held together… Here we have all these folks who don’t like each other very much nonetheless unable to withdraw from their engagement. Of course– and Anthony never believes me when I say this –I say this tongue and cheek. I’m sure we’d have a great time hanging out if we ever got a beer together and that at some level our potshots at one another have become a sort of “schtick” in the last three years… At least I hope so!
September 7, 2009 at 8:58 am
Online discussions have a kind of positive feedback loop of emotional intensity for a variety of reasons. I suspect its because they don’t have the kind of social venting mechanisms that sitting around and having a discussion over a beer do.
Levi,
I think you’ve misunderstood my point about Critique. I’m not trying to point to any particular kind of Critique (I have many problems with the Heideggerian/Derridean forms of it), but trying to get at the relationship between, say, the critique of ontology and ontology proper is.
The critique of ontology is not just the ordinary argument we have in doing ontology, where we compare different positions and provide criticisms and justifications of them. This process is very important, and we should do our utmost to avoid any attempts to undermine it.
The critique of ontology is the debate in which we attempt to establish the constraint upon ontology – the conditions that any ontology must meet and the resources it is allowed to use. This should come before ontology in a temporal sense. We should try to delimit what ontology is _before_ we engage in it. The relevant question is whether we should seek some absolute certainty in critique before we start doing what it prepares us for – i.e., ontology.
My point is just that the critique of ontology is subject to the same kind of revision through argument that ontology itself is. We can propose a provisional critique of ontology, which sets up the boundaries for doing ontology, develop an ontology, and then discover that the boundaries we set were wrong, this forces us to revise the whole thing. The fear of having to undergo such massive revision can prevent us from progressing from critique to ontology until we have apodictic certainty, but it needn’t do.
All I’m really trying to maintain is that regardless how any of the previous critical projects have miss-stepped or failed to get off the ground, that doesn’t excuse us taking an un-critical approach to ontology, because critique can be performed in the sensible way that ontology itself should be performed.
September 7, 2009 at 1:48 pm
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