Agenda & Interventions

NON-PHILOSOPHIE MAINTENANT : THEORIE ET PRATIQUES

Lieu : Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR

Date : 15.11.2003
Heure : 9h30 - 18h00

Cette conférence rassemblera des universitaires français, macédoniens et vénézuéliens pour débattre de la théorie et de la pratique de la Non-philosophie telle que définie par les écrits de François Laruelle, Professeur de philosophie à l’Université de Paris X - Nanterre.


La Non-philosophie est le nom d’une discipline intellectuelle autonome développée et ajustée par François Laruelle dans une série d’ouvrages publiés à travers ces deux dernières décennies.

Il ne s’agit surtout pas d’une anti-philosophie mais bien plutôt d’une nouvelle pratique de la philosophie unifiant trois axiomes fondamentaux : le Réel comme condition nécessaire mais non-suffisante pour la pensée, la Décision philosophique comme matériau contingent déterminable par le Réel, et la détermination non-philosophique de la Décision comme effectuation du Réel en fonction de la philosophie.

Cependant encore largement méconnue de l’Académie anglaise à l’exception d’une poignée de spécialistes, la pensée de Laruelle gagne lentement mais radicalement, internationalement, cette reconnaissance qui l’a longtemps desservi.



Le colloque, premier du genre dans le monde, réunira des chercheurs de différentes nationalités et diverses Institutions travaillant à explorer les voies dans lesquelles la méthode non-philosophique découverte par François Laruelle peut être développée par-delà du contexte immédiat des propres écrits de Laruelle.



Ce sera également l’occasion de la première rencontre officielle de l’Organisation non-philosophique internationale (ONPhI), une entité fondée sur l’espoir de coordonner les recherches non-philosophiques actuellement comprises isolement par des individus variés travaillant dans des Institutions disséminées partout dans le monde.




Intervenants :


Erik Del Bufalo, University of Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela:

‘Politics Without the World: Toward a Human Praxis of the Universe, Toward a Universal Theory of Democracy’.



Gilles Grelet, Université de Paris VIII-St. Denis & Collège International de Philosophie:
‘Son of Man, Brother of the People: Behold the Theorist’.



Katarina Kolozova, University of Skopje, Macedonia:

‘On the Non-Dichotomic Possibility of Thinking the Unity of a Non-Unitary Subject’.



François Laruelle, Université de Paris X-Nanterre:

‘Recent Developments in Non-Philosophical Theory’.



Sathya Rao,Université de Paris-X Nanterre, France:

‘Quine, Davidson and Laruelle: A Unified Theory of Translation and Interpretation’.



Anne Françoise Schmid, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon:
‘Epistemology and Non-Philosophy’.





Compte rendu :

Theatre Closed

The work of the non-philosopher François Laruelle is heralded as an entirely new approach to the practice of philosophy. Of course, no important philosophical movement avoids being termed ‘new’, either in the institutional sense of advancing philosophy as an academic discipline, or else in dealing with new questions and subject matter. Philosophy’s historical mission has always been to renew the raw materials of being and thought – in ethics, politics, economics, aesthetics, science, and so on. However, the claims of the world’s leading non-philosophers, which this CRMEP-sponsored event was intended to showcase, brought with it far more radical claims.

Laruelle’s opening address mounted a ‘problematic genealogy’ in their defence. Non-philosophy cannot answer the question – which purports to be its own question – of continuity, filiation, contiguity. ‘What is philosophy?’ is meaningless from this (non-) perspective, for if there is no place from which to posit the being of philosophy itself – Laruelle’s problematic is steadfastly post-topological – then the question is a non-problem, as much ‘for philosophy’ as for anything else. Indeed, the philosophical intentionality of Laruelle’s ‘presentation’ is not so much One-sided or abstract in the Hegelian sense as wholly non-existent from the synthetic/analytic, internal/external ‘point of view’. Philosophy is not limited by a system or world, and so cannot be said to bear a (non-)relation with the un-philosophisable. Non-philosophy is thus not the Other of philosophy, its impossible negation, or the death from which it eternally returns. Instead, the ‘non-’ of Laruellian relationality is to be taken in the uni-lateral, or ‘unilational’ sense, of a radically immanent One: a duality without sides.

This was bound to elicit some perplexed responses from the audience, several of whom seemed to be under the misapprehension that a rival definition of philosophy was being put forward, one that attempted to rethink ‘man’ in relation to ‘philosophy’. Surely this was a Young Hegelian move? Not so, responded Laruelle, since non-philosophy is not out to bind itself to worldly concerns. The problem of the identity of man, e.g. whether he is this or that historical subject, is seemingly a false dilemma of philosophy’s own making. Philosophy poses it so as to pretend to solve it on the speculative basis of its being-a-problem. Non-philosophy is instead the ‘displacement’ of problems, a ‘utopia’ where ‘contradictory hypotheses’ are not solved, but ‘cloned’. This is the transcendental ‘determination in the last instance’, a formula borrowed from Althusser, but here seemingly placed in the service of nothing so relatively positivist as class struggle in theory, but of ‘radical immanence’, which involves the ‘discovery of [...] human Messianism or immanent future’, but which looks more like future death, the end of speculative philosophy in toto.

In light of this nihilistic ‘revelation’ the day’s remaining speakers appeared to be weighed down by the unenviable balancing act of advancing consistent theoretical positions whilst constantly being ‘cloned’, so to speak, by Laruelle’s first-order heresy. Was this the un-presentable ‘point’ of the proceedings? Perhaps. At any rate the answer was only ever destined to transcend ‘conventional’ philosophical presentation. Would a ‘non-conventional’ presentation therefore amount to running around the room, wondered a facetious delegate?

Presentational difficulties were perhaps most marked in Sathya Rao’s paper, ‘Translating All in One’, which extended Laruelle’s concerns that non-philosophers should attend to the transformation of the academy, undemocratically secured by capital and the State. This drew obvious objections of parochialism. Philosophy, or what’s left of its ‘autonomy’ in British universities, hardly needs to be saved from the forces of law and order. The free market has already achieved that anarchic liberation fairly successfully itself. This led inevitably to the question of the interventionist dramaturgy of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), a non-worldly experimental front jointly set up by conference organiser Ray Brassier and Gilles Grelet, whose paper on Maoist Gnosticism was presented in abstentia. Was it not the case that INPhO was just another instance of the historical avant-garde seeking to upset the conservative equilibrium of contemporary philosophy? After all, how could an organisation that exists by way of a manifesto hope to elude being seen as a specific challenge to orthodoxy? As a philosophical objection this sounded rather flimsy, like suggesting that Kant’s transcendental critique is invalidated by virtue of the philosopher’s membership of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, it at least served to underscore the dividing line between Grelet’s non-philosophical Gnosticism, wholly Real, and the rational and wholly ‘reasonable’ philosophical agnosticism of the audience.

For Grelet, the task for thought – ‘theorism’ or ‘theory of rebellion’ – is to explode the speculative traditions that put thought to work and make it subject to the demands of instrumental reason. Thought of the Real cannot be ‘cashed out in words’, inscribed didactically in statements. Clearly Grelet is drawing here on Lardreau and Jambet’s L’Ange in seeking some sort of ‘unholy alliance’ between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Of course, both psychoanalysis and philosophy establish themselves institutionally by positing the irrational or the unthinkable as the very condition of their own institutional rationality. In the case of psychoanalysts this grain of the real then becomes objectified through clinical practice (of which Grelet is undisguisedly contemptuous), while in philosophy it becomes the transcendental horizon of thought, being, truth, etc. Moreover it becomes, in either case, the realm of the Master, with the philosopher and psychoanalyst as the purveyors and the economic paymasters of Culture and institutions. In the Real, however, these are quite arbitrary distinctions.

The attempt to carve reality up into separate realms – Real, Imaginary, Symbolic – as Lacan does in order to manage pathology, or take a distance from the State, as does Badiou with his definition of the subject, amounts to a strategy that endorses the classical separation of philosophy (rational) from anti-philosophy (irrational). The marriage of these two formally distinct realms would thus preclude the religious revelation characteristic of both. But is this what Grelet is aiming for? In a unilateral universe where the Real has taken over everything any marriage or dualistic pairing of supposedly antagonistic bedfellows is meaningless. The Master cannot be destroyed, only its semblance. Is Grelet’s real aim here, then, rather than unilateralising the philosophy/psychoanalysis pairing under the rubric of ‘non-religion’, the unilateralisation of philosophy and science, or perhaps science and religion? With this dualism in mind it would appear that INPhO’s real ‘wager’ belongs not to the domain of anti- or non-philosophy (non-religion) as such, but to the one most suited to the absolute exclusion of all metaphysical problems of identity: mathematics. As Laruelle admits, it is in mathematics that the problems of creation are invalidated, and where the world, within which we include all its violence and struggle, assumes the figure of a ‘phantasy’.

JASON BARKER