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LARUELLE DOES NOT EXISTAnthony Paul Smitha

a La Salle University, Department of Religion, 1900 W. OlneyAvenue, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USAPublished online: 10 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Anthony Paul Smith (2014) LARUELLE DOES NOT EXIST, Angelaki: Journal of theTheoretical Humanities, 19:2, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2014.950847

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In the beginning there is Black – Man andUniverse, rather than a philosopher and theWorld.

[…]

Man, who carries the Universe with him, iscondemned, without knowing why, to theWorld and to the Earth; and neitherthe World nor the Earth can tell him why:The Universe alone responds to him, bybeing black and mute.

Black is neither in the object nor in theWorld, it is what man sees in man, and thatin which man sees man.

Black isn’t merely what man sees inman, it is the only “colour” inseparablefrom the hyper-intelligible expanse of theuniverse.

Solitude of the man-without-horizon who seesBlack in Black.

The Universe is deaf and blind, we cando nothing other than love it and assist it.Man is the being who assists the Universe.

[…]

No light has ever seen universe black.

[…]

See black! Not that all your suns have fallen –they have already returned, only slightlydimmer – but Black is the “colour” thatfalls eternally from the Universe onto yourEarth.

François Laruelle, “Universe Black in theHuman Foundations of Colour” 402–03,408

Laruelle does not exist.François Laruelle, “Non-Philosophy,Weapon of Last Defence” 244

the difficulty of non-philosophy

T he first time I met François Laruelle was inRome at a conference being hosted by the

Centre of Theology and Philosophy (housed inthe University of Nottingham’s Department ofTheology and Religious Studies). It was, to besure, a strange group of people gathered there,mere miles from the Vatican. A number of phi-losophers, theologians, and other intellectuals(academic and otherwise) had come together

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ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 19 number 2 june 2014

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/14/020001-11 © 2014 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2014.950847

EDITORIALINTRODUCTION

anthony paul smith

LARUELLE DOES NOTEXIST

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under the banner of “The Grandeur of Reason.”The title was a reference to a line from thenPope Benedict XVI’s infamous “RegensburgAddress,” where he held up the merging ofChristianity and Europe as divine providence.I was loosely affiliated with the Centre, as Iwas studying with Philip Goodchild who was astaff member there at the time, and becausemy own work straddles the line of philosophyand theology proper, albeit in an aconfessionalmode.

Laruelle was present as a keynote speaker,one of many planned keynote speakers meantto speak alongside and in conversation with pro-minent Christian theologians like JohnMilbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and GrahamWard. But in the end, one by one SlavojZizek, Quentin Meillassoux and Iain HamiltonGrant dropped out until only Laruelle andGiorgio Agamben remained to speak from anon-Christian perspective. And it was indeedstrange to find Laruelle here; after all he is argu-ably the most trenchant critic of a certain kindof self-sufficiency found in philosophical andtheological universalism that has set in like rotat the very foundations of European thought.But at the time the Centre of Theology and Phil-osophy had attracted a number of students andconferees who were not in lockstep with thisvision enthusiastically embraced by the confer-ence organizers, and though that heterogeneousmoment passed and the culture changed dra-matically over the years, that year in Romebristled with difference, conflict, and possi-bility; the presence of Laruelle among this con-tingent of heretics was a testament to that.

Having read some of Laruelle and the littlethat had been written about him in English byRay Brassier and John Mullarkey, I wasexcited to meet him. With my clumsy Americantongue I nervously introduced myself overdinner, told him I had been reading his workand showed him my copy of Philosophie etnon-philosophie (his 1989 work which hasrecently been translated by Univocal Publish-ing). He looked at me with playful pity andresponded, “Un livre tres difficile.”

It’s true that I found the book difficult then,and though I understand it a great deal better

now, some five years later, new readers to Lar-uelle often express their frustration with the dif-ficulty of his work. While it is no more difficultthan any other philosophies that attempt tocreate a new way of thinking, and in so doingcome up against our standard syntaxes(I would include here thinkers as diverse asHusserl, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Deleuze),non-philosophy is nevertheless new for manyanglophone readers. The syntax, the vocabulary,the use of concepts don’t hang in the air in thesame way as terms like deconstruction or thebody without organs, or the ways in which settheory has been used by Badiouians. Thoseapproaching Laruelle for the first time mayfeel as if they have had the wind knocked outof them, becoming lost amidst his more techni-cal, abstract works like Philosophies of Differ-ence and Principles of Non-Philosophy. Theimpetus for this volume, then, has been toprovide a number of explicatory works on Lar-uelle’s non-philosophy, translations of non-phil-osophy into the languages of analyticphilosophy, German Idealism, religious mysti-cism, and others. For example, Laruelle’s keyconcept of the Principle of Sufficient Philos-ophy is explicated here by Rocco Gangle usingthe work of Robert Brandom, the famous Pitts-burgh-based American analytic pragmatist, inhis “The Theoretical Pragmatics of Non-Philos-ophy: Explicating Laruelle’s Suspension of thePrinciple of Sufficient Philosophy with Bran-dom’s Meaning-Use Diagrams”; while EugeneThacker’s “Notes on the Axiomatic of theDesert” unpacks Laruelle’s concept of radicalimmanence using the tradition of desert mysti-cism, and in so doing shows Laruelle’s majordifferences with Michel Henry and Deleuze interms of thinking immanence.

Along with these explicatory works thisspecial issue hopes to show the varieties ofnon-philosophy, the way non-philosophy canoperate when its methods and concepts aretaken up by someone other than Laruelle orwhat he sometimes half-seriously, half-jokinglyrefers to as the “Laruelle-subject.” Includedhere are texts by thinkers who have beenworking alongside Laruelle in some capacityfor a number of years. Katerina Kolozova, for

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example, a Macedonia-based philosopher whohas also taught and studied in France and theUSA, has used the methods and concepts ofnon-philosophy in her work in political philos-ophy and gender studies. Her “Violence: TheIndispensible Condition of the Law (and thePolitical)” deploys non-philosophy’s con-ceptions of unilaterality and the last instanceto think through the problem of violence asarticulated through Walter Benjamin and CarlSchmitt (who have been instrumental for laterattempts within radical philosophy to accountfor and think through violence). Anne-Fran-çoise Schmid and Armand Hatchuel, by con-trast, have put Laruelle’s work in what wouldnormally be called the philosophy of scienceand epistemology in dialogue with interdisci-plinary projects around the study of Concept-Knowledge (C-K) Design Theory with their“On Generic Epistemology.” Their essay aimsto think beyond the usual demand for epistem-ology to be “critical” to an epistemologybecome “fictional,” from the “criteria of scienti-fic nature” to the “identity of science.” In sodoing they expand upon Laruelle’s work in sofar as they spell out how his theory plays outin a practice that is not philosophical. Ofcourse non-philosophy is already a practice initself, but here it is put into practice within anew field, and within a collaborative scientificresearch project.

However, in addition to these other non-phi-losophical voices, it also seemed important to letthe voice of the inventor of non-philosophyspeak, and so four essays written or co-writtenby Laruelle have also been included. Each ofthese has been chosen because of the way inwhich it intervenes in more familiar debateswithin ethics, theology, and gender studies,and the first two show where Laruelle has gonein his recent work with a more intentionalengagement with quantum physics. The firsttwo of these essays were originally delivered aslectures at two separate Nottingham Centre ofTheology and Philosophy events. The first,“Principles for a Generic Ethics,” was deliveredon 5 March 2010 at a workshop entitled “Fran-çois Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy: Theology,Gnosticism, and Theory.” This event, co-

organized by Aaron Riches and me in muchthe same spirit of productive adversarialexchange as the Rome conference, brought Lar-uelle to Nottingham for a day in which aboutfifty students and others participated. After Igave a short introduction to non-philosophy,Laruelle delivered his paper, and this was fol-lowed by a roundtable discussion with PhilipGoodchild, John Milbank, and John Mullarkey.1

The paper examines the Kantian ethical themeof means and ends under the non-philosophicalrubric of the generic. In the course of the essayLaruelle argues for a return to seeing humanbeings as simple means, but a means rethoughtand revalorized: means placed under the ulti-matum of protection. In the course of explicat-ing this new conception of means he toucheson a number of issues, foremost among thembeing the place of technology. Rather than theusual Heideggerian hysterical fear of technologi-cal encroachment, or the exuberant naive opti-mism of a Kurzweilian embrace of technologyas the saviour of humanity, Laruelle maps outof a fusing of means (technology) and thesubject under the regime of the subject.

“A Science of Christ?,” translated by AaronRiches, was also first delivered at a NottinghamCentre of Theology and Philosophy event, “TheGrandeur of Reason” conference discussedalready. The essay, which touches on themesexplored in more depth in his currently forth-coming Christo-Fiction, was originally pub-lished in the conference volume entitled TheGrandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition andUniversalism. It is reprinted here with thekind permission of the editors and the press,and I want to especially thank Aaron Richesfor securing that permission. The translationhere has been slightly amended to bring someof the terms in line with what have becomethe established translations of technical terms.The focus of the essay explores the connectionbetween messianity (and the more traditionaldiscourses of messianism) and scientific prac-tice. In the course of the essay Laruelle makeshis understanding of science clearer, showingit as a general name for a kind of human prac-tice, as well as discussing the traditional Chris-tian theological problem of the incarnation

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where, for orthodox Christianity, the humanand the divine are taken to dwell withoutmixing or separation within the person ofChrist.2 While Laruelle clearly signals that hedoes not accept the authority of Christianity,he nonetheless uses the tradition of thinkingthe incarnation in order to think through therelationship of two forms of law, Logos andTorah. In this way the essay is incrediblywide-ranging, though in a subtle way, touchingupon the nature of science, the nature of reli-gious discourses, the political problem of theauthority of law, and, of course, the nature ofphilosophy itself.

The third essay, “Sexed Identity,” translatedby Nicola Rubczak, is co-written with Anne-Françoise Schmid and explores the implicationsof non-philosophy for thinking through thequestions of sex and gender. The essay was orig-inally published in French in 2003 in the Mace-donian journal Identities: Journal for Politics,Gender, and Culture and is published herewith the kind permission of the editors andthe press. In terms of the vocabulary he uses,Laruelle’s non-philosophy often appears to beall-too-philosophical and so all-too-misogynistic.Take, for example, the central concept “Man-in-person,” which is in part an effect of the Frenchlanguage but is perhaps not just an effect. Thisessay goes some way towards showing the femin-ist impulses within non-philosophy and theways in which it already resists phallocentricphilosophical language. In this essay Laruelleand Schmid attempt to show the ways inwhich non-philosophy separates the human(which goes, not without problems, under thegeneric name of Man, referring to species-being) from the subject. For a non-philosophicaltheory of the human must proceed without anytranscendental attribute, including those ofgender and sex, while the subject may indeedundergo sexuation. This is the non-philosophi-cal attempt to think a universal that actually isuniversal, rather than a universal which takessome particular as the universal; though inrecent years Laruelle and Schmid have bothreferred to this conception with the term“generic” rather than “universal.” This shortessay shows the ways in which Laruelle’s non-

philosophy both shares many of the sameimpulses of contemporary radical philosophy,feminism included, and diverges from them,as Laruelle and Schmid both posit philosophicalsexual difference as something to be liberatedfrom in the name of feminist struggle. Therelationship of non-philosophy to gendertheory has been significantly expanded byKaterina Kolozova and interested readersshould see her Cut of the Real: Subjectivityin Poststructuralist Philosophy (ColumbiaUP, 2014), including the preface written by Lar-uelle where he advances the argument here bythinking the generic identity of the human as“queer.”

The final piece, “Theorems on the GoodNews,” translated by Alexander R. Galloway,is included to showcase Laruelle’s use of other,more experimental genres of writing in thepursuit of non-philosophy. The piece was orig-inally published in the first issue of the journalLa Decision philosophique in 1987, which wasthe home for many of Laruelle’s more exper-imental pieces as well as essays by others inthe non-philosophical collective. The theoremspresented here touch on many of the sameissues present in the other essays, especiallythe Greek and Judeo-Christian origins of philos-ophy and the identity of the human. The per-formance of non-philosophy ought not belimited to the genre of philosophical writing,but may follow Laruelle’s own example of exper-imental, poetic writing and even go furtherafield into less discursive and more performativegenres of the manifestation of thought.

the black cows of philosophy

But why give any attention to non-philosophy atall? Laruelle claims that one of the reasons forthe negative move of non-philosophy, which isonly one aspect of the non-philosophicalstance, is because philosophy is a harassing dis-course for human beings and other creatures.Philosophers, like the majority of humanbeings, are not very often kind to otheranimals. Within philosophy we see that all toooften the animal is either a part of thesubject–predicate dyad (the famous example of

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the “rational animal”) or a polemical and some-times humorous metaphor (for example,Badiou’s description of Sarkozy as the “RatMan,” which was perhaps more offensive torats than Sarkozy himself). Like humanbeings, animals are mere objects to shiftaround the linguistic field of philosophy. Theyare so rarely ever shown as already-manifest oras something which is lived, another way tosay “radically immanent,” but these humansand other animals only exist as yet anothermirror for philosophy to show itself in. Theanimal is made to reflect the philosophy speak-ing about it and in being so rendered theanimal is no longer lived, she no longer has anidentity except as a mirror for philosophy. Anidentity which is not one.

And here enters the cow, an animal whosereal suffering on an industrial level has veryrarely been mitigated and often then only atthe demands and insights of human beingswhose empathy seems strange and misplacedto the wider populace. Philosophers don’toften talk about real cows, but after Hegelthey seem like American Midwestern highschool students, obsessed with cows at night.No doubt our philosophers have less cruel inten-tions than pushing the poor beasts over whilethey sleep, but instead they seek to use theimage of a black cow at night to try andknock down some philosopher they deem tobe too stupid or naive to be worthy of muchattention.

The reference to Hegel’s famous veiled dis-missal of either Fichte, Schelling, or both is alltoo clear in Harman’s own not-at-all veiled dis-missal of Laruelle: “Laruelle’s One is not thenight, but the daylight in which all cows areblack.”3 While the reference is clear, themeaning of Harman’s last line is far fromclear. To place it within its context the readerneeds to know it was found in a review of Lar-uelle’s Philosophies of Difference (originallypublished in 1986 and published in Englishtranslation in 2010). The review itself ultimatelyfails to live up to the promise and demands of aphilosophical review, as Harman barely eventakes time to summarize the text, providingalmost no citations from the book itself, and

uses up most of the space outlining a bizarrevision of philosophy where contemporaryFrench philosophers put themselves forwardto sit in a “Supreme Court of French thinkers.”Harman shows that he lacks even basic famili-arity with Laruelle’s work, claiming that non-philosophy belongs to the tradition announcingthe “end of philosophy” (something Laruelleexplicitly rejects in a number of his works, butmost forcefully in the recently translatedStruggle and Utopia at the End Times of Phil-osophy), but still seems to think he has foundthe gotcha moment in his concluding paragraphwhich I quote in full for context:

But even arrogance is forgiven when it comesfrom the great illuminators. And here wereach the third and most serious obstacle tothe reception of Laruelle’s work. For it isnot at all clear that his central insight is ofvalue. First, it can be questioned whetherwe really have a direct experience of theOne at all – yet this is the whole foundationof Laruelle’s often extreme claims. Second,he gives no proof for the assertion that hisis a different sense of the One from that ofthe neo-Platonic philosophers. And finally,even if Laruelle can handle these objections:so what? What good would it do to installan opposition between the One as a unilateral“determination in the last instance” and thecosmos of difference where the “larvae”become entangled in their pointless games?Laruelle’s One is not the night, but the day-light in which all cows are black.4

With his “so what?” Harman has opened up adangerous path for philosophers to judge them-selves by. For, if Harman were braver, he wouldhave to go on to ask what ultimately is the valueof any philosophy, any theory at all once youtoss aside even the academic play of “handlingobjections.” But, moreover, there is an interest-ing betrayal of language in his condemnation.He begins by saying that arrogance is forgivenwhen it comes from great illuminators andthen goes on to speak of Laruelle’s conceptionof the One as the greatest illuminator, daylight.Harman reveals the all-too-philosophical con-vertibility or amphibology of illumination andobfuscation here and he does so without

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seeming to realize his betrayal, covered as it inhis drive to pen a clever line, to show himselfthe clever philosophical stylist.

What is revealed here though? Ultimately Iam not bringing up Hegel, Harman, and blackcows in an introduction to an issue on Laruelleand non-philosophy to be perverse. Nor am Isimply participating in an aggressive philoso-phical battle for territory, which good taste dic-tates we hide from the pages of our journals,keeping it for snide remarks at conferences orstatus updates on social media. I bring upthese two very standard philosophers, Hegeland Harman, because the black cow can helpus to see – not illuminate, not elucidate, butsee with a simple vision – something about Lar-uelle’s non-philosophy. It isn’t that Laruelle isthe great illuminator, nor that he is the greatobfuscator, as this reversibility of a light thatilluminates and a light that blinds is just theconstitution of the usual philosophical subjectgoing all the way back to Plato’s philosopher-martyr who escapes from the cave of thisworld. Drew S. Burk shows this reversibilityof illumination and obfuscation in his “WithOne’s Eyes Half-Closed, a Particle of Laruelle,”explicating non-philosophy’s relationship tostandard philosophical aesthetics by looking toLaruelle’s writings on photography. Burkshows that Laruelle does not try to illuminateor obfuscate in his readings of other thinkers,artists, and materials, but instead tries to see a“particle” of them. This vision happens innon-philosophy in a way akin to the manner inwhich photographers do not elucidate or obfus-cate a subject in their photos, but instead createfictions, a new identity that is not simplyrepresentation.

But who knows what Harman really meantwith his clever line? After all, I doubt he isdenying the existence of black cows. But if wewere to do that thing he loves so well and specu-late, then it seems reasonable to assume he isclaiming that Laruelle’s critique of the philos-ophies of difference rests solely upon a newvalorization of the Same, that Laruelle’s One isakin to the conception of the Absolute thatHegel mocked in his day. And, again, Harmanwould be wrong, but would accidentally

illuminate something about Laruelle’s project:namely, his theory of identity qua radical imma-nence and the ways in which this conception ofidentity has shaped Laruelle’s engagement witha host of intellectual problems, as well as theengagement of those who have come after Lar-uelle and attempted to take up non-philosophyin their own work. Rather than providinganother iteration of the general introduction tonon-philosophy – a general introduction whichmany of the authors here already include – therest of this introduction will quickly describeLaruelle’s conception of identity qua radicalimmanence and the way in which this con-ception lays the theoretical foundation for anengagement with a myriad of intellectual pro-blems, both by Laruelle himself and by otherswho have taken up non-philosophy in theirown way.

meditation on the non-black cow

So what exactly is the aim of Laruelle’s non-phil-osophy if not elucidation of past philosophersnor their misanthropic obscuring? To get ananswer to this question let’s revisit the originalphilosophical reference to the black cow. Thefamous line comes, of course, from the prefaceto Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit where hewrites:

Dealing with something from the perspectiveof the Absolute consists merely in declaringthat, although one has been speaking of itjust now as something definite, yet in theAbsolute, the A = A, there is nothing ofthe kind, for there all is one. To pit thissingle insight, that in the Absolute every-thing is the same, against the full body ofarticulated cognition, which at least seeksand demands such fulfilment, to pal off itsAbsolute as the night in which, as thesaying goes, all cows are black – this is cogni-tion naively reduced to vacuity.5

Above we speculated that Harman means to cor-relate this risible conception of the Absolutewith Laruelle’s conception of the One.

Well, first of all let’s be clear about Laruelle’sconception of the One in order to show its

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radically different character to the Absolute ofGerman Idealism. We can find one of his mostdirect statements on the One in a short pieceLaruelle wrote to Deleuze after the publicationof What Is Philosophy?, where Deleuze andGuattari both lauded Laruelle’s Philosophyand Non-Philosophy and raised some questionsabout his project. In this piece, entitled simply“Letter to Deleuze,” he apes the style ofSpinoza and it is perhaps owing to this stylisticparroting that Laruelle is so direct when hewrites:

By One, I describe an individual that is absol-utely finite or stripped of attributes or of phi-losophical decisions, that derives its essencefrom its identity without which it would benecessary to express it in a universal attri-bute; that is to say a last instance that is notfinite and constituted by a universal collec-tion of individuals, but which is immediatelya multiplicity of individuals that know them-selves to be multiple and solitary withoutever forming a collection or a universality.6

The conception of the One Laruelle is puttingforth is not at all an Absoluteness of the Same,but instead a way of thinking identity which isradically immanent to itself, without anyrecourse to transcendental attributes to overde-termine this radical identity. In slightly lessabstract terms, and to return to our black cow,this is a cow black in itself, without its blacknessbeing determined by something outside of itself.To think the identity of the cow without simplyturning the cow into a map of its tastiest meats:has a philosopher ever thought like that? Has aphilosopher ever thought a black cow that is inthe midst of life, a lived black cow?

Of course, Laruelle has philosophical prede-cessors for his conception of identity quaradical immanence, and interestingly one ofthose predecessors was Fichte, who was perhapsthe target of Hegel’s original clever remarkalong with Schelling. Even as the impact ofGerman Idealism on contemporary Continentalphilosophy continues to be felt in thinkers col-lected under the banner Speculative Realism,Fichte remains a much-maligned thinker,usually seen as a stepping stone to either

Schelling or Hegel. But Laruelle is not usual inhis philosophical engagement, and just as hewas one of the few writing in French aboutDerrida in the 1970s so he is one of the few tovalorize the work of Fichte. After all, accordingto Laruelle, he and Fichte share a certain identityin common as peasant philosophers. From theages of eight to fourteen Laruelle used to lookafter the cows on his grandparents’ farm, andto shock his Parisian students – who probablyhad never been in any physical proximity to acow – claimed to be the only philosopher alongwith Fichte to do so. This is not the only thingthat Laruelle shares with Fichte, as AlexanderGalloway shows in “The Autism of Reason.”There, Galloway places Laruelle within theKantian tradition and shows that Laruelleshares Fichte’s strong interest in the a priorirealms of thought, rather than Kant’s mixedapproach, to explicate Laruelle’s relationship tothe traditional philosophical problem of “firstprinciples.”

Galloway’s piece is very useful for under-standing Laruelle’s appreciation of Fichte.This appreciation is made clear when Laruellewrites that the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre (trans-lated into English as the Science of Knowledgebut which could also be translated with thegerund Science of Knowing) provides “one ofthe most lucid positions, one of the most beau-tiful solutions to the problem of philosophy.”7

While Laruelle denies that non-philosophy is asimple neo-Fichteanism, he does think along-side Fichte’s principles of radical identityexpressed as I = I. In Principles of Non-Philos-ophy Laruelle compares his own theory of iden-tity writing that, from the perspective of non-philosophy, thinking from the One wouldmean not I = I but I-in-I. What he means bythis is simply an identity taken within itself,and so he actually moves away from the subjec-tivism of an I oriented philosophy, or a subjec-tivism, and instead thinks this abstract One asidentity that is neither subject nor object in itsrepresentation. He summarizes this movingwith and then away from Fichte, writing:

For Friends of the earth and Friends of Ideas,the duality of Is which know themselves to be

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free and those Is which take themselves asthings or substances, we substitute theduality of One(s) that think themselves“objectively” as absolutely-not-objects, asradical immanence, and One(s) that perceivethemselves in a philosophical-all-too-philoso-phical manner as transcendence anddistance.8

So a dyad of a real One and a real One that hal-lucinates itself as transcendence under a philo-sophical illusion. To illustrate the meaning ofthis, let’s turn one last time to our black cow.

Hegel’s original complaint about the night inwhich all cows are dark refers to the ways inwhich philosophies of the Absolute couldprovide no meaningful knowledge of the iden-tity of various things since, from the perspectiveof the Absolute, all was the same, all was one.Laruelle’s attempt to think from the One isnot making the same statement. Let us beclear: Laruelle’s claim is not that all is one,that all is the same. That would be to turn iden-tity into a meta-object, a kind of set of all setscontaining within itself all the forms of actualindividuals. The status of identity is actuallysomewhat closer to Harman’s daylight inwhich all cows are black. But not where blackis an attribute, but rather the black which notranscendental attribute, no attribute with anydistance (like “colour”), has ever touched. Sothe daylight in which philosophers gaze uponthe cow, carving it up in their minds as thebutchers they are along dotted lines of attri-butes, thinking that they then know the cow.But that’s easy enough to think, that’s just theway we break apart the world in order to formsome mastery over it and that philosophy alltoo often does not advance beyond this formof thought is not something to be lauded for itdoes not respond to the true challenge ofthought to know an identity in itself. Even aswe carve up the cow she, like the universe Lar-uelle speaks about in the epigram to this intro-duction, “responds to him, by being black andmute.”9 The daylight in which all cows areblack, yes, for Laruelle’s central claim is thattheory must be practised as a rigorous sciencewhich thinks the true identity of things, thething as radically immanent to itself. Thus

one, whether a cow or a human, is “neither asubstance nor an act, but an identity whoseentire consistency is inherence or immanence(to) itself.”10 Thinking from this level ofethical, real abstraction is what Laruelle aimsto do.

varieties of non-philosophy

Of course, for Laruelle himself, the main focuswill be on the identity of the human. Both as aproblem and an “answer without a question,”by which he means that the human is “nolonger a question philosophy dares still pose,to say nothing of trying to answer it.”11 InStruggle and Utopia at the End Times ofPhilosophy he makes clear this “non-huma-nist” orientation of non-philosophy writing:“Non-philosophy is an attempt at a reply toperhaps the most determining if not uniquequestion of science fiction and gnosis: shouldwe save humanity? and what do we meanby humanity?”12 But one of the purposes ofthis special issue, as stated above, is to showthe various uses others have made of non-phil-osophy. So, must we stay within Laruelle’snon-humanist paradigm, which must necess-arily always risk a return of a simple philoso-phical humanism? In response to a question Iposed to him, asking whether non-philosophyis simply what Laruelle has written orwhether it is a method or practice thatothers can take, he said:

Laruelle does not exist. There is a “Laruelle”base for non-philosophy. There is a subject-agent, a contributor, a manufacturer, butthat’s all. A proletarian because the struc-tures need to be sustained by a concrete indi-vidual. Non-philosophy too. Non-philosophyis not what I’ve written even though that is astyle. It’s still what I have written in so far asI identify myself with humankind.While philosophy identifies itself with thephilosophical tradition, myself, I back awayfrom that identification: it’s simplyhumankind.13

While taking Laruelle’s work as a base orground, John Ó Maoilearca is one of those

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who has taken non-philosophy furthest inEnglish. His use of Laruelle in Philosophyand the Moving Image: Refractions ofReality extended non-philosophy into thearea of film-philosophy, while here in hisessay “The Animal Line: On the Possibilityof a ‘Laruellean’ Non-Human Philosophy” hequestions whether or not the non-humanismof Laruelle can be used to rethink the identityof the animal. In this way Ó Maoilearcanot only moves towards a new variety ofnon-philosophy but also makes an importantcontribution to the field of animalstudies, arguing for a kind of empatheticanthropomorphism.

These varieties of non-philosophy are notnecessarily “new non-philosophies,” but whatLaruelle hopes will be “new effectuations” ofnon-philosophy. Writing in Struggle andUtopia at the End Times of Philosophy, Lar-uelle discusses at length the possibility ofother variants of non-philosophy and writesthat any non-philosophical collective (thoughhe is speaking specifically about the Organis-ation non-philosophique internationale(ONPHI)) “is not the re-foundation of non-phil-osophy, or even ‘other non-philosophies’, butrather the power of invention of disciplines as‘non.’”14 The “non” of “non-philosophy” isnever the full negation of philosophy, butrather its generalization or being madegeneric. And so the power of the invention ofvarious other non-disciplines speaks to thepower of generalizing those disciplines. In thisvein my contribution, “Against Tradition toLiberate Tradition: Weaponized Apophaticismand Gnostic Refusal,” is one step in the continu-ing development of a non-theology. By untyingthem from their being moorings to a transcen-dent conception of tradition, I aim to show theways in which generalizing theological formsof thought can lead to a way to use theologyand religious thought in ways that allow us tounderstand the power of abstraction in creaturallife.

But not every variety of non-philosophy willdevelop in ways that avoid conflict. Laruelle,too, recognizes this in Struggle and Utopia atthe End Times of Philosophy, writing:

we ultimately find philosophical and doc-trinal conflicts of interest traversing all thegroups working under this label of non-phil-osophy (including even its inventor if we takeinto account each book on non-philosophyseparately) and which are the annunciatorsof future divides. The divides always have atheoretically objective appearance withinthe proposed reasoning, but there is alwaysa more complex cause.15

It may be that this complex cause is, as Laruellealways theorizes can happen, a return of philoso-phical illusion within non-philosophy, thoughthis time at least an immanental illusion ratherthan a transcendental one.16 Or it may be thatthe complex cause is the foreclosed nature ofthe Real itself, which can be seen in the theoreti-cal work of Gilles Grelet, former student of Lar-uelle and current co-editor of one of the homesfor non-philosophical works “Nous, les sans-philosophie.” Grelet’s own “anti-philosophy asrigorous gnosis” (which Laruelle characterizesin Struggle and Utopia at the End Times ofPhilosophy as “non-religion”) is seen by Lar-uelle as the leftist deviation of non-philosophyand the debate between them characterizes theongoing development of non-philosophyoutside of Laruelle’s own words and works.Grelet’s critiques of Laruelle are developedupon lines which Grelet himself sees as the radi-calization of non-philosophy into anti-philos-ophy. While Grelet’s unique fusion of Lacanand Maoism clearly owes much to Guy Lardreauand Christian Jambet, it too builds upon thecentral non-philosophical insight that the Real(a cause) is distinguished radically from theWorld. In his “Proletarian Gnosis,” Grelet pre-sents a programmatic piece outlining his ownvariation of non-philosophy in an explicitly pol-itical and abstract way.17 Daniel ColuccielloBarber’s “Mediation, Religion, and Non-Con-sistency in-One” also presents a critique of Lar-uelle’s own theory of identity. First, Barbershows the power of this theory, using theexample of the ways in which Laruelle escapescertain deadlocks within the philosophy of reli-gion, but then moves to ask whether Laruelleisn’t too beholden to the very Christianformula of “neither Greek nor Jew.” By

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attempting to move out of a universal formulathat has, according to Barber, failed, Barberalso moves towards a further generalization ofnon-philosophy.

As Laruelle himself said:

There are invariants and rules in non-phil-osophy. There are rules formulated for aschool, a research collective, meaning ineach of my books there is an expositionof rules that sum up what it would benecessary to do to be a non-philosopher.But it wouldn’t be that I am a victim ofdelusions of grandeur. I know very wellthat these rules are made not to befollowed.18

Arguably, in each of the essays, whether theyare explicative, productive, or critical, or somemix of the three, there is a certain recognitionof the Real (as radical cause) foreclosed to sub-jectivity or objective capture, and so they fallfully within the invariant structure and rulesof non-philosophy showing that non-philosophymay advance away from simply what Laruellesays and does without having to deny the signa-ture of Laruelle on the concepts and methods. Ifnon-philosophy is to be achieved then one mustbe cognizant of the rules, but not forsake theliberty that non-philosophy promises in itsmaking other disciplines generic. So, withoutfalling into the trap of a normalizing heresy,future non-philosophers ought to take noticeof the rules and invariants of non-philosophy,but taking them in hand theymust also be wielded andchanged because Laruelle doesnot exist and neither do we.The non-philosophical wager isthat this is good news.

notes

“A Science of Christ?,” by François Laruelle, was

published originally in The Grandeur of Reason: Reli-

gion, Tradition, and Universalism, eds. Peter

M. Candler Jr and Conor Cunningham (Canter-

bury: SCM, 2009) 316–31. “Sexed Identity,” by

François Laruelle and Anne-Françoise Schmid,

was published originally as “L’Identité sexuée” in

French and Macedonian in Identities: Journal for Poli-

tics, Gender, and Culture 5 (2003): 49–61. “Theo-

rems on the Good News,” by François Laruelle,

was published originally as “Théorèmes de la

Bonne Nouvelle,” La Décision philosophique 1 (May

1987): 83–85. All are published here with the per-

mission of the respective editors and presses for

which we thank them.

The cover image was provided by Sean Capener,

and special thanks to Marika Rose for her editorial

assistance.

1 Audio of this event has been archived online and

is available at <http://itself.wordpress.com/2010/

03/15/laruelle-at-the-university-of-nottingham-ref

lections-and-audio/>.

2 Strangely enough Laruelle is far from alone in the

French tradition in engaging with the problem of

incarnation, a problem that goes under the

general rubric of Christology. For a comparison

of his engagement with Michel Henry and Alain

Badiou see my “‘Who do you say I am?’: Secular

Christologies in Contemporary French Philos-

ophy,” Analecta Hermeneutica 4 (2012), available

online at <http://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.

php/analecta/article/view/703/603>.

3 Harman.

4 Ibid.

5 Hegel 9.

6 Laruelle, “Letter” 396.

7 Laruelle, Principles 140.

8 Ibid. 141.

9 Laruelle, “Universe” 403.

10 Laruelle, Principles 141.

11 Laruelle, Struggle 3.

12 Ibid.

13 Laruelle, “Non-Philosophy” 244.

14 Laruelle, Struggle 160. ONPHI’s web presence

can be found at <http://www.onphi.net>.

15 Ibid. 85.

16 See Laruelle, “Non-Philosophy” 243.

17 For more on Grelet in English see my transla-

tor’s introduction to Struggle and Utopia.

18 Laruelle, “Non-Philosophy” 243.

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bibliography

Harman, Graham. “Review of François Laruelle’s

Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to

Non-Philosophy.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Aug. 2011. Web. 21 June 2013. <http://ndpr.nd.

edu/news/25437-philosophies-of-difference-a-criti

cal-introduction-to-non-philosophy/>.

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V.

Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.

Laruelle, François. “Letter to Deleuze.” Trans.

Robin Mackay. Mackay 393–400. Print.

Laruelle, François. “Non-Philosophy, Weapon of

Last Defence.” Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Trans.

Anthony Paul Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2012. 238–51. Print.

Laruelle, François. Principles of Non-Philosophy.

Trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith.

London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Laruelle, François. Struggle and Utopia at the End

Times of Philosophy. Trans. Drew S. Burk and

Anthony Paul Smith. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.

Print.

Laruelle, François. “Universe Black in the Human

Foundations of Colour.” Trans. Robin Mackay

and Miguel Abreau. Mackay 401–508. Print.

Mackay, Robin, ed. From Decision to Heresy:

Experiments in Non-Standard Thought. Falmouth

and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence, 2013. Print.

Anthony Paul SmithLa Salle UniversityDepartment of Religion1900 W. Olney AvenuePhiladelphia, PA 19141USAE-mail: smithanthony@lasalle.edu

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