THE AUTISM OF REASON

Abstract

Instead of a “meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a “return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of “meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as “merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an “autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One.

Keywords:

• Laruelle
• non-philosophy
• Kant
• analytic
• a priori
• identity
• metaphysics

Notes

1 Laruelle, Concept 123.

2 Deleuze 11.

3 Kant 1, 24, 25, 26, 31 passim.

4 “Science and philosophy meet in the universality of the synthetic a priori,” writes Laruelle, giving credit to Kant's centrality in modern philosophical discourse.

As an example of a non-philosophical undertaking, we focus directly on the problem of the a priori. We take the “synthetic a priori judgment,” which Kant revealed to be the basic essence and algorithm of philosophy in the form of a hybrid between metaphysics and science, and treat it as our material. (See Laruelle, Principes 321, 314)

5 I am grateful to Ray Brassier for his ideas here and throughout. Needless to say, however, I take responsibility for the various claims, and possible shortcomings, of the present essay.

6 Why are additive/synthetic and non-additive/analytic the only two options? Indeed, a number of thinkers, among them Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, have demonstrated the limitations of the analytic/synthetic model. Instead of additive or non-additive predicates, such thinkers propose a different approach: a subtractivist model in which predicates are subtracted from subjects, not added to them. Using concepts like the “generic” or the “whatever singularity” these writers have essentially proposed an alternative mode irreducible to either the synthetic or the analytic. See, for example, the sections on the singular and the generic in Badiou, Being and Event, or the chapter titled “Whatever” in Agamben, The Coming Community. While he is not a “subtractivist” per se, Laruelle can, in a very general sense, be included in this tradition to the extent that he endorses a generic state of immanence, whether it be the real as One-in-One or humanity as Stranger or Man-in-person (Homme-en-personne). See, for example, Laruelle, “Generic as Predicate.” On the term “Man-in-person” see also Laruelle, Future Christ 2, 5, 20 passim, and Laruelle, L'Ultime honneur 26, 50 passim.

7 Laruelle discusses Fichte on a number of occasions, particularly his treatment of the “I” (the Self) and the relation “I = I” (Self = Self) only to dismiss Fichte's I as an “intellectual intuition” unable to achieve true immanence within the real. See, for example, Laruelle, Principes 105–06, 168–85.

8 Recall that while tautology is merely useless for many, it is more malevolent for others, symptomatic of the depraved circularity of modern life. Marx, for example, begins his explication of the general formula for capital with the tautological expression M-M, or money-money, a contracted form of the C-M-C-M-C-M chain (commodity-money-etc.). This allows him to inject the concept of surplus into the chain, resulting in a cycle of M to M′ (money to money prime) where money is “not spent [ … but] advanced” (Marx, Capital 1: 249). Later, theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord would lament the closed circuits of society and culture precisely for their seemingly impervious, tautological and therefore repressive effects. “The spectacle is essentially tautological, for the simple reason that its means and its ends are identical” (Debord 15, par. 13). Laruelle, for his part, is content to shrug off such nefarious connotations. Immanence is too seductive a prize for him. Laruelle maintains that the tautological identity formula (for example One-in-One) is the only true expression of immanence.

9 On the theme of Marxism, Laruelle is admittedly somewhat vulnerable to the same critique that Rancière makes of Althusser in Althusser's Lesson. In that book Rancière indicts Althusser on the grounds of intellectual elitism, that Althusser, by making Marx more scientific, was only making Marxism “safe” for university professors and other elite technicians. See Rancière, La Leçon 35. We might be wary, therefore, of similar accusations made against Laruelle, something like “Laruelle's Lesson.” There will be those who indict Laruelle on the grounds that he is transforming philosophy into the ultimate elite science, non-philosophy, available to few and practiced by almost none. But this seems to be something of a cheap shot, as it was in Rancière. So let the indictment be voiced here, merely paratextually, in the hopes of pre-emptively inoculating Laruelle of such a vulnerability in the eyes of others.

10 Laruelle uses data (an Anglicism, in fact, despite French being closer to Latin) to distinguish it perhaps from the more prosaic données (data). Regardless, the Latin origin of data – from the verb dare, to give – is revealing, particularly for its phenomenological overtones: data are the things having been given.

11 Laruelle, Principes 227, 228. One particularly interesting demonstration of this method of non-philosophical cloning is Laruelle's short experimental piece “Variations on a Theme in Heidegger.” Starting from one of the most important and often-quoted passages in Heidegger's Being and Time, the section in which Heidegger describes the ontic distinctiveness of Dasein in terms of its being ontological, Laruelle repeats and modulates Heidegger's language through sixteen successive paragraphs, like a musician circling back through various motifs, until Heidegger's claims become more or less globally transformed into non-philosophy. As Laruelle summarizes at the end:

Two series of variations divide up the Philosophical Decision and open it up to “non-philosophy.” On the one hand, variations on the circle or the circle as variation: Being-as-being, Saying-as-said, Logos-as-differe(a)nce, Desire-as-lack, Everydayness-as-subject and even Difference-as-One […] And on the other hand, in effect, variations that affect the ontical itself, either as being, as Other, as lack, as substitute – in short, as One […] When at last man – through the Vision-in-the-One that he “is,” prior to all comprehension of Being – sees the circle of circles pass by again, it's so he can glimpse it as it passes outside and under the One, above and even “over” him, like a cloud over the moon, or like the sun of reason over the inalterable opacity of man. It is then that philosophy floats, indifferent, through the air of “non-philosophy.” (Laruelle, “Variations” 93–94)

12 Laruelle, Principes 273. Indeed, during his summary of the axioms and theorems of non-philosophy, Laruelle combines all of the following figures into a unilateralized, transcendental identity: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Gödel (ibid. 276–77).

13 To be clear, analysis, defined as the process of dissecting something into its constituent parts, is typically held at arm's length by Laruelle, even if the realm of the analytic is attractive to him. In other words, analysis per se is no more appetizing than its complement, synthesis; whereas the analytic opens the door toward a purely immanent and generic condition of the a priori.

14 Admittedly, Laruelle speaks in such historiographic terms from time to time, as in his assessment of the Hellenistic and Hebraic wings of philosophy, both antedated by non-philosophy: “The ‘historical’ signification of non-philosophy is established thus in the following way: neither Greek nor Judaic nor the two combined, non-philosophy is the ante-Greek and ante-Judaic identity of thought, the experience of thought ‘before’ its Greco-Judaic disjunction” (Laruelle, Principes 211).

15 Ibid. 99.

16 Ibid. 97.

17 Ibid. 99.

18 The name of Laruelle has at times been associated with Speculative Realism, due perhaps to Ray Brassier's pivotal role in introducing Laruelle to an anglophone readership, and thus with Object-Oriented Ontology via its association with Speculative Realism. But it is here, with Laruelle's theory of the subject, that we see at least one incompatibility with the kind of realism espoused by Object-Oriented Ontology. One of the central tenets of that movement is the so-called “equal footing” thesis which states that all objects are on an equal footing. This includes man, who is just one object among all others. The “equal footing” thesis suggests essentially that man, with his outsize pride, has sinned and must therefore, as compensatory penance, be reduced to the level of all other objects. In other words, man, with his aggressive correlationism, has extended his tentacles too far into the workings of the world, and only a non-correlationist realism can unseat man from his privileged position as arbiter. But as Laruelle writes in a tantalizingly short piece titled “Theorems on the Good News”: “It is not man who colonizes the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely threshold of man” (Laruelle, “Théorèmes” 84). Hence Laruelle's realism is a very different kind of realism from that of the “equal footing” thesis. Philosophy has sinned, not man. The object world has sinned, not man. Philosophy and the object world are the progenitors of this depraved correlation, not man. If only they would leave us alone! Only then could man unilateralize the equality claims embedded in the “equal footing” thesis. And having accomplished that, replace this profane “democracy of objects” unloosed on us by the planet with a radically immanent object identity, a unilateral identity between man and object. That, according to Laruelle, would be a realism worth talking about.

19 Laruelle, Concept 99.

20 Ibid. 10.

21 From comments made by Laruelle during a panel discussion at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 6 April 2011.