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Abstract
This essay will strive to provide the reader with various entry points into the project of François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy and its relation to non-aesthetics, via its relation to philosophy as rigorous fiction. It is a new genre, what Laruelle also calls a philo-fiction. Via Laruelle's preoccupation with photography as a new kind of thought, we will follow his trajectory of applying non-philosophy to photography. From his concept of non-photography and continued in Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, Laruelle's practice of striving to create a genre of thinking that would be akin to science fiction and use philosophy as material shows itself in the form of experimental, theoretical applications of his philo-fiction to the photo. In their performative thrust, one can begin to see the components or what he calls aspects of philosophy and quantum physics, including the use of superposition and the imaginary number, as well as conceptual personae and generic humanity. Laruelle's work has at its base a highly poetic, fictional strain that in striving to superpose philosophy and art (fiction) also has at its core a place for reducing the violence of decision and actions attempting to work within a space of radical immanence and radical passivity. A performation-withoutperformance. Laruelle will call the photo a “weak insurrection.” This particle of Laruelle strives merely for such a poetic attempt.
Notes
1 “Laruelle's Non-Standard Lenses,” two introductory workshops held at Midway Contemporary Art Library in October and November 2012 in Minneapolis, USA.
2 In The Concept of Non-Photography Laruelle states how he sees photography as a new type of thought and how it can relate to his overall project of non-philosophy. He says:
We thus treat photography as a discovery of a scientific nature, as a new kind of object of theoretical thinking – suspending all problems of historical, political, technological and artistic genesis. So that photography is an indivisible process that one cannot recompose from the outside, even partially, like a machine. It is a new thought – and it is so by virtue of its mode of being or its relation to the real, not its aesthetic or technological determinations. (36)
3 Performation-without-performance is used by Laruelle in Philosophie non-standard to describe the attempt of non-standard philosophy to reduce the violence inherent in our actions and decisions. As he states: “But we are looking for a thinking that, however inventive it is, is the action of a non-acting, an anti-activist wager, a performation without performance; how can we ‘weaken’ the excess of action and its decision?” (Philosophie non-standard; 222; my translation). The theme of reducing violence and “weakening” the actions of our decisions is a principal one across the entirety of Laruelle's project. See his works such as Théorie générale des victimes and Une biographie de l'homme ordinaire, etc.
4 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography 49.
5 Laruelle speaks of his conception of philosophy as being a material for his non-standard philosophy and non-standard aesthetics in a very candid manner in his interview with John Mullarkey found in “Non-Standard Philosophy and Art” in Cox, Jaskey, and Malik. He states: “I would like to use philosophy as a material (in the manner of a space or a color, a materiality) for an art that would make an oeuvre with conceptual thought without once again creating an aesthetics or a philosophy.”
6 The word “vague” in French can mean both wave and vague, and Laruelle plays off these meanings of indetermination quite frequently to get at his position and style of in-the-last-instance in regards to quantum indeterminacy and uncertainty.
7 Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard 477; my translation.
8 Laruelle, Philosophie et non-philosophie 26:
Rather than inventing new modes of philosophical decision, modes of its unitary and sufficient usage, leading back to the narrowness and arbitrariness of the Greek solution which is consequently condemned to overexploitation, new resources of thought can emerge only from the unprecedented conjunction of autonomous science and second philosophy. It will not be said too hastily that this would be a “new alliance” proposed to old adversaries. Instead, it is a question of a perpetual peace treaty between science and philosophy, a treaty henceforth founded on the former rather than manipulated by the latter on its behalf, as has generally been the case in history. From science to philosophy, rather than the other way around, it has become possible to establish a democratic and peaceful community. “Non-philosophy” is the symbol of this new agreement and of the work that can be done in this community.
9 Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard 222; my translation.
10 See Laruelle's reference to R. Girard in his lecture the “Generic Orientation of Non-Standard Aesthetics” at the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 17 Nov. 2012, available <http://www.univocalpublishing.com/blog/111-lecture-on-the-orientation-of-non-standard-aesthetics>.
11 Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard 143; my translation:
At best, we can speak about a “negative” or rather “impossible” non-philosophy as with the imaginary number or more still with the “imaginary home” [foyer imaginaire] or convergence of the negative rays. Non-standard philosophy is the imaginary optics that uses the optics of philosophy and folds them onto the generic. This is merely a partial example but it is at the heart of the generic quantum. It could have been, as Marx would have said, of an individual or bourgeois essence, but it will be generic and transhuman.
12 Laruelle's shift in his preoccupation with Fractality and its relation to Identity, which can be seen in his early discussion on the photo's relationship or unilation to Identity, changes with his interest in the concept of superposition found within quantum physics. With this shift to a position in-the-last-instance that is indeterminate or uncertain (hence his use of what he calls “aspects” of quantum physics) Laruelle becomes more interested in the irreflective photo-graphic flash as self-belonging. See Photo-Fiction 20–21 on the superposition of vectors in the act of photo-fiction as well as its theoretical position as being a lived art as rigorous fiction that is chaotic due to its insufficient nature as indeterminate. See also 47 where Laruelle states that “Self-belonging and the event are the mirror of each other.”
13 Ibid. 143.
14 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography. Laruelle refers to the “photographic flash” of philosophy in contrast to that of photography itself when he states:
Photography, without technique, without art, without science, condemned endlessly to condemn to reflect itself and to nostalgically resurrect the Heraclitean lightning-bolt that came too soon. Philosophy is that premature thinking that will have constituted itself, not through a mirror-stage, but through a flash-stage, a darkroom-stage, giving it a fragile being, a fragile basis, in this photographic mode, unfinished and too immediately exploited. (3)
15 See his discussion on this topic in Philosophie non-standard, in the section entitled “The Wave Function of the Philosophical Flash” 104–07. Laruelle attempts to discuss and superpose philosophy and science's relation to light itself and shows why philosophy perhaps was premature in its relation to the flash of light:
We take back up the radical origin of philosophy beginning with its undulatory character of the flash, philosophy having always been a premature or non-scientific interpretation of its own physics. Oriental or not, light has become its philosophical formatting, an object of its common or current usage, an ordinary means of thinking, but we intend to show that it has been nothing more than a poorly misunderstood science, the auto-interpretation of a radical flash and that it was lacking quantum, that for reasons of confusing the originary flash with transcendent object, it could have been the corpuscular cosmos upon which it's reflected. Instead of knowing itself as an interaction as understood in quantum physics, it thought itself as a reflection starting from the object. Under the name of “philosophy,” it has become a certain abstract practice of the effects of light, a theatre of reflections and cavernous shadows, whose premises it does not know. But under its material angle, thought is a photo-electric phenomenon, the flash is the still corpuscular and cosmic photon of philosophy. (105)
16 See Châtelet's extraordinary but difficult text Figuring Space.
17 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography 3.
18 For more studies on Laruelle's relationship to light and thinking, see Alexander Galloway's essay on Laruelle's relationship to another artist whose work focuses on how we see and relate to light via his artistic installations, namely James Turell. “Laruelle and Art” 230.
19 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography 29.
20 Ibid. 32.
21 At Midway Contemporary Art Library, Minneapolis (15 Nov. 2013), Laruelle made this expressed claim to a public who asked him about his relation to French theory.
22 See the chapter in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? regarding conceptual personae.
23 See the section entitled “Le Nageur transcendantal et le nageur immanental” in Philosophie non-standard 314–15.
24 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography 99.
25 Laruelle, Photo-Fiction 35.
The style of photo-fiction is taking a photo with one's eyes closed, on the condition one admits that they are closed which is to say they had been open and more precisely, they are half-closed, the beating of eyelids by which we take excessive measure of the world and through which we master the intensity of its hallucinatory aspect: neither wide open nor automatically closing themselves as with a camera or robotic photographer. (Ibid.)
26 Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard 315.
27 See Alexander Galloway's remarks in regard to the seeing of perception itself in his essay “Laruelle and Art” 230.
28 See Laruelle's Concept of Non-Photography where he states that perhaps if there is any true witness to Identity it would be that of the Stranger.
29 See Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind.
30 Laruelle, Photo-Fiction 13:
What photo-fiction will produce is a kind of chaos that is even more intense than the photo, perhaps as a mixture of cubism and fractality exerted on the same conceptual material, on the basis of a special logic of what we could call an art-fiction or a non-standard aesthetics. The photo-fictions will no longer be made of firmly sealed unities closed in on themselves but will come from an algebra of the “negative quarter turn” and will be representable as configurations of vectors.
31 Laruelle, Concept of Non-Photography 31.
32 Ibid.
33 See Mullarkey and Smith.
34 See Laruelle's invention of the oraxiom combining equal parts axiom and the oracular position of philosophy (the oracle). It is essential to thinking a theoretical installation of photo-fiction or what Laruelle names as non-philosophy and non-standard philosophy as philo-fiction.
35 The onto-vectorial is a neologism created by Laruelle to explain his position of the vector at the heart of the ontology of existence.
36 Laruelle and Mackay, From Decision to Heresy 401.
37 See Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics.
38 Balso, Pessoa 54.
39 Ibid. 20–21.
40 See Concept of Non-Photography 29–30 where Laruelle compares photographic thought with artificial intelligence and information systems.
41 Laruelle, Photo-Fiction 72.
42 Ibid. 75.
43 Ibid. 76. Laruelle states: “Physics simulates subjectivity at least in two forms, generic subjectivity and cloned subjectivity via the quantum” (ibid.).
44 Laruelle even uses Pessoa as an example in his definition of “solitude” in his Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Pessoa is the example par excellence of the relation of self to immanence, as Laruelle states in his definition of solitude: “Primarily, Solitude can simply be understood as identity of immanence (to) self.” This, perhaps, is also why Laruelle is so keen on developing the idea that the auto-matic relation of photography to the real is a new relation to identity.
45 See John Mullarkey's recent interview with Laruelle in “Non-Standard Philosophy and Art” in Cox, Jaskey, and Malik.
46 See Deleuze's remarks in L'Ile déserte on the need for philosophy to become more creative and inventive as well as contemporary with the arts and sciences in his interview entitled “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought” (188–97).
47 Laruelle and collaborators, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy.
48 Laruelle, Photo-Fiction 28:
A thought-music or music-fiction in the spirit of the quantum should be possible as well as a photo-fiction along with so many other possible scenarios. To think “aesthetics” in the form of scenarios, quantically conjugating a variety of arts and philosophies, would enrich and liberate possible productive forces and would justify the existence of art not as thought, as was talked about with post-modernists, but a veritable thought-art, entirely specific and worthy of being called “contemporary.”
49 In a recent interview Laruelle suggested, with regard to his theoretical and experimental non-aesthetics and the genre he has strived to open up for new possibilities of art practice, “It's as if my entire theoretical oeuvre had been conceived with its sights set on positing the conditions for a new genre or were dedicated to a singular poem.” See John Mullarkey's recent interview with Laruelle in “Non-Standard Philosophy and Art” in Cox, Jaskey, and Malik.
50 Ibid. Laruelle, in the Realism Materialism Art interview with Mullarkey, makes this quite clear:
More than anything, I've always led a relentless war against the famous “example” whether it be concrete or abstract, and pretty much the same war against aesthetics. Whether right or wrong, and I admit that it could be wrong, I'm trying to construct an oeuvre that, if it must cite an aesthetician, would make a theatrical play or a very narrow, re-localized moment within the oeuvre.
51 Pessoa 86.
52 Laruelle states his appreciation of the surrealists in his recent interview with Mullarkey in Realism Materialism Art, but also says:
People often say that I'm an artist-without-art, a philosopher-without-philosophy, that I take the “stance” or “pose” of an artist without practicing it, the stance of a philosopher without a doctrine, and I would add, someone of faith without a religion. This critique thus recognizes me by subtraction, that I'm not exactly part of those sincere liars that are the artist, philosopher, or believer.
53 Laruelle pondered this question during his lecture on the “Generic Orientation of Non-Standard Aesthetics” at the Weisman Art Museum.
54 See Laruelle's definition of the term “particle” in the glossary at the beginning of Philosophie non-standard:
A hylomorphic entity that, in the form of unilateral duality, combines without mediation the actual noematic particulate form and the matter coming from the corpuscle. A simple transcendence without doublet or given in-immanence. The result of a generic, quantic, and non-textual deconstruction of philosophy. (58; my translation)
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