THE ANIMAL LINE

Abstract

This essay argues that a radical, non-standard, philosophical concept of the human is one that is consistently used both towards itself and others: it is an amplified concept that applies itself non-philosophically, that is, generically. Our purpose here, consequently, is to outline how Laruelle's work can be seen (or re-visioned) as performing something other than an inflation or deflation of either side of one fixed philosophical dyad (human/non-human); rather, it can be seen as unilateralising the couple, that is, expanding (amplifying, mutating, superposing) the meaning of the two alongside the One Real that resists any lone philosophical version's attempt to commandeer that meaning (and so the essence of what is human and what is nonhuman). It is the performative mutation that counts, not the terms of the dyad. As such, this essay also contends that what Laruelle explicitly does with philosophy – namely its de-authorisation and democratisation – is also what must be done, by implication, in a non-standard philosophical radicalisation of the human. Nonstandard philosophy does not know what the human is (such definitions are the task of philosophy), but this negative capability is precisely what allows it to expand, performatively, the meaning of the human in its ongoing search to discover what the human may be.

Keywords:

• non-human
• Laruelle
• non-philosophy
• post-humanism
• animal
• philosophy
• philosomorphism
• anthropomorphism

Notes

1 Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers 57, 68, 166; idem, Future Christ 25; idem, Philosophie et non-philosophie 92; idem, “Controverse” 72; idem, Théorie des identités 76.

2 Idem, Dictionary 61.

3 Kolozova 158.

4 Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers 40.

5 Idem, Philosophie et non-philosophie 32, 21.

6 Idem, Dictionary 61.

7 Laruelle has described non-philosophy simply as the unending search to discover what is man (London Graduate School Non-Philosophy Workshop, 7 Dec. 2011).

8 See Galloway.

9 This, of course, reorients the Hegelian view, as articulated by Adorno (in Negative Dialectics) that

not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally a part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject. (Adorno 183)

It is this conceptual possibility that needs to be reinvented.

10 See Laruelle, En tant 37, 109, 110.

11 See Mullarkey, “Animals Spirits.”

12 Laruelle, Le Concept 12.

13 See Dennett 3–22. At one level, all philosophy is cognitivist for Laruelle – a reduction of thought into inferential, representational, knowledge.

14 This stance is worth comparing with what Bergson (38) describes as the “open soul” in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion:

The other attitude is that of the open soul. What, in that case, is allowed in? Suppose we say that it embraces all humanity: we should not be going too far, we should hardly be going far enough, since its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature. And yet no one of these things which would thus fill it would suffice to define the attitude taken by the soul, for it could, strictly speaking, do without all of them. Its form is not dependent on its content. We have just filled it; we could as easily empty it again. “Charity” would persist in him who possesses “charity,” though there be no other living creature on earth.

15 Laruelle, En tant 32, 33.

16 Idem, Philosophie et non-philosophie 90, 91.

17 Kolozova 199.

18 Laruelle can use “animal” with scare quotes one moment – as in Future Christ (“it is still an ‘animal’ essence there [of aggression]” (7)) – to mark his distance from a philosophical abuse, but then muddy things by identifying the animal as a true philosophical entity (rather than victim of abuse): “[…] heresy is the innocence of Man, undoubtedly because it is not completely a metaphysical animal, which is to say an animal” (70). Or see also Laruelle, “Le Tsunami” (9–15):

In the history of the “evolution” of the philosophising species, the properly human stage, of which the model would be the fish-water, has been preceded by the stage of the actual philosopher. The philosopher has features of the ancient animal, but not of the most archaic, that was forced out of its first element, water […]” (14)

19 See Laruelle, “Le Tsunami” 10.

20 Idem, En tant 250: “The One, The Real, Man” (“it's all the same to me” [même combat]).

21 Ibid. 207. See also 59, 185, 210–11.

22 Ibid. 216. As Anthony Paul Smith points out, “the meaning of individual in English does not capture all that Laruelle intends when, in French, he differentiates individual from individuel. The first is a neologism of his own construction playing on the sense of “dual” in order to express the fundamental duality of individuals and the second is the term that is usually translated into English as individual, but he plays with the “duel,” which means the same in English as it does in French, to signify that it is a fundamentally antagonistic concept” (Smith 241 n. 18).

23 See Laruelle, Future 2: “The-man of the philosophers and of common sense is a generality that levels out a special duality, an indivi-duality through which it is a cause or determinate identity of the subject in-struggle with the World, Christianity, gnosis and Judaism included.”

24 Idem, Théorie des Etrangers 162, 166.

25 Ibid. 162.

26 Laruelle, “Is Thinking Democratic?” 236.

27 Idem, Future 23; my emphasis.

28 Idem, Anti-Badiou 11.

29 Idem, Théorie générale 147, 149.

30 Idem, Philosophie et non-philosophie 250.

31 Idem, Philosophie non-standard 320.

32 Idem, Future 25.

33 Ibid. 26.

34 Ibid. 25.

35 Ibid. 25, 30.

36 Brassier 137. Significantly, what Galloway calls Laruelle's “autism” (Galloway 202), and Kolozova his necessary humanism of the “Ego-in-Ego,” Brassier here rightly traces back to an influence stemming from Michel Henry's egological philosophy, which has itself been accused of borderline solipsism. Where Laruelle escapes such solipsism, despite his personalism of the ego, will be seen below.

37 Elsewhere, we have called the second form a “complete-anthropomorphism” (complete because it changes man too) that should be contrasted with the half-anthropomorphism (projective) that is usually held up as its only form simpliceter – see Mullarkey, “Tragedy of the Object.”

38 We should note that this is not to state a thesis that “the human is multiple,” but rather to perform a multiplication of theses concerning the human. Hence, when Théorie des Etrangers proposes “the most general possible science of man in as much as he is man, and of man existing in a multiple state” (23), it is the gesture of proposing this science (in all its detailed performance) that counts.

39 Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers 24.

40 Ibid. 40.

41 Idem, Dictionary 30.

42 Idem, Théorie des Etrangers 22, 41.

43 Idem, En tant 37.

44 Idem, Théorie des Etrangers 40.

45 Ibid. 110.

46 See idem, Théorie générale 147, 148: “Man-in-person is not a kingdom within a kingdom any more; he does not have priority over the animal” (yet man does have a “before-priority”); or man is not exceptional, “everyone is victimisable” and the “simple animal” too can be “protected even defended” (but “it cannot be treated better than man”).

47 Ibid. 148–49.

48 Ibid.

49 Even with respect to non-humans like the sea, Laruelle posits that “Man can finally see his fixed and moving image, his intimate openness as the greatest secret in the ocean,” as well as – “the sea which is also human in the way which the human is every Last Instance” (Laruelle, “L'Impossible” n. pag.). See also Smith 173–74 on this.

50 Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers 78, 110, 96, 160.

51 Idem, Théorie des identités 92.

52 Idem, Philosophie non-standard 521.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid. 507.

55 Idem, Philosophie et non-philosophie 251.

56 See idem, En tant 137ff.

57 Badiou 55.

58 See Laruelle, En tant 33: non-philosophy “redistributes” thought (materiau disponible) “to every man. Philosophy can really become ‘for us’ or ‘popular’ only in becoming non-philosophy.” In that non-philosophy does not know what man is, we aim to distribute thought even further than “man.”

59 See Mullarkey, “Animal Spirits.”

60 See idem, “1 + 1 = 1.”

61 Laruelle, En tant (34) speaks of “[…] postural ‘mutations’ more profound still than changes of philosophy or of ‘positions.’”

62 Idem, Théorie des identités 309.

63 See idem, Phénomène, especially 254 on the serpent as (for Ravaisson) the “unique object of philosophy” that embodies an “animal figuring (of) grace” (animal figurant la grâce). See also Mullarkey, Post-Continental 153–56.

64 Laruelle, En tant 34.

65 Ibid. 250.

66 Idem, Principles of Non-Philosophy 217; see also Brassier 134.

67 See Cull 122.

68 Laruelle, En tant 50.

69 This last quote here is attributed to the mime artist Marcel Marceau. Significantly, Ron Broglio has recently described the performance art of Marcus Coates in terms of a “knowing idiocy” that he compares to that of Diogenes' performance of a “dog philosophy.” See Broglio 101; Cull 109.

70 In Book III of The Republic, Plato promises that “pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything” will not be “permitted to exist.”

71 Kolozova 113; my emphasis. What Kolozova refers to here as the “behind” is analysed in cinematic and philosophical terms as the “background” in Mullarkey, “1 + 1 = 1”; idem, “Animal Spirits”; idem, “Tragedy of the Object.”

72 Kolozova 138.

73 Ibid. 144.

74 Laruelle, Théorie des identités 312–13; idem, En tant 242.

75 En tant 225: “My project [ … is] to introduce philosophy to heretical experience.”

76 Kolozova 27, 33.

77 Laruelle, En tant 224.

78 Idem, “Non-Philosophy” 251.

79 Idem, Théorie des identités 302.