#francois laruelle

[humanperson105]

Gabriel Catren and Meta-Transcendental Philosophy

Gabriel Catren's project (as well as the work of Francois Laruelle) represents a continuation and radicalization of the Kantian/Copernican turn in philosophy that can be called meta-transcendental. “[If we read Laruelle not as a “non-philosopher” but as a meta-transcendental philosopher], [i]t then becomes possible to re-interpret the term ‘decision’ in Laruelle’s work as a synonym for transcendental synthesis [...] In this regard, Laruelle can be interpreted as a kind of renegade Kantian whose internal subversion of transcendental idealism not only rehabilitates the possibility of transcendental realism but also provides Kantianism’s posthumous rejoinder to Hegelian idealism in all its guises [...]” Ray Brassier - Nihil unbound pg 134.If Kantian transcendental philosophy is an account of the conditions by which experience and knowledge are possible, then meta-transcendental philosophy is an account of not just the genesis of the conditions by which experience is possible but the genesis of all possible conditions of experience. Insofar as the practicalist Aristotelian/Fichtean/Kantian orientation subordinates intelligibility to sensibility and roots experience in sensible intuition and apperception (rather than the Hegelian account of the self-determination of normativity, in which sensibility is subordinate to intelligibility), it then follows that possible experience is concomitant with possible sensible intuition, and given that the conditions of sensible intuition cannot be self-determinate, experience can be determined in the last instance by an external entity or unilateral immanence rather than a self-determinate universal totality and thus engender a multiplicity of possible forms of experience in which human experience is but one transcendental perspective among many.

In Catren's rewriting of Christian trinitarianism, the multiplicity of transcendental perspectives or types, what he calls the transcendental landscape, is knit together into a collective patchwork subject by Eros, understood as a force of binding together and integration, which is primary over the force of Thanatos in Catren's inversion of Freud. "... the drive par excellence is no longer the death drive but the drive for life (Eros). The will to remain relegated to the impersonal life, far from taking the form of a death drive that pulls the individual back to the undifferentiated one, manifests as an erotic desire to engender and federate the separated living beings into higher forms of living unity." (Pleromatica -Pg 359) The weak point of Catren's book Pleromatica is that, due to Catren's yolking intelligibility to the sensible, the speculative import of the transcendental landscape is rendered absurd as alien transcendental types become empty abstractions we can know and say nothing about that mirror Hegel's description and critique of the thing in itself as "total emptiness, only described still as an ‘other-world’ the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought".

[beingcompiled]

[edwordsmyth]

“No doubt we too have dreamed. We dreamed of a joyous Iliad that left too hastily to look for its Odyssey, that believed it reached this Odyssey from time to time, and that wandered from shore to shore without ever finding solid ground, doomed to sink in the contemplation of immobile stars that the river Metaphysics carries along. Let’s say immediately: non-philosophy is a dreamed philosophy, a reverie or a fiction that owes a great deal to a certain power of dreaming peculiar to music.

And music is the placenta that has to give birth to non-philosophy.”

-François Laruelle

[deletia-distro]

“Theorems on the Good News” — François Laruelle

“In being sufficient, philosophy acts on man through a kind of causality resembling enchantment; logos imprisons man within a magic circle, and it closes around him a second time just as he strives to exit the circle… As long as man lives under the Decision or the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, he lives also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability.”

In this brief set of theorems, contemporary French intellectual François Laruelle begins the work of elaborating what he has come to call “non-philosophy”. Interrogating the relation between “man” and “philosophy”, these theorems articulate Laruelle’s claim that all forms of philosophy are dependent upon a prior decision, which philosophy itself is constituetively ignorant of—a dialectical splitting of the world that makes grasping the world philosophically possible. These theorems act as an attempt at exposing this decisional structure non-philosophically.

READ / PRINT

[athousandgateaux]

The true atheism is not as simple as philosophy imagines it to be. It occurs in two stages: the banal refusal to believe in a God is self-contradictory and satisfies those who think little, but the refusal to believe in a good God is the true rebellion. There is always a God lying in ambush, preparing his return in whatever negation is made of his existence, even a materialist one, but it is important that it be a malicious God, a thesis that only an 'ultra'-religious heresy can face. The atheism of indifference is weak and lays down its arms along with its speech to philosophy; the second is a strong heresy, the 'non'-theological radicalization of a malicious God, his extension to every divinity that would appear as One or Multiple, as Sole and Great or even as natural and pagan.

Francois Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, pg. 21

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

Justifications for Black and white (The importance of the “Achromatic” in my work)

Pieces featured:

-Fig.1-And so on to infinity-(Robert Fludd 1617) Source: Eugene Thacker, Public Domain Review(2015)

-Fig.16-Nameless Entity (Clark Ashton Smith 1961)-Source: Eldritch Dark(2009)

(Both from my latest essay featured in the beginning of this blog, The Cat in the Box,  Meditations on horror as paradoxical allegory.)

All quotes are taken from ‘Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2′ by Eugene Thacker, 2015

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I always feel as if I have to defend my intentions for my art in ever single project, it’s part of the reason why I work so hard, because I don’t want anything to be left up to misunderstanding or blazing ignorance by my critics, the issue of colour is one of my fundamental frustrations as mentioned already before in this project, and of which I won’t write about more past this post. I’m presenting quotes of interest here because I of course get the most influence from literature and philosophy I thought it would be best to defend my choice of aesthetic through the words that inspire this intention most. The second book of Thacker’s ‘Horror of philosophy’ series deals in the formulas of the very title, that of the paradox of consciousness, such as discussing the existentialist conundrums of Heidegger on being and nonbeing, this having some relation to the above quotes, in that I’m often fascinated by how Thacker brings theorists together to discuss the openness of alternativity within contemporary discourse. In particular on the very being of nothingness, darkness and voids within our own comprehensions of the universe in the face of total blackness, this in turn becomes about how we can perceive a spectrum of colour, and yet that isn’t all the colours that exist, we only know what we can experience and study, but beyond our being of comprehension there is nothing but blackness. A blackness that Robert Fludd believed to be pre-universal and yet paradoxically still exists now, making blackness a contentious enough issue to excite someone as contemporary as me hundreds of years after Fludd imagined the universe as a black square, that was all and nothing, not even needing to show the range of visible colour in his idea as it was all colour and no colour at the same time, making darkness and the abyss of the space around all the more abhuman at its most natural understanding. For those most fascinated by this darkness like Francois Laruelle, Arthur Schopenhauer and Nicola Masciandaro, as quoted above, blackness is not merely a paradox of colour, but an extreme beyond it, the very alternative to light itself, and so by the metrics of the eye and brain function when caught between either of the two, we see the very gap between what is known to us and to what is hidden, when merging them you don’t get colour, you get contrast and starlight, yet blackness can’t exist without a lack of light, and light can’t exist without lacking blackness, this reveal and unrevealing of existence is such an incredibly fascinating problematic to me as my work shows. It’s of course quite common in horror fiction to exploit this as the very subject of duality when representing the mundane and it’s transformation into the uncanny and alternative, this almost consuming darkness is a tool which exists in horror fiction as an agent of transmutation to what is known and what becomes reimagined through the unknown, this is the very back bone of weird fiction and is Lovecraft’s crutch. As evidenced here in the works of Clark Ashton Smith, a known peer and celebrated peer of Lovecraft, darkness is always the backdrop to the alternative and marries well with the uncanny, no villain, monster or gothic fantasy and folklore has ever attempted to bring itself to the complete serenity of the light as it would totally lose it’s mystery and curiosity, it would be without atmosphere or impact, that is why we tell ghost stories in the dark and why he we are afraid of the dark as a natural instinct, it simply does not reveal all and that both excites and can distress us in equal measure.

This immediately invalidates the need for colour play, it’s way such icons as Junji Ito are all the more memorable for their black and white style, the level of detail one can achieve when they aren’t bogged down by the normative and mundane quality of realism, and in turn colouring an image to have it resemble usual viewing of subjects in our own lives, the more unnerving and disquieting this can be on the audience, after all, it’s still being used to this day in critically acclaimed horror films such as the Light House (2019) to further sensationalise the darker imagery and scenes of said medium through the achromatic. Colour often simplifies the image and makes for better pulp science fiction material than it does for representing gut wrenching metamorphosis or existentialist horror stories, after all, if your going to make horror works that unnerve you to the point of reconsidering your own perception of mankind and what has the potential to crawl out of the supposedly endless nothingness of space then colour is going to make the entity all the more cartoony and without imaginative qualities, it has to exist outside our assumptions to be terrifying, and operating on a spectrum of colour that we see everywhere and recognise as normative constantly does nothing to challenge you. We don’t see in black and white and so using this medium to make works about exploded anatomy and abhuman portraiture is a always going to be so much graphical and unconventional in it’s form, it’s not realistic because it isn’t intending on being so. If I negate colour in my works then I’m actually allowing the audience to think outside of the whiteness and the blackness of my Rorschach-esque work, after all Dr Rorschach didn’t need to colour in his ink blots to see the eyes of his patients light up such a frantic way at would could be the face of their latest nightmare on paper, it’s all up to interpretation when you entirely remove the suggestive symbolism of colour. We humans have a symbolism for everything that is visible to us and colour is the worst offender academically speaking, it’s easy to see red as blood, it’s easy blue as water and yellow as urine, I don’t need to go over the entire spectrum of colour just to convey how mad it is that people think colour would improve my work, might as well start putting rainbows in books to see if that stops libraries going out of business, it’s more absurd that my portraits and yet I get chastised for allowing the audience to create their own understanding of how realism would represent my pieces if any of my portraits could reveal their whole picture, it’s part of the storytelling and the mystique of my work, something I feel most contemporary art students wouldn’t know even if it paraded itself in front of them with its tackle suggestively pointing at them. 

I hope this properly illuminates why I find colour annoying as a suggestion in the work, there is clear weight and value to the what I’m doing here, and I will be writing more about the importance of the Achromatic as the project goes on, this most certainly will be an important subject when doing the show and considering how the work fits alongside works of colour and under the bright lights of the studios, surrounded by colourful characters. 

[onetwofeb]

Jeremy R. Smith @en_demic

As far as non-philosophy goes, it is a non-humanist project. I urge readers who are suspicious of this to visit my translation of the subsection on non-humanism from Théorie des étrangers, found here:

[criminal-delirium]

Classes I’m assigning myself over the summer:

-Gunpla 101

-Fundamentals of Speculative Realism.

-Topic: Ray Brassier and Nihil Unbound 

[and/or]

-Topic: Francois Laruelle and Principles of Non-Philosophy

-Topic:  RPGs [Shin Memami Tensei, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim... etc.]

[sciamanoinglese]

72. IBP: Non-Philosophy with John O'Maoilearca

72. IBP: Non-Philosophy with John O’Maoilearca

In an attempt to make more sense of non-Philosophy, and therefore non-Buddhism, I interview Irish philosopher and academic John O Maoilearca, the author of All Thoughts Are Equal, an exceptionally accessible introduction to the work of that pesky French philosopher Francois Laruelle, who we’ve been name dropping on the podcast for quite some time.

Laruelle’s work navigates an interesting…

[humanperson105]

Pagan Theatrics: “Libidinal Materialism”, Machinic Vitalism, and Anti-Humanism.

“It should be recalled that Fichte made of the “Wissenschafslehre” [Science of Knowledge] a supple instrument for thought’s most various tasks. This idea of a plastic philosophical instrument has its origin in Kant and Critique, obviously, but it doesn’t find its fulfilled form until Eternal return, the only process that is transformed along with its materials and which is consumed/consummated on the spot in order to go further: a machinic process, a power of metamorphosis that can be “specified” as textual, a process of production, reproduction and consumption of signs that has put structuralism and linguistics six thousand feet under and that immanently entails the criteria of the distinction between textual gadgets and textuale machines.” (Francois Laruelle - Introduction to “Textual Machines” 1976)*

        This quote from Francois Laruelle comes from a work that bears a striking similarity to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “Libidinal Economy”, released just two years before the work quoted above. Both thinkers were attempting to synthesize Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Nietzsche (as well as other favorites of French post-war theory such as Sade, Klossowski, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.) into an anti-humanistic Machinic Vitalism shorn of all vestiges of what they saw as Christian guilt and morality that still clung to modern thought. “[A] machinic process, a power of metamorphosis that can be “specified” as textual, a process of production, reproduction and consumption of signs that has put structuralism and linguistics six thousand feet under . . .” The brief period of post-1968 Machinic Vitalism (I prefer Machinic Vitalism to Libidinal Materialism as the heavy influence of Nietzsche and Deleuze prevents this from being a form of materialism) arguably ends with Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980), Lyotard only writes one more “Machinic Vitalist” book (Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, 1977) before abandoning the theme and becoming a follower of Wittgenstein, and Laruelle abandons this position in 1981 (Philosophy I, 1971-1981). The full library of Machinic Vitalism would include, Klossowski’s “Living Currency” (1970), Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-oedipus” (1972), Lyotard's “Libidinal Economy” (1974), and Jean Baudrillard’s “Symbolic Exchange and Death” (1976). I believe the reason for Machinic Vitalism’s brief life span is due to the apparent dead end it reaches in its attempt to overturn Kantian humanism (consider the more careful and measured tone of ATP compared to AO). 

        Libidinal Economy differs from Textual Machines in that Lyotard remains more faithful to psychoanalysis than Laruelle does in that he replaces the Lacanian castrated subject with a “libidinal band” (a dispositif or arrangement), a psychotic mobius strip drive circuit without an ego or unconscious, while Laruelle leaves behind the subject through the impersonal will to power-as-libido. By forgoing subject (or ego) and unconscious, Lyotard, as well as Laruelle, assembles a libidinal textual machine powered by Nietzsche's will to power/eternal return read through Freud's death drive (the compulsion to repeat) that forgoes all questions of meaning and representation and overturns the subject in favor of the endless circulation of impersonal acephalic pre-individual intensities. In Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” (1972), the will to power as desiring production is still reigned in by the ethics of power as (potencia), a joyful Spinozistic affirmation of creativity and experimentation, rather than the will to power as a greater degree of power subjugating a lesser degree of power, as it is for Lyotard and Laruelle:

“So you thereby challenge Spinozist or Nietzschean ethics, which separate movements of being-more from those of being less, of action and reaction? - Yes, let us dread to see the reappearance of a whole morality or politics under the cover of these dichotomies, their sages, their militants, their tribunals, and their prisons. . . Not good and bad intensities, then, but intensity or its decompression. And as has been said and will be said again, both dissimulated together, meaning hidden in emotion, vertigo in reason. Therefore no morality at all, rather a theatrics; no politics, rather a conspiracy.” (Libidinal economy pg 42) 

        Machinic vitalism introduces Nietzsche’s naturalism to Freud’s energetic theory of the drives and creates an intensive Machinic-Naturalism that reveals the inhuman, impersonal mechanisms at work in both Freud and Nietzsche. The dead end of Machinic Vitalism and its psychotic form of animism comes from the fact that psychosis is a symptom of foreclosure (Verwerfung). This foreclosure comes from the insistence of Nietzsche and his followers (Lyotard and Laruelle, amongst others) on absolute immanence, whereby being (nature in this case) is one. To say that nature is one is to say that there is only the will to power as a greater degree of power subjugating a lesser degree of power, and all individual things, subjects, signs, and traces are just greater or lesser degrees of this power. I characterize this as a foreclosure because if nature is truly all one, then not only do we live in a completely deterministic universe in which nothing we do matters, but more importantly, we also can't act in any way whatsoever as we have no free will and can only hope to affirm a will to power that is completely indifferent to us. This is why Kant in the “Critique of Pure Reason” finds the basis for human freedom in the distance at which the human subject approaches being. If it wasn't for this distance between thinking and being the subject would not be able to make decisions and choose how it goes about approaching and making sense of the world it inhabits. If the subject was absolutely immanent to being and existed on the same plane as the things in themselves, there would be no need for language, concepts, or reason. Most importantly, this is the crucial difference between sapience, reason and freedom and mere mechanistic (natural) existence or sentience. “The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.” (CPR 152-153) To truly overturn humanism, is to insist not that humans are indistinguishable from the rest of nature as a mechanistic totality, but rather that to be human and to think is to always be artificial and to be at a remove from nature and what is “natural”. To be human is not to have a nature but to have a history.

        Nietzsche’s narrative in “The Genealogy of Morals” (prehistoric man/beasts of prey > aristocrats > bad conscience > nihilism/ubermensch >) is a cyclical transhistorical mechanism that subsumes human culture and history under nature as will to power. Machinic Vitalism has escaped Kantian humanism at the cost of creating a self enclosed mechanistic universe where nothing ever changes. This leaves next to nothing for Machinic Vitalism to work towards or attempt to solve and leaves its followers with three options: 

Follow Lyotard (and Deleuze) back into a less radical post-Kantianism still under the sway of the linguistic turn and abandon any or all political ambitions.

Stay with Machinic Vitalism and follow Nick Land and the Accelerationists and adopt a hard determinism that makes political change seem near impossible and only leaves open political options on the far right.

Follow Laruelle and abandon Machinic Vitalism in favor of realism and/or transcendental materialism.

 Machinic Vitalism as an attempt to overturn Kantian humanism in favor of a post-human pagan pantheistic naturalism was, in the end, unsuccessful but produced a unique approach to overcoming the limitations of bourgeois humanism that has gone on to influence thinkers like Mark Fisher, Ray Brassier, and Reza Negarestani. The term "Pagan" was originally used by Christians like Augustine as a blanket term for the multiplicity of non Abrahamic polytheistic religions in continental Europe. Much like these original "Pagans", what I call Pagan Naturalism does not refer to a conscious affinity between thinkers or a historically defined period of time, but is rather a blanket terms for pre, post, or anti Kantian conceptions of nature that take the shape of various forms and configurations of absolute immanence, panpsychism, and or pantheism that fail to recognize or reject the existence of the distance between thinking and being. This would also include thinkers with no familial resemblance to Nietzsche, like Spinoza, Whitehead, the Neoplatonists, Giordano Bruno, Michel Serres, etc. Machinic Vitalism is merely a particular anti-human variation of Pagan Naturalism that emphasizes the continuity of the organic and the inorganic.

*Translation of F. Laruelle’s Introduction to “Textual Machines” - Taylor Adkins, 9/1/13. https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/translation-of-f-laruelles-introduction-to-textual-machines/#_ftn7

[anarchist-caravan]

Non-revolted man has the primacy of the Real and determines rebellion by struggle but rebellion is the radical and transcendental beginning of combat. … It all begins with or in rebellion but all of it is determined by the spirit of struggle. 

Francois Laruelle

[edwordsmyth]

"The philosopher living in the milieu of the 'foundational' ideal and absorbed by it can only rid himself of philosophical foundation if he places it and finds it elsewhere—for example, in the mathematics and set theory to which he attributes this power of founding, or that he solicits with this hope.

But the non-philosopher renounces wholly all foundation, renouncing it not only for philosophy but also for science. He accepts that he works on a science that is contingent, in the sense that it reduces as far as possible the foundational pertinence of science. The essential point is that it should be a knowledge that cannot be furnished by philosophy. Not only must we abandon the foundational function of philosophy; we must abandon foundation everywhere as an ancient ideal of thought."

-François Laruelle

[athousandgateaux]

It is not man who colonizes the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely threshold of man.

Francois Laruelle, “Theorems on The Good News”, Theorem 00000000

[tar-kovsky]

Has anyone here read Laruelle? Is he any good? Can someone recommend me some stuff? I mean not only Laruelle stuff, but anything good on contemporary philosophy? I’m kinda lost after reading about phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc.