√-1, COGNITION AND ESTRANGEMENT: Laruelle and SF

by Terence Blake

Abstract: François Laruelle has felt the stifling and limited aspect of philosophy intensely for decades, to the
point of calling his own philosophy "non-philosophy", and "non-standard philosophy". Faced with the many
"turns" that are regularly announced to resolve our problems, Laruelle's solution is to take the image of the
“turn” literally, mathematically. He employs the mathematics of complex numbers, to define his own non-
philosophical turn as a "quarter turn", the result of multiplying standard philosophy (horizontal axis) by √-1.
Unsurprisingly, Laruelle’s “quarter turn” has its precedent in science fiction, notably in the last published
story of John W. Campbell, entitled "On the Nature of Angels".

One may find that philosophy taken as a whole is boring, tedious, monotonous, repetitive and
lacking in creative intensity, with only a few exceptions. Even the exceptional cases (books,
systems, concepts) can come to be banalised by their own creators, as they recite and organise their
ideas over repeated use. Sometimes our own productions seem to be second hand copies of our few
moments of learning or of inspiration.
Despite contemporary philosophy’s increasing recourse to a euphoric rhetoric of de-anthropisation,
individuation, conceptual creation, infinite intensities, pluralism, and the great outdoors, nothing
seems to change and the old academic game seems to perpetuate itself.
Even Deleuze's battle cry "philosophy is creation of concepts" has lost its provocative and political
power, and can be found repeated unthinkingly as a self-evident formula. It has gone from strange
provocation to marketing slogan to micro-social doxa in the space of a few years.
We have witnessed many attempts to break out from this impasse. The image of a "turn" has been
invoked to proclaim, to describe and to incite to a radical change. The linguistic turn, the practice
turn, the ontological turn, the ethical turn, the speculative turn, the scientific turn, and most recently
the mathematical turn have succeeded or accompanied each other, provoking some change within
the academic microcosm but without changing its fundamental laws.
François Laruelle has felt this stifling aspect of philosophy intensely for decades, to the point of
calling his own philosophy "non-philosophy", and "non-standard philosophy". His own solution is
to take the image of the “turn” literally, mathematically and physically, and to take the mathematics
and the physics imaginally, generically.
At this very general level, Laruelle is operating with the same sort of double crossover, or two way
cross movement, as science fiction. An image (insight, affect, intensity, virtuality, quality, potential,
speculation, intuition) is translated (literalised) into cognition, and this cognition is re-translated or
estranged into imagination.
More specifically, Laruelle employs the mathematics of complex numbers, i.e. numbers comprising
a "real" component (inscribed on the horizontal axis) and an "imaginary" component (the factor of a
real number multiplied by √-1, thus forming an imaginary number, inscribed on the vertical axis).
The two axes (real and imaginary) define the complex plane, and allow Laruelle to express his own
non-philosophical turn as a "quarter turn", the result of multiplying standard philosophy (horizontal
axis) by √-1, effecting a rotation of 90º, onto the imaginary or vertical axis.
We can make several remarks at this point in our analysis
1) Laruelle is not always very clear on this point, but we must consider that the specific geometrical
two way cross movement or re-mapping from the horizontal line onto the complex plane is only one
possible analog of the generic conceptual double crossover.
2) Laruelle, in his argument, implicitly presupposes the first movement, a reductive quarter turn in
which a speculative item on the imaginary axis is rotated into a cognitive content on the real axis.
This first, clockwise, rotation is presupposed by Laruelle as underlying the formation of standard,
"sufficient" philosophy. The dissolution of this sufficiency then requires the inverse movement, a
rotation in which cognitive content is transposed onto the imaginary axis.
3) Laruelle seemingly considers only pure cases, i.e. sufficient philosophy limited to the real axis
and non-standard philosophy confined to the imaginary axis. Despite vague talk of composites of
philosophy and science under science, Laruelle does not make full use of the complex plane in its
entirety.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Laruelle’s “quarter turn” has its precedent in science fiction. In his recently
published book ASTOUNDING: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron
Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction Alec Nevala-Lee notes:
The September 1971 issue featured the short story “On the Nature of Angels,” the last
piece of fiction that he ever wrote. Campbell proposed that the soul was a complex
number in which the variable b stood for the level of sin. No one knew the exact level at
which a spirit became good or evil after death, so it would be best, he said, “to keep our
soul’s b value as close to zero as possible.” (ASTOUNDING, 379).

Taken at face value this story appears to be a silly tongue-in-cheek thought-experiment, but taken as
a metaphor it describes something of the nature of the genre of science fiction itself, and of non-
philosophy.
The superficial “humorous” level comes from the moralistic description of the complex number in
which the imaginary axis gives the level of sin or grace and the real axis gives the unique, constant
value of the soul’s identity.
However, more seriously, this complex number could be seen as determining the respective values
of imaginary estrangement and real cognition. This would then provide a formula for defining the
difference between science fiction (defined by Darko Suvin as “the literature of cognitive
estrangement”) considered as escapism and as speculative fiction:
Campbell had wanted to be an inventor or scientist, and when he found himself working
as an editor instead, he redefined the pulps as a laboratory for ideas—improving the
writing, developing talent, and handing out entire plots for stories. America’s future, by
definition, was unknown, with a rate of change that would only increase. To prepare for
this coming acceleration, he turned science fiction from a literature of escapism into a
machine for generating analogies (ASTOUNDING, 8).

Thus Campbell writes in the short story “On the Nature of Angels” not only of a quarter turn, as
Laruelle does, but of a limit to respect, beyond which lies mere escapism, and within which the
analogies of speculation remain productive:
Scientists have proven, however, that if the soul’s end-of-life b component is less than
some number, E, the resulting “eternal” wave function will represent a “good” spirit,
with a positive eigenvalue. Conversely, if b exceeds E, the soul will become an “evil”
spirit (John W. Campbell, On the Nature of Angels, Analog, September 1971, 160).
The question of the value of E, defining the escapist limit, is an important one, for evaluating both
Laruelle’s work and that of his followers. I have argued elsewhere that most of the “performance”
philosophy elaborated by the Anglophone disciples of Laruelle goes well beyond E, falling into
escapist idealism.