PLURALISING LARUELLE

non-Laruellean non-philosophy and many visions-in-ones

by Terence Blake

Abstract: Laruelle occasionally discusses contemporary fellow thinkers such as Deleuze

and Badiou, but I have argued on my blog (AGENT SWARM) and in my more synthetic
articles, that we can construe Laruelle’s treatment of these figures as not constituting the
objective representation of the real philosophers, but as the dramatised deployment of a set
of conceptual characters. This dramatised (or “operatic”, to use Laruelle’s term) reading is
not how the official Anglophone disciples of Laruelle read him, displaying as they do a
deplorable tendency towards naive realism in their approach to their master-thinker. My
own approach to reading Laruelle could be called “post-Laruellean pluralism”, or “non-
Laruellean non-philosophy”. To make the discussion more precise I list forty points of
convergence and divergence.

1) Mystic versus mystique: against the mystique of the Laruelleans. I find François
Laruelle’s non-philosophy very interesting, and his later non-standard philosophy even more
so, but I absolutely reject the mystique thrown up by his disciples around his ideas, that he
himself cultivates. We do not need another obscurantism.
2) Against the double standard in philosophy. Laruelle is guilty of maintaining a double
standard: while practising and demanding a charitable reading of his own work as non-
philosophy, he practices an uncharitable reading of the work of rivals such as Deleuze and
Guattari, and Badiou, reading it as standard, "sufficient" philosophy.
3) Laruelle's victims. In particular, Laruelle relies on an uncharitable reading of the work
of rivals such as Deleuze and Guattari, and Badiou (not to mention Foucault and Lyotard) as
enmeshed in philosophy’s sufficiency. These intellectual rivals are his (non-)victims.
4) Virtue epistemology. Laruelle's non-philosophy is a form of virtue epistemology. He
correctly identifies the vice of philosophical sufficiency, but his own readings of other
philosophers are not virtuous. They are uncharitable and ungenerous.
5) Un-generic methodology. Behind this lack of charity towards rivals there lies a real
methodological problem. If Laruelle is so stifled and harassed by the sufficiency of
philosophy, why does he not seek fellow thinkers outside the confines of a very narrow
French nostalgic set of references?
6) Non-philosophy is un-generous and un-generic. Laruelle gives us an uncharitable
phantasmatic reading of his rivals yet remains within a narrow set of references. He has
neither the depth nor the amplitude of Deleuze, Lyotard, Badiou. He fails in terms of his
own criteria.
7) Against French sufficiency. Paradoxically, there is a principle of French sufficiency at
work in Laruelle's writings. He does also refer to German idealism as well, so we could call
it the principle of Franco-German sufficiency.
8) Circles of sufficiency. Laruelle's principle of sufficiency is his version of Meillassoux's
correlationist circle. He does not succeed in breaking out of this circle. In PHILOSOPHIE
NON-STANDARD he pluralises the correlationist circle, and calls them the circles of Hell:
"the human being struggles inside these circles of hell and strives to be freed
from them" (page 9, my translation).

9) Misleading terminology. Laruelle's term for the great Outside beyond any correlation is
the Real. This is in not to be confused with the Lacanian Real. Disappointingly enough,
given his grandiose proclamations, Laruelle's Real is "man-in-person".
10) Breaking the translation barrier. Anglophone Continental Philosophy is not yet in a
position to fully grasp and to discuss critically Laruelle’s later "quantum" thought, as up to
now Laruelle's research programme has principally been translated and explicated either by
religious or by political reductionists.
11) Qualitative quantum. I have no objection to Laruelle's qualitative use of quantum
ideas. Paul Feyerabend, Slavoj Zizek, Karen Barad, and Steve Fuller have highlighted the
heuristic use of qualitative ideas both in the development of quantum theory and in their
own thought.
12) Quantum Porosity. Even if by qualitative quantum thinking all that Laruelle means is
the logical impossibility of either correlation or withdrawal, due to the impossibility of
sharply defined untraversable boundaries, that in itself is a very useful insight.
13) Against inflation. Laruelle proposes quite a few of such useful maxims, but he has
inflated them into a system self-proclaimed to be new, unique, and beyond all the others.
The absurd presupposition is that there is only one non-philosopher - Laruelle.
14) The Uniqueness Hypothesis. Laruelle's pretension to uniqueness is the artefact of his
un-generous readings and un-generic, biblio-correlationist circle of sufficient context
combined with his art of philosophical inflation.
15) Visions-in-Ones. Heuristic maxims,rules of thumb, and insights are elevated into a new
solipsism: only Laruelle is "Real", due to his vision-in-one. This vision-in-one is not unique
to him. It exists under other names in Deleuze and Guattari (the Outside), Badiou (the
Absolute), Lyotard (the Arrive-t-il?).
16) Permeability versus Demarcation. Rejecting sharply defined un-crossable borders and
boundaries is an important step, that allows us to cut through the pseudo-Lacanian pathos of
the "trauma of the real", indulged in by some of Laruelle's disciples. Ignorant of science,
they have stopped short of his quantum thought out of self-interest.
17) Cargo cults of jargon. Steve Fuller is another quantum thinker (as are Slavoj Zizek and
Gilles Deleuze) who also operates with a "vision-in-One", but he would not use such
pompous constipated jargon. He writes too well and too clearly to be annexed by the cargo
cultists of Continental profundity. (Note: for a very interesting account of academic cargo
cults see Steve Fuller's "Academia as Cargo Cult").
18) Against scientistic cowardice. Steve Fuller uses his own "vision-in-One" to criticise
standard histories of science and standard methodologies, and so dares to critique actual
scientific practice. None of this is to be found in Laruelle's grandiloquent critique of all and
everything except "science".
19) Against empty abstraction. In Laruelle's non-philosophy phase, the word "science" is
an empty token, an argumentative joker. It serves to legitimate his philosophy by way of a
desiccated abstraction. He gives it some content in his later non-standard philosophy, by
drawing on quantum physics, but this is more a case of metaphoric transfer than of
substantial influence.
20) Outside the frame. Laruelle's argument is based on a qualitative application of the
wave/particle duality associated with the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling. This is his
way to break free from the "myth of the framework" (that vitiated his non-philosophy) and
from the spectre of relativism.
21) Heuristic metaphors. One may defend Laruelle’s use of such metaphoric transfers on
the grounds that we do this sort of thing all the time, and that it is necessary to use concepts
loosely in order to communicate, and even more so to get thought moving.
22) Images of thought. A second defence of the quantum metaphor is that Laruelle is not
engaging in analytic philosophy of quantum mechanics, but rather attempting to construct a
general image of thought.
23) Exploration versus reference. A third defence is that philosophy is more concerned
with conceptual exploration than with referential truths. However, this characterisation does
not constitute not a licence for a philosopher to say just anything that comes into his or her
head, regardless of empirical reality.
24) Empirical testability. On the contrary philosophy, even transcendental philosophy, is
far more empirical than it usually acknowledges, and should be even more so. Laruelle’s
system would be in big trouble if it was shown that he got the science wrong.
25) Democracy of thought. A fourth defence of Laruelle's quantum metaphor would be that
it is a democratic move, against the hegemony of experts. In practice, science makes use of
or presupposes philosophical concepts. Scientists are not, and should not be, the sole
proprietors of these concepts. I defend Laruelle’s attempt on democratic grounds. I say
"attempt" as there is no guarantee that he will be successful in constructing a new and useful
type of thought.
26) Open Dialogue. One of the indicators of success of Laruelle's endeavour would be for
him to explore argumentatively but charitably the relations of his thought to that of other
recent and contemporary thinkers working on comparable endeavours, but this is falsified
by Laruelle’s continuing noetic posture of uniqueness and beyondness.
27) Lexical obscurantism. One of the major obstacles to understanding Laruelle’s texts,
and so responsible for their obscurity, is the almost complete absence of comprehensible or
useful definitions, even according to a very loose, contextual, pragmatic notion of
definition.
28) Laruelle litanies. Laruelle uses an idiosyncratic set of words and expressions in a
repetitive incantatory way, agglomerating them one after the other to form a secular litany.
This does him a great disservice.
29) Lexical addiction. For example one of Laruelle’s older, non-philosophical, words is
"unilateral" In his non-standard philosophy phase he introduces the quantum notion of
complementarity, but he cannot free himself from the old terminology, talking about
"unilateral complementarity", which is a contradiction in terms.
30) Lexical abstraction. Some of his followers claim that Laruelle’s style seems obscure
because its syntax is innovative, following the « syntax of the real ». However there is not
much syntaxic innovation in his texts, rather, as we have seen, the obscurity is lexical.
31) Naive empiricism. This ill-formed notion of "syntax of the real" is an expression of the
worst sort of empiricism, the paradigm of an a-theoretical correspondence with the syntaxic
structure of the real, that we are obliged to transcribe in our non-philosophical writing.
32) Ideological protection. In reply to objections, ad hoc defences of Laruelle’s style are
advanced, notably the hagiographic defence of this style as expressing the "syntax of the
real". One forgets to mention that a "syntax of the real" contradicts "unilaterality".
33) Performative infallibility. A further ad hoc protective measure is the pragmatic defence
of Laruelle’s dogmatic and solipsistic approach as embodying philosophy as "performance".
34) Eluding testability. Both of these ad hoc notions (the syntax of the real, performance
philosophy) are attempts to elude the very real semantic obscurantism of Laruelle’s texts.
Both try to grant infallibility to Laruelle’s pronouncements, to protect it from logical and
empirical testability.
35) Sutural Reductionism. Each of Laruelle’s Anglophone presenters writes under the
dictation of a particular suture: religious, political, artistic, or scientific. Thus alongside
clones of Laruelle’s own scientism we are confronted with religionism, aestheticism, and
politicism.
36) "Laruelle does not exist". Thus the full extent of Laruelle’s research programme,
expounded outside the obedience to any particular reductionism, is as yet unknown in
English.
37) Pop-philosophy. Laruelle’s qualitative use of concepts is close in spirit to Deleuze’s
notion of "deterritorialisation" of concepts, in view of the creation of a pop-philosophy. The
problem is that neither Deleuze nor Laruelle attain that "pop" level of expression. They
remain too academic.
38) Manifestos and Theatre. Only Badiou seems to have succeeded in the production of
"pop-philosophy", with his two manifestos for philosophy, and even more so with his series
of “plays for children” (the Ahmed tetralogy).
39) Pop immanence. Volume three in the BEING AND EVENT trilogy, THE
IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, combines classical philosophical prose with extracts from his
seminars, and theatrical episodes from his Ahmed Tetralogy, along with mathematical
exposition.
40) Non-Laruellean non-standard philosophy. Badiou's THE IMMANENCE OF
TRUTHS is a thousand times more deserving of the name non-standard philosophy than
anything Laruelle has produced, as is Deleuze and Guattari's A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
or Zizek's LESS THAN NOTHING.