Laruelle and the Reality of Abstraction

Abstract

The article focuses on the problematic relationship between reality-in-itself and reality-for-us, from Kant through Heidegger to Laruelle. According to Brassier, Kant makes a fundamental mistake when he demarcates between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-us because this distinction itself is purely conceptual, the noumenal as the real is made logically dependent on the phenomenal as the ideal. It turns out that we are afflicted with an abstraction created in favor of the need to provide some-thing, not no-thing, behind phenomena, that is, to avoid the absurdity of the phenomenon without what is. Turning to Heidegger's Laruelean treatment, the author shows the radicalization of the Kantian phenomenal being in the latter: otherwise, the reality of phenomena, understood as the modus in which they are given before objectification, is conditioned by the transcendence of the phenomenal proper. This particular transcendence can be designated as the unobjectivisable transcendence, which is immanent to the being as such in its continued formal distinction from the phenomenon or object of representation. Laruelle, for his part, attempts to radicalize Heidegger by appealing to his interpretation of the concept of essence. Whereas Heidegger conceives of the latter as a scission between the objectivating transcendence and the unobjectivisable transcendence (the "Clearing»), Laruelle conceptualizes this cleavage as an absolute scission, but this scission is assumed to be real. But, as Brasier believes, this demarche is only half successful.

Translation from English by Lolita Anamalova according to the publication: Ⓒ Brassier R. Laruelle and Reality of Abstraction // Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. R. 100-121.

Published with the kind permission of the author.