Immanence as Resistance. (Non-)philosophical dialog between Gilles Deleuze and François Laruelle

Abstract

The article reconstructs and analyzes in detail the concepts of immanence of J. Deleuze and F. Laruelle, as well as their actual and imagined dialogues and mutual critiques from Deleuzian remarks in «What is Philosophy?», referring to Laruelle's non-philosophical strategy of thought as one way of thinking immanence, to the implicit counter-theses of Laruelle, who claims immanence no less than Deleuze, and their open responses to each other. Thus, whereas Deleuze outlines the plan of immanence as something that needs to be created, outlined, grasped (to concept) and which is nevertheless the basic implication of any thought (both philosophical and non-philosophical, where the latter is the non-conceptualizable), Laruelle sees such a demarche as assigning radical immanence to the domain of philosophical thought alone, which thinks of itself as self-sufficient and thus claims conceptual totalization. Laruelle's radical immanence is not the Spinozian One: according to Laruelle, such immanence is something absolutely irreducible, something to which even the predicate of being cannot be added. It is a kind of «givenness-without-givenness» Real. Thus, radical immanence is non-philosophical because it is a generic (générique) experience that people share directly, and does not need an ontology or philosophy of being to be. Whereas the plane of immanence is non-philosophical because it is a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual level that nevertheless constitutes the heart of philosophy as the inseparability and reciprocity of the External and the Internal.