Interview with François Laruelle, non-philosopher

Abstract

Bastien Halle's conversation with François Laruelle is devoted to unfolding the main problems, principles, and ideas that non-philosophy, as a discipline that is specifically non-philosophical and not, in Laruelle's view, supra-philosophical, formulates and works with. Thus, the first and most important problem, idea, and principle of non-philosophy becomes the Real, understood as an irreducible residue that haunts philosophical thinking that claims totalization. Since the Real is discarded by philosophy itself as impossible to question, and invariably accompanying, Laruelle postulates the minimization of its presence and considers philosophy itself as the subject of non-philosophy, treating the latter as a «philosophical fiction», the «raw material» of non-philosophy. The Real itself regulates the general movement of thought as One, but a One that is not involved in being, but is one of the extreme terms of what Laruelle calls the unilateral duality: the situation of a one-sided relation between X and Y, where the latter is an absolutely independent One-in-One, and the former is a dependent term, aspiring to Y, derived from transcendence, a clone of the One. The One, on the other hand, is axiomatic and represents, in Laruelle's thought, a radical, radicalized immanence, the main operation (with) of which becomes the vision-in-One. This latter also characterizes the One as (not)-One (from a transcendental perspective), implying a relationship of dependence. According to Laruelle, the absolutely independent, Real as One undermines the self-sufficiency of philosophy insofar as it is «given-without-givenness» and in principle unavailable for issuing, where this «not» is actually the same transcendental clone indicating dependence on the One as radical immanence. This is why non-philosophy is thought of by Laruelle as a panoptic position that undermines the self-sufficiency, self-justification, and self-substantiation of any possible philosophy.

Translation from French by Nikita Arkhipov based on the publication Entretien avec F. Laruelle, non-philosophe (avec Bastien Gallet) // Musica Falsa. 1999. No. 13.