Introduction

Superposing Non-Standard Philosophy and Humanities Discourse

Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve

How to found a rigorous science of the human, established in the rigor specific to theory as such — that is to say, in the experience of the full and phenomenally positive sense of theoria? One that no longer borrows its means of investigation, of demonstration, of validation, from existing sciences? It must be founded in the specific essence of its object, in the truth of its object: the discovery of the science of the human and that of the real essence of the human are the same thing.

— François Laruelle

1. LARUELLE AND METHOD: OBJECTS, OBJECTIVES, OBJECTIONS

Discourses are meant to be determined, at least in part, by their objects. The discourse of biology is meant to be determined by living things, for instance, and that of economics by flows of production, consumption, and exchange. Sciences at any rate are intended to track determinations in their objects and generate knowledge in some form or another through these determinations. What about the discourse of philosophy? What is its determinate object? How does this object become philosophy's aim or goal, its primary objective? What about the other fields and discourses grouped together, however loosely, as the "humanities"? What type of determination coordinates these "human" disciplines with their various objects and objectives? One way that the theoretical apparatus developed by François Laruelle over the past several decades may be understood is as an attempt to provide a new orientation of thought toward the concept of the object, in general, and the humanobject, in particular. Laruelle's thought has become broadly known under the names ofnon-philosophy and, more recently, non-standard philosophy, and indeed the core concept of objecthood taken over and transformed by non-philosophy is that provided first by philosophy. The aim or objective of Laruelle's work may be described in general as the honing of a human theoretical stance that would no longer objectify the human in the manner of philosophy and its disciplinary avatars but would instead proceed within and among the materials given by such disciplines via a method of immanent theory, or generic science.

One way to approach non-philosophy is thus by conceiving the new standpoint it registers with respect to the traditional objects of philosophy. It is this key aspect of Laruelle's thought that bears special relevance for the humanities, since it is precisely the peculiar status of the objects of humanities discourse — products of human creative action — that gives these disciplines their special character. From a non-standard or non-philosophical point of view, the various objects investigated by philosophy are always already preformatted by philosophy itself. Thus philosophy essentially mediates itself through the objects it purports to examine. The basic point of non-philosophy, then, is to offer a tendentious yet robust and plausible account of philosophy's "essence"— not, however, in order once and for all to fix philosophy's identity and close its endless discussions about itself, its iterations and reiterations (this would be the philosophical analogue of non-philosophy's project). Rather, nonphilosophy seeks to operationalize, in a second step (although this question of ordering will prove to be crucial), its account of philosophy as a fresh chance under contemporary conditions of thought — political, aesthetic, scientific, religious/antireligious, ecological — to extend theory in creative and experimental ways that might otherwise remain stymied.

What is this non-philosophical account of philosophy's essence? Or, to put it in pragmatic terms: How does Laruelle's own conceptual discourse delineate what philosophy is? Despite a variety of superficially distinct formulations, the answer is quite straightforward: philosophy for non-philosophy consists in the decisional, abstract partitioning of a universal domain (typically Being or the All, but at times merely thinking or conceptually deflated material nature) into two indissociable standpoints, one relatively concrete and empirical and the other relatively structural and conditioning. What Laruelle, following Michel Foucault, calls the empirico-transcendental (or transcendental-empirical) doublet is one canonical instance of this (meta-)structure. Another important class of examples is given by the "philosophies of difference" indexed by the names Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze as well as their many commentators and followers. But it is also possible to go back to much earlier philosophical cases: the pre-Socratics (Heraclitus and Parmenides are paradigmatic here), Plato and neo-Platonism, pagan and baptized Aristotelianism, and related movements and traditions. These too are models of the basic philosophical algebra, two internally complex terms conceived equally as operations closed under their various synthetic compositions. The important point is that this algebra is by its very nature infinitely plastic, self-reflexive, and differentiating/differentiated, as well as endlessly auto-disruptive or self-critical. Rather than a fixed and rigid form into which particular philosophies might be crowbarred like Procrustean dreamers, this notion of an abstract theoretical algebra characterizing philosophy as such — a two-in-one of conceptual terms or functions that morphs naturally into a three-in-two (thus a two-in-one-in-three-in-two and so on) — is, for the immanent or non-synthetic stance, taken by non-philosophy, an always partial/impartial structure that both solicits and provides its auto/hetero-supplementation. The core claim of non-philosophy — arguably its sole claim or unique axiom, given the data of historical/a priori philosophy — is that for all the obvious differences and mutual incompossibilities among these cases of philosophy, their common mode of thinking...