As far as I can tell, so far, Laruelle took Derrida very very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that his response against Derrida reads like a satire of Derrida. He really had nowhere else to go, at that level, except to produce a rehabilitation of the ‘real’ or ‘reality’, using Zen-like logics to do so; basically, shifting the philosophical grid away from ontological concern, and onto the populist conceptuality, albeit Zen-powered, of this common term.
That he engages in a conceptual populism is perhaps shown by his practice of basing axiomatic definitions on common epistemological assumption (‘that which everyone already knows’). This is an appeal to the effortlessness of the ordinary. But it is also, as he would say, but is careful not to, an ‘autoposition’ of the ordinary. In addition, my argument would be that this ‘autoposition of the ordinary’, as inflected by an ordinary understanding of science, too easily plays into the hands of a crass, instrumental positivism; from there, perhaps, it is processed into a surface of conceptual consumerism.
This is shown by the considerable elisions of interpretation Laruelle practices in his encounters with Derrida. The ostensible reason for these omissions is structural; he projects onto the ‘philosophies of difference’, the burden of various binary and triadic structures; as characteristic of them, and of ‘ontological philosophy’, in general.
He imagines, that by dispensing with ontological concern, and switching to the conceptual populism of reality, he can escape those structural burdens.
By casting ‘ontological philosophy’, as a Moses before the promised land of Being, Laruelle can then institute his notion of ‘the One’ as a Zen-like immediacy, transforming the onerous textuality of ‘ontological philosophy’ into programmes and workshops under the signs of the ‘real’ and ‘non-philosophy’.
This has the advantage, of course, of socialising ontology, but eventually Laruelle and his followers will find that sheltering in the contemporary nostalgia of social-scientific-empirical modularisation comes at a price. Monotonously chanting positivist mantras, in the name of the ‘real’, does not make that price less exorbitant. No ‘axiom’, however facile, can satisfy that fee.