[terenceblake] “Laruelle’s “non-standard” thought is thus a half-way house between standard philosophy and ontological pluralism.
{AK}: Academic philosophies of-, are, without exception, metaphysical-semantic inflations of concepts. There is an unlimited conceptual alphabet, so to speak, the majority of which is neglected in favour of the anthropic and academic preoccupation with the notion of realisation, and it’s hypostatic imaging as the ‘real’. The inordinate inflation of this principle is mainly due to deprivation and expression anxieties. There are others, but their delineation requires a more expansive context of explication. We can call almost all socially institutionalised philosophy ‘realist’, in this sense. The reality principle is a not so strange attractor, exerting its pull on all communi-cable philosophies of the anthropic.
Laruelle’s response to both epistemological and ontological proliferation, is essentially a monist empiricism, or empirical monism, which he achieves largely through a judicious appropriation of Buddhist techniques of metaphysical deflation. His borrowings, though, are selective, serving the purposes of his monist empiricism. The nature of that selectivity; its procedures and omissions; strongly characterise it, I would argue, as an insidious apologia at the outset, for innate forms of positivist instrumentalisation at the social core. The instrumental option is nothing new, but the lengths to which Laruelle has gone, in order to absolutise it as a reality-bolstered axiom, show both a degree of intriguing defensiveness, and an ideological inflation of a very specific idea of ordinariness, which can only be characterised as some yet to be determined cultural resistance. The notion of resistance bespeaks a threat, whether hallucinated or not. Obviously, whatever its forms, that threat is interpreted as a threat to the core reality of positive instrumentalisation.
Laruelle’s conversion of philosophies into a Lego or Meccano set of material possibilities is something that SF thinking has been doing all along, with far greater range, but it doesn’t just do that alone, nor as some kind of monotonous revelation.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">[terenceblake] "There is the non-standard voice of an unknown stranger and an unassimilated foreigner in Laruelle’s texts (“étranger” in French means both stranger and foreigner) along with the more standard voice of a Continental academic philosopher. Even the title of the book expresses Laruelle’s awareness of, and struggle with these two voices.
Laruelle’s appeal and continuing relevance lies in the difficult and conflicted harmony (or at least co-presence) of these two voices. He maintains the exigency of immanence in perhaps its purest form today, although that very purity may have prevented him from attaining it except in its most general, and programmatic, outlines.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">{AK}: How 'pure' can such an exigency be, if there are two irreducible voices? Is that not a telling duality artefact of the current fad for the transcendence of immanence? To describe it in terms of 'purity' at all, betrays this idealisation of the immanent, and thus, concomitantly, of its polar twin, the transcendent. The same conventional and questionable logic of metaphysical distribution informing both terms is at play; the same hallucinated surfaces of substantial structuring and positivist instrumentalisation continue on, like cartoon characters running past the edge of a cliff, in theoretical mid-air, their dogmatic limbs spinning around according to their misplaced nostalgias of effective philosophical or non-philosophical, action.
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[terenceblake] “Reading this book and the immediately preceding books (where Laruelle tries to come to terms with Lacan) and also the succeeding ones (where he tries to come to terms with Levinas and Althusser), we can see that something more than non-philosophy is required if Laruelle is to actually implement his research programme.
Laruelle is in need of a non-standard supplement to allow him to pass from the critique of philosophy’s sufficiency and abstract programmatic talking about a different mode of thinking to its concrete practical effectuation.
{AK} When John Coltrane said that he didn’t know how to stop playing his saxophone solos, miles Davis told him: “Take the horn out of your mouth!”
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[terenceblake] “We can conclude that despite the seeming promise of its (negative and positive) heuristic principles of Laruelle’s metaphysical research programme it is missing a crucial element: the bridging principle that would permit the practice of non-philosophical thought. This un-bridged gap accounts for the disappointing attempts at realisation, usually amounting to repetitive affirmations of a “new use of philosophy” by Laruelle and his disciples, as if simply proclaiming something made it so. This characterises Laruellean non-philosophy as a form of performative idealism
{AK}: I agree. There is a risk of instituting an insularity of action or performance, something I cautioned against, almost two years ago:
“[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Individually, they are all One – and this is firstly a performative gesture before it becomes an ontological thesis (that tells us ‘what they are’)”:
{AK}: If this “One” is “firstly” a somatic sign, is such deliverance into an ecstasy of accomplishings, not a flight into an ‘action mysticism’?
There are two possible subtextual registers operating here: one, is the anchoring in a kind of Wittgensteinian “showing” that sidesteps interpretative drift; two, is the implicit valorisation of an unquestioned expediency, in the appeal to ‘practical action’ as an unquestioned ‘given’.
The dancing ‘body’ is, in-deed, important, but it is precisely because of that import that it risks returning to whatever insidious & coercive dualisations are floating around: the remnants of Cartesian afterglow.”
(http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=886)