Direct Tangent 2.6

So lets back up a little. Francois Laruelle is a contemporary thinker – I cant really say ‘ philosopher’ because – who is known for his ‘project’ called Non-Philosophy, which is proposed as distinguished from the thus framed traditional discipline of ‘philosophy’. It is a philosophy, but Laruelle rightly presents the implicated end-run of philosophy, the platform upon which the proposals of philosophy are founded, and thereby finds that he cannot present his idea as philosophy; since he has discovered or revealed or proposed philosophy as a thing in-itself by his idea, his idea then must lie not within philosophy but without it. This is his premise. Why he must disgise it in such supra-vulgar language is the question I answer through rebutting his project.

See, non- philosophy must be a project; it cannot be merely another theory. What he means by ‘project’ is similar to what we know as praxis, which can be defined as an authentic marraige in one’s being of thought and practice. It is not merely belief but belief that joins in the act as the act informs constructive learning; praxis, in this way, can be said to be existential because it it does not rise above reality in some ideal-theoretical fantasy of would-be could-be world, rather, it upholds the integrity of the human being responsible for its real world.

Yet, at its root, non-philosophy is a theory. Laruelle defines it as a project because of the contradiction that is presented upon the segregation and relagation of philophy to a thing in-itself. When he does this he is left with a necessary remainder ( did I hear Slavoj Zizek?) that if left there as an idea fades away in moot negation. So it must be a project; it must be something one does as well as thinks. But if this is so then his non-philosophy falls flat. It becomes nothing more than any other religion or philosophy.

The problem of non-philosophy, then, has to do with this problem of redundancy. Again, I am not totally sure why he has to dress it up in jargon; I see it as an indication of limit rather than liberation, and yet he apparently is talking about the latter. He has confused himself before he has finished his essay. And then, as I described previously, because he has manipulated the jargon so well, he has picked up other acolytes who have faith in his great gospels and attempt to develop the project and proceed to create what will inevitably be confusion, because they have began in a haze of religious confusion.

What I am saying is that while Laruelle has come upon the proper problem, his solution reveals that he is in what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls bad faith.