If I am saying so myself: this title is pretty fkg great; hilarious.
Anyways….
My reply to a comment by Mr. Adkins came out pretty good, so I’m posting it (with some editing):
Mr. Adkins: – “”There is no contradiction where there is radical duality”.
Also, the excerpt above is interesting, the one about there being ‘no illusions’. This may be true for non-philosophy and from the perspective of vision-in-One, but philosophy’s own belief-in-itself-as-in-the-real is the source of its transcendental Illusion, and the latter is veritably the same thing as its resistance, which is what non-philosophy, as science of philosophy, takes as its object.””
Direct Tangent 5.31: “- I submit that due to this doubling-back upon the “tatters”, non-philosophy will remain ‘unheard’ due to the persistent confusion that is the discussion of the philosophical object. Yet neither can be excluded since there are no illusions; I would say illusions only occur with the conventionally oriented.”
Yes, again: from your comment, it is difficult to believe that you are considering that what I write has any merit, since it appears that you only have glanced through my essays. For i agree and have said as much as your paragraph reply.
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There may indeed be no contradiction where there is radical duality, but the appearance of the explanation of it cannot avoid a contradicting duality. Even as I come upon the occasion of L’s work, I can only see it in reference to my particular experience, as an occasion-in-the-last-instance, so to speak, and this is a sublimated or reconciled form of duality in that i want or attempt to mean ‘my whole experience’. (I will address Slavoj Zizek’s comment on ‘love’ – we “do not love the whole world; we pick and choose what we love” – in a later post.) I see that L uses ‘radical’ in an attempt to release, or distinguish his meaning from what other typical or usually-philosophical meanings may be or have been proposed. The fact that he uses the term ‘radical’ must imply something that everyone commonly knows of the ‘usual’ meaning of of radical-ness or he would have chosen a different term.
Yet, I have problems with the ‘vision-in-One’. No matter how this is situated in meaning, he would not use the term ‘One’ if the usual meaning of ‘one’ was not operative somehow; neither would he have used the idea of ‘vision’. Any proposition of unity is a transcendental form (I will make my argument around this in an upcoming essay, I think); there is no situating a meaning of “oneness” without implicating some sort of “oneness” – that is unless he is speaking ironically. If his intent on using such ideas is to identify where such meaning lacks, and in this lack show exactly where non-philosophy resides or functions, then his idea is ironically solute: But I do not think he leaves his rhetoric open for such repetition; I think he is attempting to re-iterate a type of Hermeticism or ‘early’ Gnosticism so as to verify some sort of evolutionary progress of consciousness. The difference between what he is saying and what I am saying is quite a fine line, and I am working out how this line can be. ( with your help it seems 😉
The fact that I have come upon such presentation is revealed in duality, but unified by its being presented to me is a radical project; as i take it back to relinquish it again, without but absolutely with, transformed by my positional-absence (if i am also allowed to make up hyphenated terms and we can speak of it this way) – this is an ironic project. To deny duality through some assemblage of meaning does not negate duality, the meaning accounts for it. Hence philosophy and non-philosophy respectively, but my conventional methodology and philosophy, again respectively.
In this respect, I cannot expect a conventional agent to understand non-philosophy unless it is some thing to be comprehended, and not occasioned.
I may apprehend or comprehend that any and every manifestation and or presentation is really some sort of radical immanence, that I am included as instigator-receiver as well as passive catalyst and active resistor in the total scheme of meaning that includes what may be other-ness, that I am included totally just as what I may see as other beings are really part of my own radical immanence, but in a way that excludes the possibility of philosophically situating myself inclusively as that having providence or of ownership of other or others, or they me, and in such a way that we all thus co-participate in the democracy of strangers on or of or in a (non-)planar (non-)dimensional unilateral non-particular situational loci-circum-stance – it seems to me he is in a discursive process of describing a situation of positing without the necessity of its positing, attempting to describe how position is really movement and movement really position, like some quantum discourse or something. He is arranging giving terms, and this situating of meaning appears on the scene as contradictory; he is resolving innate philosophical contradictions through presenting “positive-negation”, of posing terms as if they are completed by including a negative with the positive, thus his preponderance of hyphen-terms. The need for such hyphens is due to dividing what is necessarily complicit and involved; where there is auto-polemic, hyphens are needed to overcome the division, to merge the dyadic meaning, for example, ‘non-philosophy’; where there is a suspended meaning, a meaning cleft from its counterpositional situation, hyphens are needed to emphasize the divisional position, such as, ‘vision-in-One’. But all of these terms, by their discursive manifestation, appear as positive. If the proposal is seen as not contradictory, that is, the situating of terms that supposedly encompass and thereby resolve the contradiction of ‘positive-negative’, then he is involved in the promotion of a particular method of truth, one that argues a true universe and by extension or reduction, the true object. The true object is a mythological proposition: its meaning is exactly transcendental, not immanent; yet, immanence is the mode of the mythological. There are no people who can behave radically in a radical sense who also can be known by others as such, it denies the very idea of radicality – except by two mutually exclusive moves: irony is in play, or, in as much as ‘radical’ is known in the same way or mode as one might be known as, say, a republican or democrat, passive or active, or short or tall. But if this latter is the case, then non-philosophy has no more or less baring upon truth, reality or existence than any other floating idea concerning proposed bases. Hence, the issue of non-philosophy’s presentation apparently contradicting is meaning. This is the summation of my accusation of Laruelle being in Bad Faith (see my earlier posts, and below).
When attempting to speak of the truth of reality and existence honestly and openly, there is usually, conventionally, no situating of meaning that avoids this; each situation carries the accounting-for element and the exclusive element. Indeed, Badiou, Lyotard, Foucault, even Bourdieu – probably all the postmodernistical French, all see this and express themselves against or in consideration of this phenomenon. Zizek does very well with this also. When the contradiction is taken as an indication of where truth indeed lay, instead of indicating where it falls short or fails, then we can begin to understand what is Radical: that non-philosophy is but one manner of situating terms to account for the truth, what Laruelle implicates by saying ‘knowledges’.
Though he would release himself from the philosophical imperative by ‘non’-ing everything, his result gains a re-circumscription, which is exactly an ideological assertion. When one sees that Laruelle part of a philosophical tradition, and his proposition is just the latest assertion-in-the-last-instance of what theorists in a certain tradition have been already developing using their various terms and attitudes (‘attitude’ like that of a flying plane’s angle of attack against the air) then his lack can be seen in obvious relief.
Bad faith is the condition of not seeing that ones object of faith is not true, a situation evident in a presentation the meaning of which is denied by the presentation. As i have said elsewhere; If Laruelle knows his proposition is true, then he is in bad faith by his presentation, or, if he agrees with the subsequent efforts that claim non-philosophy, then he is in bad faith due to his conventional orientation upon the term. Hence, I see my situating of terms to describe the situation as more precise and more inclusive of the facts. His jargon is unnecessary and forced, though it may be sufficient for the presentation. Unilateralization only resolves ironically, that is to say, it cannot be known or enacted and remain radical, unless, as I have said above, non-philosophy has no more or less validity than the reasons someone likes the Steelers better that the Dolphins in American football. And thus, it is very pertinent and revealing that he would even notice a question that has to do with whether or not humanity should be saved, because he sees his effort as a part of progress towards the true object.
My question has to do with this aspect of L’s work: what does it mean when a meaning accounts for is own lack? And, how is it possible to uphold or suspend the contradicting motion of appearance ? The answer is ironic. Hence I eagerly await the arrival of “Principles of Non-philosophy”, and “Future Christ”.
Unexpected Objects 