Levi, in a reply to my last post, raises some questions about non-philosophy:
I am unclear as to why being or the real must be understood as something completely independent of the human. … What perplexes me is why a realist ontology is required to make the move of claiming that being as such is completely unrelated to the human. This strikes me as a dual world ontology where one form of being is really real and the rest is simply appearances that are not. If this is the case, then the question becomes not that of how we attain the real, but rather how various politics construct or build their polis, their values, the bodies that populate this polis, and so on.
I’m going to reproduce my comment here, with slight modifications, because I think it will help clarify a lot of what I’m doing on this blog.
The point I’m getting at, and I think the same goes for Laurelle, is not that there are two worlds, one human and one non-human, and so on. It is not that there is a false, phenomenal world related to humanity, and then a true noumenal world unrelated to humanity. The point is that the Real is radically non-relational, not related to anything, human or not. But again, this does not imply a separate, non-relational world. The Real as without-relation does not, strictly speaking, exist, because the dyad of existence/non-existence is already an intra-worldly determination; a world is a horizon of existentiality or relationality.
In this way, we can easily claim that a large part of the world is not related to humanity and that it nevertheless exists, but this is still a determination of thought, and dependent upon a philosophical decision according to which the Real is submitted to the existential dyad. This is why for Laurelle, a world is always a Thought World.
The Real as radically foreclosed to such decision, as indifferent to conceptual predication that separates existence from non-existence, phenomenon from noumenon, et cetera, has no positive sense of Being or existing itself. It does not constitute a separate world. Rather, the Real as vision-in-one is, in-the-last-instance, identical to this world, with all of its human and non-human regions. The difference lies in that the Real as foreclosed is, as it were, an operation to which we submit these philosophical decisions and determinations, suspending their efficacy or sufficiency, making them only relatively autonomous, dependent upon that which they, in constituting themselves, must omit, abolish, exclude. The Real is nothing more than this foreclosure, this gap within philosophical decisions that the latter must cover up or fill in.
So there is only one world, the one determined as such through philosophical decision. The Real is simply the name or symbol for the insufficiency of this decision to that which it seeks to determine, and the operation that suspends philosophy’s pretensions to sufficiency or exhaustive determination.
In a comment, Alexei summarizes the ultimate impasse that realist ontologies like Levi’s run up against:
My anxiousness about object-oriented philosophy (and the foreshortened versions of Kant we’ve been seeing) is really a function, I think, of the fact that I have no idea what it would mean to think ontologically, without relation to the normative. For that seems to mean not only (1) trying to climb out of your own skin to think about the world, but (2) trying to think this non-subjective world without concepts. Quite simply put, then, Ontology is only ever conceptual, and concepts are first and foremost normative animals.
How we can talk about a world without humans without ‘climbing out of our skin’?. Non-philosophy is the answer to this problem, not by pretending to get us out of this skin, or contenting itself in imagining this world without really experiencing it, but by claiming that the Real as radically immanent or lived-in-One is precisely such an experience, one that has the effect of suspending the self-suffiency of ontological discourse without negating or supplanting it.
This is why non-philosophy does not rely primarily on concepts, using them rather as its material, extracting from them non-conceptual symbols that enact the foreclosure of the Real, thereby suspending the self-sufficiency of said concepts. In other words, non-philosophy does not imagine a world without humans any more than it denies such a world. It forces into our world that gap that separates us from a world without us, and this gap is the Real.
hey reid, i don’t really have anything productive to add, but just wanted to say this is a really great exposition of laruelle here!
p.s. yay for animal collective! not sure if you saw this online yet, but here’s a recent live show:
http://www.nyctaper.com/?p=513
i just missed being able to make it to that show, and now i’m kicking myself for not having found out about it earlier.
I saw Animal Collective live once, about four years ago. Best live show I’ve ever seen.
Thanks for the link, and the compliment! Like you, I’m still pretty sketchy on Laurelle due to the lack of translated material, and a lot of his work is still opaque to me, but I’m doing the best I can for now.
How is this different than a general Negative Theology as to God/Nature, or the assumption that all our concepts and ideas are historically contingent constructions of agreements, or the Pragmatist’s advisement that only a difference that makes a difference need be argued over, or even Plotinus’s idea that “The One” stand above even the distinction of Being and Non-Being?
And…does this mean that all of Philosophy’s metaphysical attempts to fashion a coherent grounds for truth and agreement necessarily were retardations, that is did not Hegel’s notion of Idea, Kant’s Ethical normativity, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, even Descartes’ dual Substance lead to frameworks (however mistaken) which bring about scientific observations which make the world more concrete? That is, if the philosophical mistake is to assume priority over non-philosophy, have not the benefits of philosophy, in history, come from just this “willing suspension of disbelief”?
Kvond,
Well, to be brief, each of these positions is staked on a certain conception of existence or existentiality. Negative theology relates existence to God through a total withdrawal or negativity, even to the extent that God withdraws from existentiality altogether. The problem here is that God nonetheless does distinguish himself from existence, up to and including the bare fact of existing, whereas the Real does not so distinguish itself. Moreover, the gesture of separating the Real or God from existence is still a decisional one, in that it divides the Real itself from the Real as such, or its (negative, in this case) manifestation. Non-philosophy is precisely the suspension of such separating gestures.
As for historicism, I don’t really see what the problem is here. Who would disagree that ideas come about in definite historical contexts, etc? The point is that non-philosophy identifies in each instance the operative structure, and then suspends it by forcing into it the fact that it is an attempt to cope with an encounter with the ahistorical Real of History itself.
With the third, I assume you’re referring to Levi, in which case I think I’ve made clear where I differ frm him. I don’t really know enough about Plotinus to comment on him, but maybe if you explained his stance a bit?
Non-philosophy is certainly not the position that ‘philosophy is a retardation’. Non-philosophy could not exist without philosophy, it works with philosophy as its material, and it is nothing more than a supplement to philosophy, for philosophy’s sake, for the purpose of opening up to philosophy new potentials, the ability to go beyond its apparent limits.
Thanks for your comments. Will consider.