François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction and Guide

by Rocco Gangle

Everything you need to understand both Laruelle's critique of difference and his project of non-philosophyGilles Deleuze described Laruelle's thought as 'one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy'. Now, Rocco Gangle - who translated Laruelle's philosophy into English - takes you through Laruelle's trailblazing book Philosophies of Difference, helping you to understand both Laruelle's critique of Difference and his project of non-philosophy, which has become one of the most intriguing avenues in contemporary thought. He explains the context within which Laruelle's thought developed and takes you through the challenging argument and conceptual scaffolding of 'Philosophies of Difference'.

Genres: Philosophy

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Rocco Gangle is Associate Professor of Humanities/Philosophy at Endicott College, USA. His work on contemporary French thought, Spinoza, Peirce and diagrammatic logic has appeared in Philosophy Today, SubStance, Political Theology and other journals and edited collections. He is the translator of François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference (Continuum Press, 2010).

Reviews

[isaac smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book begins with the tedium of a textbook, laying out distinctions like vocabulary words. Then, with each chapter, it fell further and further out of my reach until it becomes an elephant surrounded by blind men, a nighttime beach illuminated only in sweeps by some lighthouse.

I almost gave up several times, and I took many breaks of several days.

Thankfully, Gangle brings the several chapters of what feels like a monumental preface to a monumental project, all to a sudden stop that opens up an interest in how Laruelle will go forth to address the uniquely posed problem the readers finds through "Philosophies of Difference."

I still cannot claim to understand much more about Laruelle, and it would be helpful to know more explicitly of Heidegger and Derrida, and also of Deleuze's Nietzsche. It would help to know more implicitly of Plato and Plotinus but also of Kant and Hegel. This is, after all, a transcendental deduction of philosophy, the critique of difference. And, difference in both its finite and idealist guises must not be confused with dialectics.

Here is a massive quote from the final chapter because I am tired of writing watered down summaries:

"For Laruelle on the contrary the One is simply in-One by its very essence (which from its standpoint is in no way distinguished from any being or existence that at any rate it would in no way require). It neither ‘withdraws’ (Heidegger) nor ‘emanates’ (Neo-Platonism) nor ‘immanates’ (Spinoza-Deleuze) nor ‘differs/defers’ (Derrida). The (non-)One is thus not an effect or product of the One, but simply the way whatever is taken not to be the One – paradigmatically, multiplicities, relations and terms of relations – registers as already transcendentally given in-One if any such appear. This is the way every form of relation, diversity or multiplicity becomes manifest when the philosophical difference between syntax and reality is no longer operative for thought. The transcendence and difference involved in such relations and multiplicities are in no manner negated by the One, but they are rendered thoroughly contingent. If and when transcendence and difference are manifest then they can only register as (non-)One, but such manifestation in no way marks a ‘break’ with the One from its own standpoint, much less some necessary and inevitable fracture within it.

How does this stand with the triad of Nietzsche-Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida? First of all, it should be clear that the traditional conceptions of the Real as outlined above do not obviously or neatly accord with any of them. Nietzsche’s rejection of Platonism and ultimately of truth itself takes traditional conceptions of the Real out of play. If anything, in Nietzsche to think the Real as Will to Power is nothing other than to resolve upon the evacuation of notions of independent being (‘everything is perspectival’) and of authenticity (‘there are no subjects, only masks’). In a similar way, in Deleuze the appropriation of Bergson’s concept of the virtual serves the function of guaranteeing the possibility of something being ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’. In Heidegger, ‘authenticity’ is certainly a key term in Being and Time, but the later work moves away from this earlier conception. Even in Being and Time, authenticity is not correspondence to some pre-given essence, but is rather the resolution with which human Dasein may act in the face of its own essentially finite possibilities. And of course ‘truth’ as aletheia in the late Heidegger is never grounded in an independent state of affairs but is rather effected as pure, event-ful upsurge. Finally in Derrida, the critique of presence on the basis of the irreducibility of differance universalises non-self-identity not as unlimited becoming but as irreducible trace of the Other. Yet even across this inversion or restriction/supplementation of Nietzsche via Heidegger, the basically Nietzschean rejection of truth and authenticity remains unaltered. So it might appear that by rejecting the coordination of the Real with (some part of) what exists, Laruelle is only proceeding in a manner already clearly marked out by the philosophers of Difference. Indeed, Difference itself as Laruelle conceives it just is the lifting of the difference between the empirical on the one hand and the metaphysical or ideal on the other to the level of the (presumed) transcendental or Real. Difference, on Laruelle’s own account, puts the very split between the real naively understood as the merely actual (the empirical or concrete) and the real as other-thanactual (as virtual, or as thing-in-itself, or as Other) at the heart of the Real as such. It is this invariant structure that clothes itself variously in the philosophies of Difference at issue" (163-164).