Laruelle: Against the Digital (Volume 31)

by Alexander R. Galloway

Laruelle is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In Laruelle , Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Technology, Art, Politics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2014

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still not really sure what Laruelle is up to, but the claim more or less defended throughout is that Laruelle gives us a way to think relationality without synthesis/dialectics. I know in Nihil Unbound, Brassier uses Laruelle to think non-dialectical negation. The claim is that a truly radical immanent materialism would think in terms of identity, analyticity, and superposition rather than difference, synthentic/dialectical, and relational. Laruelle is trying to do something that doesn't work with distinctions or decisions or events. This total jettisoning of philosophical vocabulary is why he says he's doing non-philosophy (or non-standard philosophy), similar to non-Euclidean geometry. It is also why to actually read Laruelle is like reading just a buncha slop. But it's almost like how he thinks of what he calls the one: we think alongside it rather than it itself. He wants to think generically, he wants to think 'something'.

Now what this actually all ends up meaning and how it 'cashes out', I'm not sure. I am skeptical if Laruelle is worth the hassle. Right now I think he just might be. But anyway, I found Galloway's book as a pretty interesting and accessible 'in' into what Laruelle is doing, even if by the end of it the whole analog/digital distinction is kind of renounced in like the last paragraph (thinking of Wittgenstein's ladder... just something to use to get to some place but we must kick it away).

[katie luisa borgesius]

a wonderfully written and spirited piece of creative commentary: precisely what is needed in today's anglophone (and lusophone, might as well add) philosophical literature, that den of fluorescent-lit Xerox workers.

might be worth skimming through the muddier parts of the introduction on your first reading.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Galloway’s book on the work of Francois Laruelle is easily one of the most interesting and clever explications of a body of thought that I’ve come across in a long time. Eschewing the standard ‘easy-does-it’ introductory approaches to a thinker, ‘Laruelle’ hits the ground running by framing the eponymous philosopher in terms of his opposition to what Galloway calls ‘the digital’. Laruelle’s revolutionary contribution to contemporary thought, argues Galloway, lies in his being perhaps ‘the only non-digital thinker we have today’. Yet far from being a Luddite pean, Galloway's 'digital' refers not (just) to the ever proliferating realm of computers, technology and data, but to a formal structure corresponding to the very act of making any distinction whatsoever (between mind and body, subject and object, form and content, say).

For Galloway, insofar as philosophy itself proceeds by way of making distinctions which then structure the very terrain of thought, philosophy is a profoundly ‘digital’ practice (think here of the binary manner by which microchips process information, the elementary distinction being between on and off, one and zero). To think in a non-digital manner then, is to think in a non-philosophical manner. In contrast to the digital which, appropriating the Marxist parlance, ‘divides one into two’, Galloway positions Laruelle as a thinker of the analog, which, in the inverse manner ‘combines two into one’. Although Galloway eventually goes on to complicate any hard and fast distinction between either (as he admits, Laruelle himself almost never thematises any of his work in terms of the digital), the pedagogical dividends of Galloway’s artifice pays off handsomely.

For all that, Laruelle is not an easy read, and is anything but a "Laruelle for dummies". Galloway’s discussions frequently move in a rarefied space of ultra-abstraction where complex philosophies (notably those of Hegel, Deleuze, Badiou and Henry) are spoken about in their most schematic and bare-bones form, a move allowing Galloway to rapidly and efficiently triangulate Laruelle in and amongst the existing philosophical landscape. Those unfamiliar with the conceptual anchor points that Galloway employs might find the brisk pace of movement dizzying, but his boundless creative energy means that ‘Laruelle’ is packed to the brim with multifarious entry points and footholds in which to orient oneself within Laruelle’s philosophy.

Especially impressive are some of the later chapters on aesthetics and ethics, where Galloway provides some utterly intriguing mediations on the non-philosophical approach to light, darkness, and color, while engaging with the artworks of those like James Turrell and (the comparatively little known) August von Briesen. If anything, there’s a sense in with Laruelle moves too quickly across its subject matter, with Galloway bounding from one thought to the next with a sort of breathless abandon that sometimes sacrifices depth for expanse. Still, with a non-philosophical horizon sketched as far wide as the one Galloway draws, there’s plenty to explore, and there’s a great deal of fun to be had while doing it.

[Ariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Galloway started correctly in saying the book would travel from the crypt to the altar. The standout points for me were refusing to make the philosophical decision, the principle of insufficiency, unilaterality, superpostion and the one. The section on art and utopia illuminated many Laruellian notions for me as well as the section on ethics. The section on The Generic and the engagement with Badiou was dense for me ie analysis between the matrices of ethics and politics.

Galloway's exegesis and style is very clear but I did struggle to grasp Laruelle-as-described at times.

One thing the book didn't go into great detail was the Philosophy V quantum era of Laruelle's thought. This is understandable because Laruelle's quantum project is yet to be completed.

But I really wanted much more on the Philosophy V era. I only got a taste of its black universe.

All up it was a good collision.

[Roger Whitson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly clear elucidation of Laurelle's thought, but I still don't get why Galloway thinks he's the most important philosopher working today. IMV, the most important chapter and the most useful one is his application of Laurelle to uncover the assumptions of digitality. Otherwise, I don't quite get the importance of the immanence of the one.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first book I've had to DNF in a while. I typically find Galloway's writing style pretty lucid but here it seems that he writes with a style that romanticizes Laruelle's repulsion to difference and dialectic more than explains precisely how and why he does this.

For example, there are times when it seems that Laruelle's conception of "the one" are almost apparent and how it is not falling into the traps of other philosophers, but then I lose it. This occurs frequently in this writing to the point that all of what makes Laruelle important slip by me. After about 75 pages, I've read the word "non-philosophy" probably almost 50 times, so much I feel like I should have some idea of what it is, but I don't. I realize this is a difficult subject that is particularly novel and compelling, but considering the lack of English interpretations of Laruelle, it's surprising there isn't more unpacking and development of exactly what Laruelle's methods and retooling of philosophy is about.

This book has convinced me Laruelle is worth studying, but it has also convinced me this is not the book that is going to do the introducing or explaining. One needs to already grasp Laruelle's arguments before this book makes sense.

[M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on Laruelle out there!