Laruelle: A Stranger Thought

Key Contemporary Thinkers (Polity)

by Anthony Paul Smith

François Laruelle's "non-philosophy" or "non-standard philosophy" represents a bold attempt to rethink how philosophy is practiced in relation to other domains of knowledge. There is a growing interest in Laruelle's work in the English-speaking world, but his work is often misunderstood as a wholesale critique of philosophy. In this book Anthony Paul Smith dispels this misunderstanding and shows how Laruelle's critique of philosophy is guided by the positive aim of understanding philosophy's structure so that it can be creatively recast with other discourses and domains of human knowledge, from politics and ethics to science and religion.

This book provides a synthetic introduction to the whole of Laruelle's work. It begins by discussing the major concepts and methods that have framed non-philosophy for thirty years. Smith then goes on to show how those concepts and method enter into traditional philosophical domains and disempower the authoritarian framework that philosophy imposes upon them. Instead of offering a philosophy of politics or a philosophy of science, Laruelle aims at fostering a democracy of thought where philosophy is thought together and equal to the object of its inquiry.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy, and anyone who wants to discover more about one of its foremost practitioners.

Genres: Philosophy

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ultimately not very useful as a "guide" to Laruelle. I'm sorry to say that Smith is such a poor writer, and so incapable of clear organization, that if one doesn't already understand quite a bit of Laruelle this book would be unreadable. I've read only five of Laruelle's many books, only one in the original French, and yes, they are tough going, and translation of Laruelle's writing is not easy. But I would suggest going right to Laruelle and skipping this book.

Just as an illustration, fairly early in the book Smith spends way too much time arguing against Brassier's criticism of Laruelle, time that woudl be better spent, in an introduction, explaining Laruelle's own position. Finally, Smith's argument against Brassier is so deeply flawed that I wound up more strongly agreeing with Brassier by the end of the chapter. For instance, Smith asserts that Brassier makes the mistake of wavering between realism and nominalism, while it is absolutely clear, even in the passsages that Smith quotes, that this is not the case at all; Brassier is merely maintaining the distinction between naturally occurring things and human practices--the former are what they are even if we get them wrong, the latter are whatever we do and we can't get them wrong. Smith's inability to grasp this fairly fundamental point leads to an inability to grasp the criticism raised, by Brassier and others, against Laruelle.

The book did have the advantage, though, of helping me to clarify why exactly, while I agree with the goals of Laruelle's project, it doesn't seem that he has provided any way to accomplish those goals. If you already know a bit about Laruelle, and understand at least a few of his books, Smith might help clarify the problems with Laruelle (although he himself cannot see them) and help explain what exactly the "Laruelleans" find so engaging in non-philosophy.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slow to start but accelerates out of bounds in the best possible way.