The Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle: Towards a Unified Theory of Science and Philosophy

Taylor Adkins and Christopher Eby

Over the past 40 years or so, Francois Laruelle has developed a theory he prefers to call

“non-philosophy,” which, among other things, is founded upon a theory of the philosophical

Decision. In order to help theorize all of philosophy as subtended by the same structure

comprised by the philosophical Decision, Laruelle and a small group of non-philosophers

completed the task in 1998 of creating a dictionary that would outline the major concepts

involved with the endeavors of non-philosophy. In an almost rigorous way, non-philosophy

makes use of philosophy and its concepts as material to be reworked according to a regulated,

axiomatized, and syntactically elaborated method that sees all things in-One (vision-in-One) or,

in a certain sense, puts ontology or Being in parentheses. In a more general sense, non-

philosophy (at least in earlier stages) considers itself to be both a science of philosophy and the

analysis of its most invariant and typical symptoms which culminate in the structure of the

philosophical Decision.

Connected with this motivation to theorize a science of philosophy is to rethink the way

in which philosophy and science interact with and upon each. One of non-philosophy‟s goals is

to effectuate the conditions in which philosophy and science could theoretically and

pragmatically work on an equal footing and the way in which democracy can be said to enter

into thought, thus dismantling the hierarchies that philosophy has always tried to establish over

science while at the same time demonstrating that science cannot simply isolate itself within its

autonomy and leave philosophy to its death or oblivion, so to speak. Science is knowledge

without thought that still requires philosophy‟s thought without knowledge, even if it is
philosophy that now must change its bearings in order to be able to have any validity with or in

the sciences; in other words, these disciplines demand a unified theory of science and philosophy

to finally come to a peace treaty that does not make one primary over or prior to the other. In

what follows, I will outline some of the more pertinent non-philosophical concepts that help

illustrate why the philosophical Decision is detrimental to a unified understanding or theory of

science and philosophy without hierarchy or dominance.

What is at stake with such a theory, and how does the philosophical Decision jeopardize

such a theory? First of all, we must specify what we mean by „philosophical Decision.‟ Laruelle

defines the philosophical Decision as an invariant structure of all philosophy that hallucinates or

believes in its ability to construct a unitary discourse on or about the Real. In fact, Laruelle likes

to call this pretention or claim to think the Real (or even to constitute or determine it, if only

partially) the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. This principle of sufficiency also culminates

and consummates itself in philosophy‟s belief to be constitutive (or at least co-constitutive) of the

Real and even to be equal to it. This confusion and hallucination, which constitutes philosophical

faith in its discourse as Real or determinant of the Real, is the essence of philosophy‟s

sufficiency insofar as it believes it can legitimate itself of, by, and for itself.

The philosophical Decision consists more exactly in the general way that philosophy

reduces the Real to a unity-of-opposites, allowing philosophy to claim its dominance as the 3rd

term that synthesizes this dyad, believing to guarantee their continuity with its survey and

decision (Being/Becoming, Self/Other, Being/Thought). In this sense, all philosophy is in a 2/3

or 3/2 matrix, philosophy intervening as synthesis over a lack or an excess on the part of this

unity-of-opposites. According to the history of philosophy, classical thought usually sides with

the excessive term, thus valorizing Being over Becoming, Self over Other, etc., while the modern
and postmodern move is to reverse the hierarchy, or sometimes even to have claimed to dissolve

duality on the basis of unity alone (for example, Nietzsche and Deleuze by collapsing being into

and as becoming, everything reduced to forces in the monistic will-to-power). Yet the reversal

of hierarchies should not be considered contingent upon the philosophical Decision alone (to

decide upon the unity-of-opposites or to choose its position in the fractional matrix); instead, the

Decision itself is structured by this move of reversals, grounded in thinking the position of these

opposites in relation to the unity that philosophy claims to provide. Due to this reciprocity and

reversibility of the philosophical Decision, philosophy‟s main medium of advance is to proceed

by revolution: even Marx and Engels in founding the dialectical materialist decision claimed to

have stood Hegel on his feet and in this way to have caused a revolution in philosophical thought

that effectively turned away from idealism towards a materialist base. As Laruelle would say, all

philosophy repeats itself because it copies itself (its structure of the philosophical Decision); this

is what could be called its auto-position, its belief in its ability to posit itself as real, and thus to

legitimate itself, to decide itself as real.

Yet the philosophical Decision is also something that philosophy does not theorize

without also simultaneously auto-affecting or, in other words, changing its parameters and its

margins, not to mention its style or approach. Thus, all philosophy recoils against this

articulation and theorization of the Decision as structure so that it can better repress the vision

that disrupts the hallucination of its ability to constitute the Real. Non-philosophy does not shirk

against this task but instead identifies it as an invariant of all philosophy that must be set into

brackets or, more precisely, placed in the non-philosophical chora. It is here that philosophy

faces its sense of identity and becomes forced to realize its non-sufficiency for the Real and also

the fact that the Real is indifferent to every decision, and thus every philosophy.
 Not to be confused with chaos, the non-philosophical chora is the transcendental site in

which all philosophical decisions are shown to be equivalent in the last instance. This is the

meaning behind the fact that the Real is neither affected, effectuated, or otherwise concerned

with any thought, let alone philosophy: it is precisely indifferent and has no need of thought or

language to constitute it. In other words, the philosophical chora is the phenomenon of

philosophical hallucinations of the Real and philosophical faith in its ability to constitute the

Real; on the other hand, the non-philosophical chora is not this spontaneously self-conscious

faith in its constitution of the Real but instead the absence of every reciprocal determination or

unitary correlation of opposites. The non-philosophical chora precisely reduces the legitimacy of

philosophy over its own claims and hallucinations, and thus over its claims on the Real; all

philosophies become equivalent here and, in a terrifying encounter of the abyss, face their

absolute inessentiality, which turns into a will to survive against their own real contingency.

Let us pause on this point for a moment. It must be understood at this juncture that non-

philosophy does not aim to destroy philosophy or to precipitate the end of philosophy, but, at

least in the last instance, it seeks to suspend the authority of philosophy over itself and its claims

while showing the limitations inherent in its spontaneous practice. In this sense, the “non-” of

non-philosophy has to be understood in the sense of “non-Euclidean,” it being clear that this

metaphor proceeds in two directions: on the one hand, it is an indictment of Euclidean geometry

for its own belief of self-sufficiency (for example, the prevalence of reductio ad absurdum

arguments and the reduction of the problem to the theorem); on the other hand, it is an emphasis

on the fact that non-philosophy engages the thought of the Real through axioms and, in this

particular case, suspends one of philosophy‟s own axioms: that of the Principle of Sufficient

Philosophy. And here it must be understood that axiom is opposed to decision: one does not
decide upon the Real, for it is the Undecided. Thus one has to axiomatize rules according to

which its unthinkability can be thought as unthinkable without paradox, or the way in which it is

both indifferent and foreclosed (or precisely not open) to thought. This is what emphatically

equalizes all philosophical decisions in terms of their claims on the Real, and it is also what

allows Laruelle to write: “For any phenomenon whatsoever, one should be able to propose a

multiplicity of equivalent interpretations, a multiplicity which is no longer unitary but

“dualitary,” such that it escapes from the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy: an infinity of

equivalent philosophical decisions for the same phenomenon to be interpreted” (Philosophie et

non-philosophie, 109). This is one of the few hypotheses in non-philosophy, and it posits a

supplementary axiom to non-philosophy by claiming that there is an empirical or de facto spatio-

temporal multiplicity of philosophies.

In order to sustain the transcendental reduction or equalization of philosophy in the non-

philosophical chora, it is necessary to isolate and dismantle one of the principal ways in which

the philosophical Decision claims to have the final say on constitution of the Real. From non-

philosophy‟s perspective, everything determined by language (what Laruelle will even call

language-universe in its non-philosophical form) is equated with philosophy and its primary

means of accessing phenomena. Philosophy‟s faith coincides with that of the apostle John: in the

beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was in the constitution of the Real, and the Logos was

Real. This is also a favored strand in certain humanist (or anthropomorphizing) ways of

understanding thought, even Derridean or Foucauldian: all thought, materiality, and reality is

inseparable from language, discourse, discursivity, or textuality (“nothing outside the text”).

It is of the utmost importance to note that non-philosophy posits instead that the Real can

by all means be described, but it is not constituted by language and even does not constitute itself
in the non-rational recesses of some sort of mystical, ineffable divinity: “This does not mean that

[the Real] is ineffable—this is the unitary position of the problem—but that its description,

which is completely possible to formulate, is indifferent to it or does not itself constitute it” (48).

Non-philosophy promotes a multiplicity of descriptions of the Real, on condition that they are

not understood as constitutive of its essence. Non-philosophy refuses the classically

philosophical understanding of the Logos as a mixture of language and the Real (Heraclitus).

Nevertheless, non-philosophy is not so arrogant as to say that language is de facto

unnecessary. Laruelle writes: “No doubt, language is required. But what we mean by nothing-

but-One is this: language is necessary to the description of the One and if one proposes to

describe it; on the other hand, it is not necessary to the One itself or its intimate constitution”

(50). Thus is denounced as what Laruelle himself calls the 20th century‟s obsession with

language and its relation of co-constitution of the Real, amply exemplified by the so-called

linguistic turn (experienced first in the analytic and then continental traditions of the past

century). Nevertheless, as we said, language is necessary to the description of the Real and, at the

same time, is necessary for axiomatizing the rules through which one thinks according-to-the-

Real. While philosophy can continue to think that the Real is constituted or determined by

language in some way, non-philosophy proceeds in the non-Euclidean fashion, postulating the

non-effectivity of language upon the Real, thus sparking a mutation (rather than revolution) in

thought that does not decide or legitimate its own position. This is a mutation of a scientific

nature—as is, in a sense, the Copernican mutation of thought, which effectively evacuates the

human from the center of thought and the Real and even introduces the possibility of describing

the non-human in thought (thought-without-human-qualities and/or machinic thought).

 The question now ceases to make philosophy become scientific: this was Husserl‟s

dream, “philosophy-as-rigorous-science,” but it lacked a foundation because the question of

science was either subordinated to the noema-noesis correlation or transcendentally grounded in

the apperception of the subject. What is needed is not only a science of philosophy but, more

crucially still, the means by which a non-hegemonic intervention into a science can be deemed

possible. This is where non-philosophy continues its thread of introducing democracy into

thought by thematizing the concept of the generic.

There is a fundamental problem that the generic responds to, and it is the violence that

philosophy has always attempted to force upon the sciences, even if it always seems to try to

unify it with its other “conditions” (Badiou). For example, in Heidegger, the problem that Being

and Time begins with is that of a science‟s capability of experiencing a crisis in its concept:

immediately forthwith philosophy opens the door to its inevitable domination. For Heidegger

specifies that ontic sciences (concerned with a region of being) can profit from philosophy

insofar as it is the only real and primordial science, also known as “fundamental ontology.” The

chasm between the ontological and the ontic, Being/being, and the fundamental and the regional

plays out in Heidegger on behalf of the unity and authority of philosophy over the sciences: it

always ends up with the smug remark that „you sciences could all learn a thing or two from

philosophy, which actually asks the question of Being, which you have obviously

forgotten/repressed, etc.‟ Since Heidegger believes he has asked the right question, the only real

question of science (which is that of Being), he believes to have ipso facto forced every science

to reevaluate their own foundations in light of ontology‟s discovery. Ontology becomes the

transcendental givenness of the slavery of the sciences to the question of Being, and thus of their

subordination to philosophy.
 Heidegger misunderstands the relation of the fundamental and the regional, or

miscalculates and misinterprets their relation. This can be illuminated if we instead understand

philosophy as a pretention to global knowledge (in its type of universality), while the generic

precludes these measures in its uniquely local activity: in other words, the global decisions of

philosophy (even decisions that stipulate that all science is absolutely contingent, i.e.

unfounded—Meillassoux) do not touch upon the local activities of science. This is perhaps one

of the reasons why Laruelle claims that non-philosophy is closer to science, since science is

closest to the One or the Real (leaving philosophy to Being alone).