Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is (...) recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One. (shrink)

This essay argues that a radical, non-standard, philosophical concept of the human is one that is consistently used both towards itself and others: it is an amplified concept that applies itself non-philosophically, that is, generically. Our purpose here, consequently, is to outline how Laruelle's work can be seen as performing something other than an inflation or deflation of either side of one fixed philosophical dyad ; rather, it can be seen as unilateralising the couple, that is, expanding the meaning of (...) the two alongside the One Real that resists any lone philosophical version's attempt to commandeer that meaning. It is the performative mutation that counts, not the terms of the dyad. As such, this essay also contends that what Laruelle explicitly does with philosophy – namely its de-authorisation and democratisation – is also what must be done, by implication, in a non-standard philosophical radicalisation of the human. Nonstandard philosophy does not know what the human is, but this negative capability is precisely what allows it to expand, performatively, the meaning of the human in its ongoing search to discover what the human may be. (shrink)

This essay argues that Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophical’ practice is connected to its performative language, such that to the question 'what is it to think?, non-philosophy responds that thinking is not “thought”, but performing, and that to perform is to clone the world. Non-philosophy is equally described by Laruelle as ‘transcendental practice’, an ‘immanent pragmatics’, or a ‘universal pragmatics’ that is ‘valid for ordinary language as well as for philosophy’. It is notable, however, that Laruelle objects to the focus on activity within (...) the concept of a speech act, and instead emphasizes the ‘descriptive passivity’ that an immanent pragmatics obliges. Laruelle calls this a ‘Performed-Without-Performation’ which would be an action of the Real: philosophical language seen as a performed, but without a ‘we’ – or any others – performing it. It is this notion of the performative, without either active human or philosophical adumbration, which is the topic of this essay. (shrink)

Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating and self-reproducing (...) structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such. (shrink)