Translation of Laruelle’s “Badiou and Non-Philosophy: a Parallel” | Speculative Heresy 3/26/13 7:30 PM Translation of Laruelle’s “Badiou and Non- Philosophy: a Parallel” Posted on March 6, 2010 by Taylor Adkins Translator’s Note: In order to avoid any sort of confusion, it should be noted that this article was included in an anthology of essays engaging various aspects of non-philosophy in contemporary philosophers. This article immediately follows Laruelle’s own essay responding to Deleuze, but was–for reasons that will become clear after reading–published under the pseudonym Tristan Aguilar. Badiou and Non-Philosophy: A Parallel Aguilar, Tristan. “Badiou et non-philosophie: un parallel” in Non-philosophie des contemporains. Ed. Le Collectif non-philosophique. Paris: Kimé, 1995. I. Everything seems to force the opposition between non-philosophy and the philosophy that takes the equation mathematics=ontology as its ontological base. This opposition can be identified on four levels: 1. The central and guiding theme: on the one hand, a philosophy of the radical Multiple (Badiou=B.); on the other hand, a non-philosophy of the radical One (Laruelle=L.). One cannot, at least at first glance, imagine thoughts more extreme or more opposed in their common research of radicality in the name of anti- contemporary radicality (the philosophies of difference: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida). 2. The object of thought: on the one hand (B.) Being, a more-than-fundamental ontology, a veritable ontological base for philosophy, an overhaul of the concept of “being” as first: on the other (L.) a secondarization of being as an instance of a completely relative autonomy on behalf of the One as radical immanence or instance of the absolutely non-objective real; a global and resolute refusal to understand the real as Being and consequently a refusal to understand the essence of thought, if not thought itself, as ontology, be it “Presence” or not. 3. Thought itself: on the one hand (B.) the militant claim of philosophy against the ideology of its “death” or its “end” (in which B. tends to include L.) under the reserve of a certain anti-Heideggerian dissociation of ontology and philosophy itself, a division internal to philosophy but of external or scientific origin: on the other, a claim of “non-philosophy” and an external though immanent distinction of philosophy https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/translation-of-laruelles-badiou-and-non-philosophy-a-parallel/ Page 1 of 8 Translation of Laruelle’s “Badiou and Non-Philosophy: a Parallel” | Speculative Heresy 3/26/13 7:30 PM and non-philosophy, a distinction which is itself non-philosophical or founded in the ante-philosophical and no longer philosophical (B.) real. On the one hand, a hero-philosopher who inscribes himself in the Cartesian, Nietzschean, and Mallarmean tradition of the heroic philosopher; on the other, a reduction of philosophy to the state of material or object of a thought which is that of “ordinary man.” Plato and Rousseau? Plato and Kant? Plato and Marx? 4. The conjuncture and the project: on the one hand (B.) how to supplant Heidegger by resuming the foundational Platonic gesture, how to avoid the Heideggerian extinction of ontology (under the form of the ontology of “Presence,” with its “post-modern” aftereffects); on the other (L.) how to elaborate a thought outside-philosophy but relating itself to every philosophy possible, modern and post-modern indifferently rather than to a particular philosophical decision (Platonic or contemporary, post-modern)? On the one hand, in what way does the fidelity to ontology demand a new, i.e. Platonico-modern ontology; on the other, how do we deliver thought from ontico-ontological primacy and more generally from every philosophical sufficiency by elaborating a new thought adequate to an experience of the One, an unprecedented experience foreclosed by philosophy? II. However, this antinomy, to indeed be real, must be nuanced and differentiated. Is it necessary to remember that, by definition, they do not speak of the same things when they use the same words? And that it thus cannot be a question of fabricating a simplistic opposition that would take these thoughts avant la lettre without a minimum of textual hermeneutics, as this is always necessary during the historical emergence of doctrines? 1. If they both oppose the Multiple and the One, it is no longer a question of the Multiple and the One which form circlets or co-belongings like in the metaphysics of “Presence” or in Greek ontology before Plato’s most radical decisions, or like the state of affairs after Plato and Descartes. B. liberates the Multiple (in principle it is at least supposed liberated) from any unity: Multiple-of-multiples ad infinitum; Being contains nothing but the multiple without unity. L. liberates the one from the multiple and from the unity of their mixtures; hence a One-in-One (we shall compare the formulas “multiple-of-multiples” and “One-in-One”) or a real as identity through and through or radical immanence (to) itself rather than to the “unity”-form. The radicality of the positions simultaneously rigidifies and softens the antinomy which must no longer be thought according to the schemas, at least the most traditional, of the philosophical antithetic. For example, both thinkers agree upon carrying out the “death of the Greek god of the One,” even if they do not interpret this formula in the same way, the first reducing every possible One to the One of the metaphysics of Presence and its real content, the One of counting, the second distinguishing from these adulterated or empirico- metaphysical forms a One-in-One which has remained absolutely unthought by philosophy or foreclosed by it (including by B.’s ontology). 2. Neither thinks philosophy without a de jure relation to science, even if they place themselves https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/translation-of-laruelles-badiou-and-non-philosophy-a-parallel/ Page 2 of 8 Translation of Laruelle’s “Badiou and Non-Philosophy: a Parallel” | Speculative Heresy 3/26/13 7:30 PM between these disciplines and have two different relations to them. Epistemology under its different forms, all differentialist to various degrees (idealist, positivist, applied-rationalist, critical, etc.), is de-programmed and eliminated as a sterile or fetishizing combination of philosophy and science. They oppose to it an identity of science and philosophy rather than a difference; identity either partial, but internal on behalf of philosophy (B.) which divides the latter, or total but external or assured by a non-philosophical cause which guarantees the undivided identity of philosophy (L.). 3. Both involve a privileged relation to Marxism, a relation more (B.) or less (L.) explicit. B. engages dialectical Materialism transformed moreover in its materialist side (Being or multiple in-itself) and in its dialectical side (multiplicity of the set-theoretical type). L. instead engages historical Materialism, transformed in its materialist side (the real as One-in-One) and in its historical side (philosophy as enveloping or universal horizon of human practices). 4. The relation to philosophy no longer has the simplicity that certain slogans or appearances might suggest. B. does not completely or without distinction maintain a homogeneous relation to philosophy which L. would call “sufficiency” of the “philosophy-all” type, despite the Manifesto for Philosophy: this relation to philosophy or of philosophy to itself is internally divided or restrained by science (mathematics), philosophy identifying itself with science and in some sense depriving itself of its traditional ontological core, a function now assumed by mathematics. Ontology is then a special form of “non-philosophy” inside philosophy itself. L. does not maintain, despite certain contrary appearances, a relation of negation, but a positive relation to philosophy, and merely a relation of suspension to its so-called sufficiency for the real. The distinction passes in B. between two “parts” of philosophy that globally conserve its authority and a prohibited or truncated form of sufficiency; in L. it passes into the “philosophy-all,” i.e. between the “Principle of philosophical sufficiency” and the identity of philosophy as simple material. The first opens philosophy from the inside to mathematics; the second opens it from the outside to a thought which is nevertheless immanent (only the radical immanence of the One-in-One can be absolutely heteronomous to philosophy and yet “act” upon it). B. affirms philosophy by sacrificing its ontology to science, while L. neither affirms nor denies philosophy but sacrifices its global sufficiency or its claim to an immanent though heteronomous identity of science and philosophy. III. This first attempt at relating B. and L. sought to scramble the appearances and complicate any sort of judgment. It is possible to carry the comparison further or complete these indications. 1. The One, Being, the Multiple. a) The real is understood either (B.) as Being, i.e. radical exteriority, not in relation to something else but in-itself (multiple-of-multiples) or in a certain way, just as the immanence of pure transcendence is thus released to itself and is absolutely autonomous; or (L.) as One, i.e. radical immanence which is not the immanence of an exteriority in-itself, but immanence (to) itself rather than in-itself. The common adversary for https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/translation-of-laruelles-badiou-and-non-philosophy-a-parallel/ Page 3 of 8 Translation of Laruelle’s “Badiou and Non-Philosophy: a Parallel” | Speculative Heresy 3/26/13 7:30 PM these thinkers is transcendent unity, synthesis in general, difference in particular, but in the name of pure Being, Being in-itself, or even the One-in-One. In reality, the refusal to various degrees bears upon metaphysical autoposition in the name of a certain identity (or non-difference) of the pure Multiple or even of Immanence.