, == AN1'HONY PAUL SMITH EDINBUI{GH University Press cp ~~.A..:f;I: cp "-<:'1iI ilS" fi 1111111111111 1H I 1111111111111 1I II 3 0560 40045188 3 (1:; Anthony Paul Smith, 2016 Transferred to digital print 2015 Edinburgh University Press J, td The Tun-I Iolyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson 's Entry, Edinburgh El IR 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/ 13pt Monotype Ehrhardt by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore, and printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd Croydon, CRO 4 YY A CIP record fe)r this book is available ti'om the British J, ibmry ISBN 978 0 7486 8526 4 (hardback) ISBN 97R () 7486 8528 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8527 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8529 5 (epub) The right of Anthony Paul Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accord an cc with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Rclated Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgments IV Abbreviations VI Introduction: A Constellation, Not a Mirror - The Form of a Non-Philosophical Readers' Guide 1 Situating Princip les ofN on-Philosophy: Introductory Concepts and First N ames 7 2 On a Democracy Within Thought: Science and Philosophy as Citizens 27 3 The Subject is Not a Thinking Thing But the Force-(of)-Thought 45 4 Unilateral Causality and the Pragmatic Theory ofPhilosophy 62 5 Dualysis: Or, How To Do Things With Philosophy 85 6 The Stranger, Nowhere at Home: Non-Philosophy and the Philosophical Scene 107 Notes 127 Bibliography 145 Index 151 Acknowledgments Books are never the result of the author alone and this is especially true when it cornes to books written on translations of other books. 1 am tempted to say that writing a book is something like translation aIl the way down. With that said, 1 first want to thank the two people most involved with the translation of Principles of Non-Philosopky: my co-translator Nicola Rubczak for helping me to think through the question of translation, and François Laruelle for always patiently answering my questions regarding his work. Thank you to Carol Macdonald and John 6 Maoilearca for suggesting the book, commissioning it, and providing encouragement during the writing process. Thank you also to Jenny Daly, Michelle Houston, and Holly Roberts at Edinburgh University Press for shep herding the project through production. Tim Clark's copy editing has made this a much better book and 1 appreciate the skill he brought to the task. Special thanks to Alice Rekab (whose intellectual and artistic work using non-philosophy 1 have found consistently interesting and inspiring), Michael O'Neill Burns (whose work on German Idealism and contempo rary French philosophy goes far beyond mere historical work), and Marika Rose (for her appreciation of a good line and helping me to see what questions a new reader of Laruelle would have). AIl three read through the manuscript and suggested a number of improvements, for which 1 am most appreciative. Daniel Whistler graciously gave me his Liverpudlian apartment for a month allowing me to make significant progress on the manuscript. Thank you to Michael O'Rourke, Fintan Neylan, and Paul Ennis who invited me to participate in their Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought (OUST) lecture series, which gave me the opportunity to present an early version of Chapter 6. Thank you to Hannah Kovacs for her invitation to speak in The After-Life of Phenomenology Workshop, IV Acknowledgnzents sponsored by Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Department ofPhilosophy, where l presented an early version of Chapter 2. My colleagues in the Department of Religion at La Salle University, especially Jack Downey, Jordan Copeland, and Maureen O'Connell, were sources of encouragement when l found the balance between writing and teaching difficult and l feel very lucky to count such colleagues as friends. l acknowledge the tinancial support provided by Tom Keagy, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at La Salle University, and Maureen O'Connell, Chair of the Department of Religion, which allowed me to participate in the colloquium held at Cerisy in September of 20 14 on Laruelle's non-standard philosophy, where l was lucky enough to spend a week with sorne of the most interesting and challenging French, Irish, English, American, and Russian readers of Laruelle and practitioners of non-philosophy. While French befuddlement concerning the vegetarian diet led to a number of meals consisting of only bread, mustard, and copious amounts of wine, the intellectual nourishment provided by my non-philosophical comrades more than made up for the lack of a full belly. This book is dedicated to the translators of theoretical texts; our task is largely thankless and our goal is an impossibility, yet the work must be done. It is also dedicated to the dear memory ofMaizie, who would provide me with companionship as she sat with me for hours as l researched and worked on the book. l very much miss editing out the additions she would make to my written work as she walked across my keys. l always supposed they were meaningless, but perhaps that was just another failure of translation. v Abbreviations DNP DictionalY ofNon-Philosophy EU En tant qu'Un IP Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection o.fthe Victim PD Philosophies o.fD ~tference: A CriticaJ Introduction to Non-Philosophy PhNP Philosophy and Non-Philosophy PNP Priru:iples o.f No n-Philosophy PNS Philosophie non-standard. Générique, Q}tantique, Philo-Fiction NM Introduction to Non-Marxism SU Struggle and Utopia at the End Times o.f Ph ilosophy TI Théorie des identités. Fra cta lité généralisée et philosophie arl~ficielle VI Introduction: Constellation, Not a Mirror The Form Non-Philosophical Readers' Guide oj~a What would a non-philosophical readers' guide and introduction look like? This was the question 1 asked myself when 1 was approached by Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press to consider writing this critical guide and introduction to François Laruelle's Principles ofNon-Philosophy, originally published in French in 1996 and in English translation in 2013. 1 have devoted a great deal of time to this text, having spent a number of years translating it alongside my friend and co-translator Nicola Rubczak. Translators have a truly horrifying task, one that 1 am unsure those who are not translators are really aware of. As Drew S. Burk (another co-translator and friend) daims, to translate is to assume that a text is legible, yet the translator is also embedded so deeply into the text that seeing and commu nicating that legibility becomes more complicated. For the text, through your translating, becomes part of your own thinking. The closeness of your production to the text makes that legibility clear to you, much in the same way ones own thoughts are themselves clear. Yet, at the sa me time, that legibility is also alien to you for it is not yours. While you may feel the text is close to you, you also have to respect that text and the way it was originally written by someone who is other than you. And other in a special way, because, at least often in the translation of philosophy and other theOl'y, you assume a certain importance of this text that you would not necessarily assume of your own texts. The thinker being translated, you feel, ought to have a wider readership and so you have taken up the task of trying to make that possible in a language other th an the mother tongue of the thinker being translated. And yet you are also more aware of the shortcomings of the text, much as you might be aware of those in your own writing, and you are aware of the shortcomings of the translation in Lamelle's Principles of Non-Philosophy comparison to the original as sorne points resist a clear translation, an easy legibility. So you move from an understanding of the text as univers aIl y legible, as if it were a divine text, and you come to a real text, imperfect, with traces or intimations that cannot be captured in the new language, with the limitations of language, the limitations of translatability, and the demands of publishing that exist regardless of the philosophical impor tance and limitations of the text. But if this is the case, then to be a translator is to be a reader who is aware. A reader that reads a text so deeply that they have re-written it word for word and yet also done so differently. It is in this mode, with this strange relation of familiarity and alienness, that I began to try and make sense of what a critical guide and introduction might look like from a non philosophical perspective. In fact I only agreed to develop this guide because as the translator of the text I could see it being part of the wider process of a non-philosophical translation, aiming to fashion a clone of the original text rather than represent it. To translate this question into a more legible form for new readers we may ask, how can an introduction and guide present itself without sufficiency, without the self-sufficiency of a kind ofhistory of philosophy? This is the sufficiency that would be present if you or I treated this introduction and guide as the introduction and guide, presenting itself as the way one has to approach Principles of Non-Philosophy. Instead, the answer may be that the introduction and guide must not present itself as a mirror of the text, it must not present itself as the reduction of the text into simpler images and examples, but instead expand and generalize the text it aims to guide readers through in the first place. Expand and generalize its legibility also where the text resists legibility in the original. For, at least here where the text in question is one of François Laruelle's, sometirnes the goal is to think something that itself stretches the capacities oflanguage and the boundaries of communicability.l But it is my contention that expanding those moments of incommu nicability is possible because they are written very clearly in Laruelle. He says in Prùu;iples ofN on-Philosophy that non-philosophy does what it says and says what it means. So my approach in this book has not been to shut down the individual reader's encounter with Principles ofNon-Philosophy, but simply to lay out certain points that constitute a constellation within which Prùu;iples of N on-Philosophy functions. In standard philosophical terms, I have aimed in part to provide something like the scholarly appa ratus implied but not explicitly found in Principles of Non-Philosophy. The reader of Laruelle's text will notice that there are none of the usual citations one is used to seeing, though there are clearly concepts and names running through the book that are plucked from the history of philosophy and European thought generally. Laruelle sees his own work as something 2 Introduction very different from a work on that history of philosophy. He sees his own work as sitting down with material (philosophy in this case) and fashioning something new from it. But, in tracing that scholarly apparatus, 1 am not aiming to provide aIl of the footnotes and citations which Laruelle elides when he daims he is not doing the history of philosophy but philosophy itself. Rather, 1 discuss the figures as weIl as the concepts that these names (Kant, Fichte, Husserl, Althusser, Henry, Marion, etc.) index and that form the material for Laruelle in Principles of Non-Philosophy. This intro duction and guide does not then primarily explicate LarueIle's concepts in the same way that he does, though it will of course trace their shape but in such a way as to show the reader where he or she may find a handhold or a foothold as they approach the original text. This guide should not be read as a replacement for Princip les ofNon-Phdosophy, but as another tool to be used as you work through that text. Towards that end, it will provide the reader with a map of the constellation of themes, the general shape of concepts, and the influence of other thinkers that guide and structure the original text. This will help the reader to read what Laruelle has written, to see what Laruelle is doing, rather than being presented with something like an authoritative reading of the work that would only point back towards its own authority.2 While in Principles of Non-Philosophy the reader will find only a single original footnote by Laruelle - and this only to signal the work ofhis friend Serge Valdinoci called "europanalysis" - there are still dear concepts and images freely ta ken and used from a pIe thora of establishment and radical philosophers: Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, and even those further afield from dassical philosophical practice like Gûdel and Lacan. Perhaps though, the most important framing points are Marxian philosophy as developed by Marx and Louis Althusser, Husserlian phenomenology as it was developed in France by Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, and the idealism of Fichte, whose Science of Knowledge is explicitly adapted and mutated. The first two, Marxism and phenomenology, are especially important in understanding the style of the text, since, for Laruelle, it is thinkers in these traditions who have taken the notion of a scientific philosophy the furthest. Both traditions, however, err in their own way: Marx goes too far towards empiricism and Husserl too far towards transcendentalism. But their efforts, even as philosophers, have to be respected even if through a kind of non-philosophical indif ference towards the use of these names as authorities or "Great Men of Philosophy." That respect takes the form of drawing matcrials from both that come to form the core concepts of non-philosophy, albeit in mutated form: namely the Husserlian question of what a subject is alongside the question of phenomenology's investigation of epistemology (how we 3