Anti-Badiou

The Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy

Francois Laruelle, Robin Mackay

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441158703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France today: Alain Badiou and the author, François Laruelle. At face value, the two have much in common: both espouse a position of absolute immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science; and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one science: mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of 'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.

1

A brief synoptic parallel

OV and NP seem opposed on every point

One takes as its basis the equation mathematical set-theory = ontology; the other takes as its scientific model the non-Euclidean theme, and later quantum physics. This opposition can be identified on four levels:

1 The governing scientific theme: on the one hand, a philosophy of the absolute Multiple and on the other, a non-philosophy of the radical One. It would be difficult, at least on an immediate reading, to imagine two ways of thinking more extreme, more opposed in the way they go about their common research into anti-contemporary radicality (philosophies of difference, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Derrida).

2 The object of thought: on the one hand Being, a set-theoretical and Cantorian recasting of the concept of “being” as primary, an other-than-fundamental ontology, a true ontological basis or condition for philosophy; and on the other, a relegation of Being to a secondary status, as instance of a wholly relative autonomy, in favour of the One as radical immanence or One-in-One, a radically non-objective instance of the Real; a decided, global refusal to understand the real as Being and consequently as the essence of thought, if not thought itself qua ontology (whether an ontology of “presence” or not).

3 The way of thinking itself: on the one hand, the militant advocacy of philosophy against the ideology of its “death” or its “end” (in which OV tries to include NP), with the caveat of an anti-Heideggerian dissociation of ontology and philosophy itself, a partition internal to philosophy (which reacts with the backlash of “meta-ontology”) but whose origin is external (scientific); and on the other, a distinction that is external, yet immanent, between philosophy and non-philosophy; a distinction itself founded in an anti-philosophical or generic real. On the one hand, a philosopher-hero who inscribes himself in the Cartesian, Nietzschean and Mallarméan tradition of the heroic thinker; and on the other, a reduction of philosophical sufficiency (as double transcendence) to the status of a material or an object of a generic science of the “ordinary man” or the “human genre.” Plato and Rousseau? Plato and Kant? Plato and Marx?

4 The conjuncture and the project: on the one hand, the question is how to succeed Heidegger by reprising the foundational Platonic gesture, how to avoid the Heideggerian extinction of ontology (in the form of the ontology of “presence,” with all of its “postmodern” consequences); and on the other, how to elaborate an outside-philosophy thought, but one that relates itself to every possible philosophy, modern and postmodern, indifferently, as its material, rather than relating itself to a particular philosophical decision. On the one hand, in what way does the fidelity to ontology necessitate a new ontology, a Platonico-modern ontology; and on the other, how to deliver thought from ontico-ontological primacy, and more generally from all philosophical sufficiency, by elaborating a new thought adequate to a generic experience of the One-in-One—an experiment foreclosed to philosophy, but formulated using its symbols.

In any case, this antinomy, although real, must be nuanced and differentiated. Must we recall the trivial fact that, by definition, philosophers are not necessarily speaking about quite the same things when they use the same words? And that it cannot therefore be a question of fabricating a simplistic opposition that takes these two ways of thinking “to the letter” without a minimum of textual hermeneutics, as is always necessary when it is a matter of the historical emergence of doctrines? If there are oppositions, then they belong to the fundamental axioms of each doctrine; and even the very axioms themselves, if we are talking about language, are not of the same nature in the two cases: OV utilizes axioms that express the ontologico-formal decision of the Idea, whereas NP uses what it calls “oraxioms,” which express the lived decisions of the generic subject operating the science of philosophy.

If OV and NP, at first sight, are opposed just as much as the Multiple and the One, it is precisely not a question of the Multiple and the One, in their interlacing and co-belonging, as in the metaphysics of presence or in Greek ontology before the more radical decisions of Plato, and as is once more the case after Plato and Descartes. OV frees the Multiple from all unity through the void and the empty set; multiple-of-multiples to infinity, Being contains only the multiple without unity. NP frees the One from the Multiple, from Unity and from their mélange; whence a One-in-One (we shall compare the formulae “multiple-of-multiples” and “One-in-One” later) or a real as immanence through and through or without-unity—an immanence radical-(to)-self rather than to the unity-form. The radicality of these positions at once hardens and softens their antinomy—an antinomy that cannot be thought according to the schemas (at least not the traditional ones) of philosophical antithetics. For example, both agree in assuming 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 to its operatory content, the One of calculation, the second distinguishing from these bastardized or empirico-metaphysical forms a One-in-One that remains absolutely unthought by, or foreclosed to, all philosophy (including OV).

The four essential principles of non-philosophy

1 Immanence is radical and not absolute. It is produced by quantum superposition (the One-in-One) and not by philosophical identification, and is thus without philosophical division or decision. Unlike transcendence, it cannot sustain any amphiboly.

2 Radical immanence acts as uni-laterality or as Last Instance, non-commutable with any form of philosophical transcendence.

3 The analysis of the philosophical milieu as doublet or as diversely specular double-transcendence is fundamental. It is perceived in one way or another by philosophies as an appearance of simplicity, but can be perceived or becomes identifiable as doublet only under the principle of radical immanence or superposition. A complete analysis of the apparent simplicity and unicity of the philosophical milieu permits us not to reduce everything to the absolute, which is the myth that this appearance of simplicity secretes; to refuse immanence as absolute, as do (in very different ways) Hegel and Spinoza, Husserl and Henry.

4 It is essential to eliminate the mélanges that are formed under a superior or transcendental unity. Every transcendental unity doubles itself in transcendence either as positive constituent (Deleuze) or as negative condition eliminated from the outset (Henry). The radical, for its part, does not eliminate the absolute, but allows for a genealogy of the absolute as immanental appearance.

Non-philosophy is the radical simplification of transcendence. Two authors have sensed this problem from different directions, and have approached this non-philosophical simplification: Deleuze via the plane of immanence without mélange, that is to say reduced to the specularity of a torsion; and Henry via a suppression of the unity of amphiboly and a return to a simple duality. These two positions present an oscillation between transcendental immanence as plane of torsion or body without organs, and immanence as transcendental ego.

Non-philosophy’s solution is as follows: (1) To maintain the amphiboly of immanence/transcendence, but as a philosophical symptom to be analyzed; (2) To conceive radical immanence as materially itself a simple transcending; (3) But one that must be resumed and superposed with itself—and not as a concrete and autonomous instance, as in Henry; (4) To accord to immanence a quasi-subjective but generic function as non-egological Last Instance, thus without making of it a superior and total unity, the body without organs, as divergence of a convergence, but instead as superposition. In their respective solutions, Deleuze and Henry still presuppose philosophy as constitutive, that is to say as transcendental triangulation. Deleuze makes of this a positive condition, Henry a negative condition. Non-philosophy avails itself of a scientific means to attack the doublets of philosophy or of its triangulation, via superposition and the quantum model. It thus possesses an external model, whereas Deleuze and Henry put philosophy to work upon itself—an auto-transformation or auto-interpretation.

Fundamental concepts

The objective of this first sketch of relations was to “scramble” first appearances, to complicate judgment. We can now take up these indications in more detail, to complete them.

1 The real is grasped either (OV) as Being, that is to say radical exteriority, not in relation to something else but in itself (qua multiple-of-multiples), or in a certain way as the immanence of pure transcendence, and thus freed from itself and absolutely autonomous; or (NP) as One-in-One, that is to say as radical immanence which is not immanence to an exteriority in itself, but immanence-(to)-self by way of interference or superposition of a quantum-undulatory type rather than an in-itself type. The common adversary is transcendent unity—synthesis in general, difference in particular. But in the name of pure Being as multiple in itself, on the one hand, and of One-in-One as superposition on the other. In reality, the refusal of this common enemy bears to varying degrees upon metaphysical autoposition in the name of a certain identity (or non-difference) of the pure Multiple or, indeed, of immanence.

2 Either Being is primary, and enjoys a primacy over the rejected One, in the secondary and operatory strata of calculation or of the count necessary to the representation of the multiple; or the One is prior-to-first, but has no primacy or hierarchy over Being, which will from now on be “secondary,” even if it is always primary and necessary for the distinct thought of representation. OV conserves the hierarchy but inverts it, “repressing” and displacing the One with the Multiple (but this inversion is also a real displacement). NP invalidates the hierarchy from the outset, in the name of the prior-to-priority or the subordinacy of order to the real, and thus distinguishes priority from prior-to-priority, metaphysical causality (first philosophy) from determination-in-the-last-instance.

3 OV and NP both refer to the composition of the Being of a certain multiple: either the Multiple-of-multiples as set-theoretical inhabitant of the void, or the microscopic Particulate as noematic correlate of the undulatory lived. But whereas the Multiple and the void are primary, the Particulate is secondary and is posited in-One, or under condition of the One-in-One. OV proposes a concept of the Multiple of multiples that is numerical and then quantitative. Its empirical origin is the set, but the empty set, which “represses” or “prohibits” the set-form and thus conserves it, probably “truncated” or barred, in the immanence of the pure Multiple. NP manifests a Multiple that is not pure or absolute, but radical, or conditioned by algebra (the imaginary or complex number), without denying the set-form or the repressed unity (whose absence or presence is not the problem here). The essence of this Multiple lies in the immanence of superposition, its simple transcending such that it falls into-immanence. It no longer has a transcendental identity, much less the transcendent identity of the repressed set-form.

4 Under the name of “ontology,” OV defines a new form of materialism, by substituting for the old “empiricist” vocabulary of metaphysical materialism the post-Heideggerian transcendental vocabulary—in particular the terms of Being, the One and the Multiple—and sometimes the Sartrian terminology of the “in itself.” This is a “materialism” insofar as it is a question of the identity “in itself” of pure transcendence, or the Multiple “in itself,” of Being outside all “ontological difference.” NP defines a thought that, as immanental and not using only transcendentals, refuses all philosophical (idealist and/or materialist) decision, and roots itself in the sole real-One, while remaining in a relation that is unilateral or without relation to… philosophy in general, to any philosophical decision whatsoever or to the world.

The first turns Platonic idealism into a materialist position; the second dissolves transcendental realism into a lived materiality, a duality of the real-One and of the unilateral thought that flows from the One.

The non-epistemological relation to science

OV and NP do not think philosophy without also thinking its relation in principle to science—even if they posit different relations between themselves and science. Epistemology in all its different forms, all differential to varying degrees (idealist, positivist, rationalist-applied, critical, etc.), is deprogrammed and eliminated as a sterile or fetishizing combination of philosophy and science. They oppose to it a certain “fusion” of science and philosophy, rather than a difference: either (OV) an identity with science which (by way of a meta-ontology) separates ontology from the rest of philosophy; or (NP) a radical fusion (in a Last Instance) of science and philosophy—a fusion “under-determined” by science, and which guarantees the undivided immanence of philosophy and permits a generic genealogy of the latter.

The suspension of the “epistemological” combining of philosophy and science supposes new relations between the two: OV detaches ontology from philosophy proper. But it treats ontology as a secondment of philosophy to science, or better, as an identity of philosophy and science. It is a matter, as far as science is concerned, of a particular but supposedly paradigmatic science (mathematics—and, within mathematics, axiomatized set theory); and as far as philosophy is concerned, of a new distinction imported into it through its identification with science: the distinction between philosophy and meta-ontology—as if science, dividing up the philosophical tradition into ontology and philosophy proper, had to redivide the latter into “meta-ontology” and philosophy. These refoldings represent a residue of the doublet and of autoposition, not yet radically eliminated. NP takes philosophy globally as ontology and with ontology, without separating them, and treats them in relation to a scientific thought grasped in its essential operations (the axiomatization of hypotheses, induction and deduction). But it has passed through two distinct positions as to their relations. Philosophy II1 supposes an affinity of the vision-in-One and scientific thought rather than philosophy, and thus attributes a certain primacy (later called “prior-to-priority”) to science over philosophy. Later works (Philosophy III, including Théorie des Étrangers)2 give further nuance to this preferential bond, which was still close to OV’s solution. The vision-in-One is as indifferent to science as it is to philosophy, but it always determines a non-philosophy that is equally a non-science (thus we refuse Deleuze’s objection). Non-philosophy, a thinking adequate to the real-One, takes as object-material the different philosophical relations between science and philosophy (of which epistemology is one), and elaborates on their basis a “unified Theory” (unified, but not unitary = philosophical) of thought as identically philosophy and science, removing their autopositional character, or its residual form present in OV.

To the four “truth procedures” (of which science is one) that sustain philosophy proper (OV), NP opposes an open multiplicity of “unified theories,” each of which takes as object-material the relations between the fundamental and the regional (philosophy + a determinate region of experience: philosophy and politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis, philosophy a...

Table of contents

• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A brief synoptic parallel
• 2 Taking the side of the "Modern" in philosophy
• 3 Old and new relations between science and philosophy
• 4 Matrices and principles
• 5 Subtraction and superposition
• 6 Philosophy and mathematics in the mirror
• 7 Ontology and materiality
• 8 Philo-fiction
• Notes
• Index