# A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy



## somnambulist (Apr 22, 2011)

Οι γαλλομαθείς μπορούν, φυσικά, να το βρουν στο πρωτότυπο

A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy
by F. Laruelle

Let me begin in traditional terms: what is the essence, what are the possibilities of non-philosophy? From the outset, it originated from four concerns that were coupled two by two; and hence from dualities. It continued to develop in terms of dualities, constantly calling them into question but never dispensing with them entirely. Its current possibilities or themes are merely a continuation or development of this (non-) essence…

…Thus, my point of view here will be historical and systematic. This reconstruction after the fact cannot avoid appearing to be a piece of retrospective self-interpretation, but since fidelity here is not to a historically predetermined meaning or truth, but to a last instance, and hence to the spirit of dualities, I stop short of anything that could draw us into a hermeneutics.

The genealogy of non-philosophy is problematic. Born, like everything else, of the intersection between two original and loosely coupled problems –whose coupling was not quite as arbitrary as the encounter between Poros [Expediency] and Penia [Poverty]1 – non-philosophy has always refused to be their synthesis, and hence their offspring. Philosophy was born of the one-sided encounter between a sleeping being (Poros) and the desire for a child (Penia), but as a philosopher Plato ultimately remains beholden to biology –he does not get right to the bottom of Poros sleep, because he still attributes it to drunkenness and closed eyes, to a merely slumbering intelligence. Similarly, he does not get right to the bottom of Penias poverty, because he still attributes her desire for a child to her sighting of Poros. Plato does not go beyond the pharmakon as coupling, as condition for the couple or procreation.

This filiation is not that of non-philosophy. Like every child, she consents to be born according to biological conditions, but she refuses the continuity of birth; she is an orphan and it is she who decides to be born “according to X”. She sees in the drunkenness of her father merely the symptom of mans blindness, of an un-learned knowing; and sees in her mothers desire for a child the symptom of the impossible desire for being-blind. Not refusing the past, but refusing to be determined by it, presenting herself as the daughter of man, her problem is that of being and remaining ahead of the image of the newborn. It is in this simply human manner that she escapes from the biological and familial cycle and provides –without founding a new family or some sort of new city– the basis-in-person for a new type of organization: an organization of heretics, of sons or daughters of man who are continuously newborn, grateful orphans of philosophy and the world. As for the act of birth, whereas philosophy is destined to parricide and is only capable of acknowledging its filiation through this founding crime, non-philosophy tries to avoid the synthesis of expediency and poverty that is parricide. Born according to X, which is to say, according to man as the unknown, non-philosophy joins its parents to the city of brothers and sisters, elevating its own filiation to utopian status. 

Η συνέχεια του κειμένου εδώ


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