Translation of Laruelle's "Badiou and Non-Philosophy: A Parallel" - Speculative Heresy

Translation of Laruelles Badiou and Non-Philosophy: a Parallel | Speculative Heresy
8/9/13 2:02 PM
Translation of Laruelles Badiou and NonPhilosophy: a Parallel

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Taylor Adkins
Translators 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 Laruelles own essay responding to Deleuze, but wasfor reasons that will become clear after readingpublished
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 nonphilosophique. Paris: Kim, 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 nonphilosophy and an external though immanent distinction of philosophy 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 herophilosopher 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
http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/translation-of-laruelles-badiou-and-non-philosophy-a-parallel/
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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 onticoontological 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 Platos 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 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-
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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 socalled 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 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.
b) Being is first and enjoys a primacy over the One, rejected into the secondary and operative stratum of the
calculation or counting necessary to the representation of the multiple (B.); the One is first but without primacy or
hierarchy over Being, henceforth secondary and necessary to the distinct thought of representation (L.). B. conserves
hierarchy by inverting it, yet by repressing and displacing the One; this Multiple is thus not a simple inversion of the
One on behalf of the Multiple, for the inversion is also a real displacement. L. from the outset invalidates hierarchy in the
name of simple priority or order and therefore distinguishes primacy and priority.
c) B. and L. both make of the pure Multiple and finally of the void the essence and name of Being. But the
Multiple and the void are sometimes (B.) first, sometimes second and posited after the One (L.). Above all, the concepts
of the Multiple differ according to their position in order. B. produces a concept of the purely quantitative Multiple or
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without quality, a Multiple of set-theoretical origin which, as void, represses or prohibits the set-form and thus
conserves it in a truncated or barred way in the identity of the pure Multiple at the core of this identity. L. produces or
infers a radical, purely qualitative Multiple or without quantity, without any residual bond with mathematics; it is as
radical as the One itself and consequently without set-form or repressed unity: the essence of this Multiple resides in
the pure non-autopositional exteriority that Being is and that follows from the One. It has nothing but a transcendental
identity, not the transcendent identity of the repressed set-form.
d) B. defines under the name of ontology a new form of materialism by substituting for the old empirical
vocabulary of metaphysical materialism a post-Heideggerian transcendental vocabulary, in particular that of Being, the
One, and the Multiple, and sometimes the Sartrean terminology of the in-itself. It is a materialism because it is a
question of the identity in-itself of pure transcendence or the Multiple in-itself, of Being outside every ontological
difference. L. defines under the name of non-philosophy a thought which, as transcendental and not simply using
transcendentals, refuses every philosophical decision (idealist and/or materialist) and takes root in the One-real alone, all
while being a relation tophilosophy in general, to any philosophical decision whatsoever. B. turns Platonic idealism
into a pure materialism, while L. dissolves transcendental realism into a duality of the One-real and transcendentalthought which follows from the One. The real or immanent One and transcendental Being of L. are opposed to the
transcendent Being of B.
2. The non-epistemological relation to science.
The suspension of the epistemological combination of philosophy and science supposes new relations
between them. B. detaches ontology from philosophy properly speaking but nevertheless treats ontology as a
detachment of philosophy after science, or better yet: as an identity of the former and the latter. It is a question, on the
side of science, of a particular but supposedly paradigmatic science (mathematics and, within the latter, axiomatized
set theory); and, on the side of philosophy, a new distinction brought into it through its identification with science: that
of philosophy and meta-ontology, as if science, dividing the philosophical tradition into ontology and philosophy proper,
would re-divide the latter into a meta-ontology and philosophy. These re-foldings represent a residue of the
autoposition which has not been radically eliminated. L. globally takes philosophy as ontology and with ontology,
without separating them, and treats it in relation with the scientific thought grasped in its essential operations
(axiomatization of hypotheses, induction, and deduction). But it passes through two distinct positions of their relations:
a) in Philosophie II it supposes an affinity of the vision-in-One and scientific thought rather than philosophy and thus
attributes a certain primacy to science over philosophy; b) in later works (announced as Philosophie III: cf. Theorie des
trangers) it dissolves this preferential bond still close to Bs solution: the vision-in-One is indifferent to science and
philosophy, but it always determines a non-philosophy rather than a non-science as well (refusal of Deleuzes
objection). Non-philosophy, the thought adequate to the One-real, takes as its object-material the different
philosophical relations of science and philosophy (including epistemology) and elaborates on this basis a unified
Theoryand not unitary = philosophicalof thought as identically philosophy and science, removing them from their
autoposition or residual form in B.
Against the four truth procedures (including science) that sustain philosophy properly speaking (B.) are
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opposed the open multiplicity of unified theories, in which each of the latter takes as object-material the relations of
the fundamental and the regional (philosophy + a determined region of experience: philosophy and politics, philosophy
and psychoanalysis, philosophy and ethics, philosophy and art, philosophy and technology, etc.) (L.). Science no longer
has exclusive privilege in philosophical material (including the case of B.), which is precisely nothing but a material.
Positivism and scientism, which are both philosophical possibilities, are suspended as much as possible. Lastly, if B.
uses a determinate scientific theory in the traditional philosophical way (Cantor, Cohen), L. instead lays claim to
scientific styles (axiomatic, non-Euclidean, and various models: fractal, Gdelian, etc).
3. The relation to Marxism.
B. recovers from set theory a quasi-dialectic, which is Platonic rather than Hegelian, for a quasi-matter or an initself of the Multiple that challenges empirical and sensible materialism. It refuses in general the difference of
materialism and the dialectic and instead posits their identity, which supposes the identity of the Multiple and the Void,
a mathematical materialism transcendent to the subject that it determines. L. reactivates and transforms the themes
of historical Materialism of which he makes liberal use: 1. The real as immanence, immanence as radical individuality;
2. thought defetishized as force (of) thought (cf. labor power [force de travail] and which 3. effectuates the One-real as
determination-in-the-last-instance; 4. a science (unified theory) of superstructure (philosophy, in its complete
concept, not as ideology), etc. Both gather together and assume a Marxist heritage which they do not wish to leave
disinherited, but both refuse every neo-Marxism.
4. The non-philosophical relation to philosophy.
B. lays claim to philosophical sufficiency but on condition of deducting ontology from philosophy which is
now carried out by mathematics, philosophy being reduced on the one hand in its relation to the latter, to a metaontology; on the other hand, in its relation to the four truth procedures in a simple function of collection, either in a
broad synthesis or a weakened non-encyclopedic system where the old function of the One returns excluded from
ontology. There is thus a non philosophical basis in the sense of mathematics simply for philosophy, and it is also a
non philosophical basis of philosophy in the sense that the latter identifies itself under the form of its meta-ontological
relation, even though the non philosophical is not thematized as such but carried out as a negative critique of
Presence. L. lays claim to the all of philosophy, without parts, but as a simple material without validity over the Onereal yet validated as the object of a non-philosophical usage. B. still maintains a philosophical relation to philosophy, but
which is non philosophical through the subtraction of science, whereas L. maintains a primarily non philosophical but
positive relation to philosophy. In the first case, non-philosophy, determined as mathematics, remains ordered in
philosophy as meta-ontology but in a relation of identity instead of difference; on the other hand, the non-philosophical
usage of philosophy returns to universalize thought beyond philosophy and correlatively to ultimately generalize the
latter, no matter what philosophical decision, in every experience in the manner of an a priori. Either philosophy is
supposed globally important through its traditional claims, or one even considers that it is a question of a simple claim
which must be limited (as for the real) and legitimated (by restriction to experience). Either there is the non
philosophical rather than a non-philosophy, the former remaining partial, external (and) internal (without difference) to
philosophy and dividing the latterthis is Bs solution and in another sense Deleuzes solution as for non-philosophy;
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or non-philosophy is global (more exactly to the extent that, through its identity, it is equivalent to/for every philosophy
and all philosophy), external or heteronomous (and) immanent, thus preserving, or requiring rather, the identity of
philosophy.
Both authors pose the problem: how do we conserve philosophy, what meaning do we give it after its death
or end? B. answers by re-affirming the ontological claim which was that of philosophy but by being assumed by
mathematics, cloistering the traditional activities of philosophy in functions now restrained by the collection and
disposition of truths produced elsewhere. L. answers by globally diminishing, over the entire scope of philosophy, the
claims of the latter but, restraining them to experience alone, assures them a certain legitimacy in the manner of a
transcendental deduction of philosophy (of the identity of philosophy), whereas B. refuses this identity and cuts it off
from its essential part. Although in reality, it is above all B. who poses the problem of conserving philosophy and who
answers with the amputation of its diseased limb (the philosophical ontology of presence) and with mathematical
prosthesis, while L. claims to assure its integral life by suspending what would prevent this identity: its posture or real
claim, renouncing this process of amputation upon itself which was already the entire life of philosophy. B. begins by
cutting into philosophy between two of its parts or functions and thus claims to save it, while L. refuses to cut and
decide (to philosophize) and on the contrary requires its identity and only distinguishes philosophy and its apparent trait
of claim upon the real in view of its identity. The first is the hero who brings himself to the aid of an endangered
philosophy, while the second is the redeemer who thinks it as saved a priori: this is why L. can give the appearance of
losing or refusing it. Philosophy was already saved, but we do not recognize this, because we were in philosophy and
because the latter hid its true face from us
Translated by Taylor Adkins
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This entry was posted in badiou, Laruelle, non-philosophy, ontology and tagged badiou, Laruelle, mathematics,
non-philosophy, ontology by Taylor Adkins. Bookmark the permalink
[http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/translation-of-laruelles-badiou-and-non-philosophya-parallel/] .
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7 THOUGHTS ON TRANSLATION OF LARUELLES BADIOU AND NON-PHILOSOPHY: A PARALLEL
Tor Hershman
on March 23, 2010 at 1:51 am said:
Tontology, kemosabe.
Pingback: Prefatory Thoughts for Reading Laruelles Anti-Badiou An und

fr sich
Stephan
on June 14, 2012 at 2:03 am said:
Excuse me its a Laruelle paper?
YWNS WSLY $ %$'

on December 11, 2012 at 9:38 am said:
Taylor WHY do I not have your email or number? Oh right i lost my

previous phone in a thrift store, and just dropped the new one in that
creek Im so proud to sit by all the time. The felicitous (non runon, non
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manic ;) phrase I was looking for the other day is at mah gamin blog
http://tahacykranosh.posterous.com/text-from-under-emerald-domesoutline-for-lit
Pingback: Laruelle Bibliography (English & French) | Linguistic Capital
Trans space
on May 2, 2013 at 5:33 pm said:
This is great Tyler. I shall read it soon.
landzek
on June 6, 2013 at 2:38 am said:
It absolutely confounds me that you can translate this work and then
having read selections from Constructive Undoing, not see near symmetry
if not parallel. Every translation I read of yours confirms my position. I wish
I could figure out how my communication is lost. It makes me wonder if I
am not too correct, but not complicated enough. I appreciate your
translations. Perhaps that is enough.
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