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Comment by John Ó Maoilearca on April 5, 2017 at 22:16

FYI, LGS Laruelle/Non-Philosophy Conference and Workshop at Swedenborg Hall this Friday. https://withoutworldlaruelle.wordpress.com

Comment by John Ó Maoilearca on March 13, 2013 at 12:16

Nice to see some non-standard philosophy at the upcoming conference - 'Performance Fictions: Perspectives on Laruelle and non‐philosophy' - 10‐11.30 on the Saturday. I'm also addressing Laruelle (and Bergson) in my talk on Saturday just after at 11.45‐1.15. Title is: 'Laruelle and Bergson on Gesture and Performance Philosophy'.

Comment by Tom Richards on March 13, 2013 at 11:49

Hi all,

Reading group will be meeting again at King's on the 25th, email me at tmbrichards@gmail.com for details if you're interested.

Best,

Tom

Comment by Tom Richards on January 15, 2013 at 11:34

London Laruelle Reading Group session: The Degrowth of Philosophy

Time/date: Thursday 31th January, 6-8pm

Venue: King's College London Strand Campus S2.39

"Philosophy is but a productive force to place in the service of humans, and I maintain that it is not yet so placed, and never has been, except in a somewhat restricted and perverse sense. I do not claim that philosophy is nothing but ideology; it is a productive force that has been 'turned' to reproduction."

After a successful first session last month the group will be meeting again on the 31st to read and discuss the paper Laruelle gave at his lecture for the London Graduate School in December, 'The Degrowth of Philosophy: Towards a Generic Ecology'.

Please email Tom at tmbrichards@gmail.com for a copy of the text and to confirm attendance.

Drinks will be served, and we will move to the Lyceum Tavern after the session for further discussion.

Best,

Tom Richards

Comment by Will Daddario on November 28, 2012 at 23:00

Paul and Laura, thanks very much for your entries. I'm sure I'll have more questions and ideas in the upcoming weeks.

Comment by Tom Richards on November 28, 2012 at 14:20

Hi all,

Me and Bryony have organised a reading group to discuss the relevance of Laruelle's non-philosophy to performance studies in advance of the LGS events on the 10th and 11th. It's taking place at KCL's Strand Campus on Thursday 6th Dec from 6-8pm. If you'd like to join us, email me at tmbrichards@gmail.com for the details.

Comment by Paul Boshears on November 26, 2012 at 17:20

There is an excerpt from Laruelle's Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy in the newest issue of continent. that was just published

Comment by Paul Boshears on November 26, 2012 at 17:14

In Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy Laruelle writes, "The proposition is thus: to elaborate [...] outside the authority of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophizability [...] a rigorous theoretical knowledge [...] of philosophical existence, [...] its style of thought and its destination as form of the World." (29)

There are two texts I hear in Laruelle's proposition above: Heidegger's Was Heisst Denken? and Deleuze & Guattari's What Is Philosophy? All parties invoked here are concerning themselves with the material practice of thinking as "doing philosophy."

Unlike Heidegger—whose Heissen-imbued Denken crystallizes into the polar relationship Being and Other—and unlike Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy as concept-making—which only parallels with immanence by being on a plane of immanence—Laruelle puts forward the genre of photo-fiction as a means of elaborating the material practice possible today in "doing philosophy." Photo-fiction is the genre of philosophical artistry (in so far as art is a doing something) that has a "conceptual materiality [...] deprived of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy," which is "a duplication of transcendence." (Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, 6)

It seems to me that Laruelle's photo-fiction is the mutation of philosophy into a practice that demonstrates the world isn't best understood once it is subsumed under the sign. The photograph is not a sign for Laruelle, but a whole universe unto itself, "Unlike what takes place in perception, and then in Being itself, a photo harbors nothing invisible" (Concept of Non-Photography, 105).  Yes, people can read photographs as signs (Barthes' Camera Lucida is a lovely text doing that), but subsuming photographs to this transcendental gaming of reality sacrifices the immanent World to a world as only ordinated things. Or to use Laruelle's words, "the photo becoming in a stroke just another indistinct object of the World and losing its being" (Concept of Non-Photography, 105).

Comment by Laura Cull on November 25, 2012 at 17:06

Hi Will 

Interesting to read your responses to the Laruelle book.

Having heard John speak on this a number of times now, I think that the idea of reversing thought - or what John also calls reverse mutation - is also a question of our relationship to the nonhuman. That is, the effort involved in the democratization of thought is not just about a willingness to see philosophy in the ordinary or everyday but also to see philosophy as that which moves in the reverse direction from the one we normally conceive it as moving in; namely from the object to philosophy, not from philosophy to the object. And within this, is the insistence that it is not just that there are other practices that philosophise, but also that there are other kinds of thinking beyond those involving humans. 

To my mind, at least, much philosophy still remains somewhat anthropocentric. The object oriented turn is obviously one move away from this; but one will still hear otherwise fairly 'radical' thinkers fail to accept or even entertain the powers of animal thinking, let alone other non human forms. Likewise, while performance studies has a long-ish legacy of exploring the animal in performance, that is continuing to develop in new and interesting ways - I still often sense an unwillingness to explore the aesthetic and ethical implications of some of the more radical positions in Animal Studies.

Regarding your second point - it's perhaps not only the emphasis on optics, but also on gesture that may be key for us in Laruelle's thought. That is, Laruelle has much to say on the notion of (non)philosophy as being a matter of 'stance' or 'posture' in a way that seems to emphasises performativity, but also the embodiment of perspective, and a sense of thought as related to notions of 'style' (resonating with Deleuze and Nietzsche perhaps). This doesn't really respond to your question - but perhaps just to emphasise my sense that Laruelle sees nonphilosophy as a practice embedded in the Real, not as a meta-philosophy or meta-theory either of other philosophies or of the Real. 

Comment by Will Daddario on November 21, 2012 at 17:42

Hi all. I'm reading John's and Anthony's recent book on Laruelle, which is extremely helpful as I continue to delve into Laruelle and non-standard philosophy. I wanted to take a moment to write out some thoughts and pose some questions. They are not directed to anybody in particular. I post them here, rather, as an index of my thought at the moment. If someone feels compelled to reply, that's great. If not, that's fine.

I'm struck by two sentences in the introduction.

1. "Being ordinary, seeing philosophy in ordinary practice, is not, despite the term's associations, easy or simple. It involves a huge effort to reverse, or 'invert' our intellectual habits, to perform that democracy of thought, and refuse to try to explain the Real, and to 'dominate' other forms of knowledge" (10). Do philosophers (i.e., people who identify themselves as working within the field of philosophy) have a difficult time with the idea proposed here? I ask because it seems to me that those of us who study performance, and especially those of us who study the performance of everyday life (in its myriad forms), practice this type of thought already. As such, whereas non-philosophy may provoke a paradigm shift in the discipline of philosophy, I believe it challenges performance philosophers to re-practice this being-ordinary, even though, or especially because, we've been attempting to do this for such a long time.

2. "One might say that [non-philosophy] is a philosophy of the look rather than the book..." (9). I'm interested here in the relation between "looking," "theatre," "theory," and "philosophy." Theory and theatre are linked etymologically to the notion of sight. Theatre: the seeing place. Theory: an act of seeing (or seeing anew). If non-philosophy embraces this optical practice of looking (or looking again), does that dissolve the relation between theory and philosophy? My question is motivated by my own reflections on the practice of negative dialectics. Adorno refers to that practice as sometimes theory and sometimes philosophy (also as an anti-system, which, I believe, is to be understood as something one practices as opposed to something one uses). But in Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic one finds the thought that dialectics is a theory more than anything else. I wonder if this distinction between theory and philosophy will be important as we continue to ponder What Performance Philosophy Is (as well as what it is not)?

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