Laruelle: Prophet or Charlatan? – Or, Philosophy as Neo-Baroque

“The baroque style always arises at the time of decay of a great art, when the demands of art in classical expression have become too great. It is a natural phenomenon which will be observed with melancholy—for it is a forerunner of the night—but at the same time with admiration for its peculiar compensatory arts of expression and narration.”

– Fredrich Nietzsche

In the last paragraph of D&G’s What is Philosophy? we discover something strange, something that in the previous two hundred or so pages has never entered thought, the term nonphilosophy:

“The plane of philosophy is prephilosophical insofar as we consider it in itself independently of the concepts that come to occupy it, but nonphilosophy is found where the plane confronts chaos” (218).1

Just after this statement we find Deleuze quoting Laruelle:

“Philosophy needs nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (218).

Why this sudden intrusion of non-philosophy just here at the moment of finalization of a movement whose trajectory has taken us through the events of philosophy itself. At the beginning we heard those primal keys ring out:

“The greatness of philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts.  So the unique, exclusive bond between concepts and philosophy as a creative discipline must be tested in its finest details. The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy” (34).

So what is it that intrigues Deleuze about nonphilosophy? Surprisingly it comes here at the end again when we see D&G qualifying this nonphilosophical subterranean submersion remark “… it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of the “people to come” in the form that art, but also philosophy and science, summon forth; mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people – nonthinking thought that lodges in the three, like Klee’s nonconceptual concept or Kandinsky’s internal silence” (218).

So we listen to this strange and prophetic tone about nonphilosophy, its facing toward chaos, its submersion in this nonceptual sea where a praxis is performed, one that is proleptic and as Laruelle will tell us in a later work it is part of a “lost paradigm” coming to us from the future. That what is extracted from the chaos of the future is “another image of man; a being that does not live, which stopped living on earth or in the heavens, the nomad of the future” (4).2

So what is this nonphilosophy? Laruelle, like some ancient nabi of the desert opens his audacious work as if he were a mixture of Nick Land and Philip K. Dick:

“Non-philosophy is an attempt at a reply to perhaps the most determining if not unique question of science fiction and gnosis: should we save humanity? and What do we mean by humanity?” (3)

I would be tempted to say: “Let’s dam the whole lot of them. Are they worth saving?” Mark Twain pipes up, the Mysterious Stranger enters the left alcove… But Laruelle, undaunted by the latest trends in philosophy that have left man and the question of “Man” behind in the dust turning their philosophical projects toward the great outdoors of being and becoming, Laruelle tells us that they and the religious both have fallen away from the true project: the salvation of Man. And, he says this with a straight face…(this is not a hoax, nor some Robin Williams stand-up routine), but one keeps waiting for him to stand up and say, “It was just a joke, a sort of philosophical hoaxterism. I was pulling your leg all along.” But, no, he believes this to be truth, a truth we should listen too, and not only listen too, but act upon with everything we are; the future is coming, and he is its prophet. Nietzsche wakes up and smiles…

Laruelle is either a mad man, a fool, a prophet, a joker are one of those strange dreamers of visions, a sort of philosophical Blake seeing into chaos and finding utopian worlds falling toward him from the future…more of a heretic, a great Dissenter.  I have to admit that I have barely opened this unusual tract that seems after Plotinus in its non-philosophical religiosity: an almost religious philosophical vision of salvation by way of theory and practice. But whose? He envisions a rival to philosophy a philo-fiction or gnosis-fiction “that we would like to see rival or at least parallel these other disciplines” (6). He tells us that philosophy is the map but that nonphilosophy is the destination, the utopian world of the future coming toward us:

“Non-philosophy aims overall to operate through radicality an inversion (uni-version) of this order [philosophy] not a reversal, an to put philosophy in exclusive dependence on Man, in the sense that it is now him and no longer philosophy that is defined in such a manner that he can determine the possibility and meaning of this new service to philosophy”(7).

If you buy into this so far then you will be offered “salvation”, a project that show us that we do “not have to be saved” because we and we alone are the very force of necessity that brings salvation back from the future. “Not that Man is the Savior, but rather the Saved-without-salvation since there are no other possible saviors before or after him” (7). And, in one final nugget he tells us that:

“Far from promising or bringing salvation to the humanity-in-the-World, it is Man that brings the World to salvation through the subject”(7).

Like some Orphic harbinger or Oracle Laruelle sings of strange new worlds, of science fiction and gnostic visions. Is this a road worth following? Having escaped my own dark religious roots in Christianity years ago, I’m not quite sure that this turn toward gnosis is exactly what a deeply rooted materialist vision needs. Almost like opening a passage at random from Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia:

Nature obeys her instructress at once, and after searching for Urania through all the celestial spheres, finds her at last, gazing in wonder at the stars. Since the cause of Nature’s journey is already known to her, Urania promises to join her, in her task and in her journey. Then the two set out, and after having passed through the circles of the planets and forewarned themselves of their several influences, they at last discover Physis, dwelling in the very bosom of the flourishing earth amid the odors of spices, attended by her two daughters, Theory and Practice.

But only poets such as Blake and Shelley would ponder allegorical passages such as this and find anagogic meanings to fill a lifetime’s gnostic visions or colloquies; or, maybe historians of science and medievalists searching after the early harbingers of materialism. But Laruelle is no allegorist, he is more of a Mystagogue or Therapeutiae or Theurgic Mystis of a darker Neoplatonism, or of an inverted gospel and anti-philosophy.

Why does Laruelle and so many other supposed atheistic philosophers (or should I say non-theistic?) seem to be turning toward religious or heretical studies seeking in the underbelly of its long shadow the theoretical insights for an age to come? Is this another history of dissent under the guise of belatedness? Is this just one more movement in the long history of western discourse turning in on itself, digging under the shadowlands of its own forgotten and tributary silences for something beyond the belated practices of the past few hundred years? Is this nonphilosophy nothing more that a return to the ancient roots of Platonic Orphism? Yet, Laruelle does them one better, in nonphilosophy he stares into chaos, the hypercosmos, the realm of unbounded time, the future for “Man”, for traces of something new, a singular world, a utopia for philosophy; or a utopia that is philosophy.

I can’t say for certain… I will continue to read this strange tome, even if I disagree with its mystifications and its religious nonreligion. I still try to be open minded, yet some things leave my diogenic self wanting to discover a fraud, a faker… is this what Laruelle is? Does anyone know for sure? Is philo-fiction or gnosis-fiction the next wave of strangeness? If this is the future of “Man” what does that tell us about our future? And, about, this thing called “Man”? Have we entered upon that strange neobaroque world where the affective worlds of nonart and nonscience reign? Maybe Nietzsche said it best:

“Such luxuries hang long on the tree like forbidden fruit. Just now, when music is passing into this last phase, we may learn to know the phenomenon of the baroque style in peculiar splendor, and, by comparison, find much that is instructive for earlier ages. For from Greek times onward there has often been a baroque style, in poetry, oratory, prose writing, sculpture, and, as is well known, in architecture. This style, though wanting in the highest nobility,—the nobility of an innocent, unconscious, triumphant perfection,—has nevertheless given pleasure to many of the best and most serious minds of their time.”

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?. Columbia University Press (April 15, 1996).
2. La Lutte et l’Utopie à la fin des temps philosophiques [Struggle and Utopia in the Endtimes of Philosophy], Kimé, Paris 2004.