François Laruelle

Non-philosophy

Laruelle claimed that all forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, but that all forms of philosophy remain constitutively blind to this decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle was concerned with here was the dialectical splitting of the world in order to grasp the world philosophically. Laruelle claimed that the decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically. In this sense, non-philosophy is a science of philosophy. Laruellean (non)ethics is "radically de-anthropocentrized, fundamentally directed towards a universalized, auto-effective set of generic conditions."

Reception and influence In 2003, he was described by Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier as "the most important unknown philosopher working in Europe today". Already in the 1990s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had referred to him as [being] "engaged in one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy." The first English-language reception of his work (Brassier's account of Laruelle in Radical Philosophy in 2003) has been followed with a slew of introductions from John Ó Maoilearca (Mullarkey), Anthony Paul Smith, Rocco Gangle, Katerina Kolozova, and Alexander R. Galloway, as well as Brassier's own subsequent book, Nihil Unbound.

Today, Laruelle's international reception is growing with dozens of titles a year translated and published in English by such publishing houses as Polity Books, Edinburgh University Press, Continuum, Palgrave Macmillan, Columbia University Press, Urbanomic/Sequence and others.

Death Laurelle died on 28 October 2024, at the age of 87.