François Laruelle


François Laruelle is a French philosopher, formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the. Laruelle has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle is notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. He currently directs an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

Work

Laruelle divides his work into five periods: Philosophy I, Philosophy II, Philosophy III, Philosophy IV, and Philosophy V. The work comprising Philosophy I finds Laruelle attempting to subvert concepts found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida. Even at this early stage one can identify Laruelle's interest in adopting a transcendental stance towards philosophy. With Philosophy II, Laruelle makes a determined effort to develop a transcendental approach to philosophy itself. However, it is not until Philosophy III that Laruelle claims to have started the work of non-philosophy.

Non-philosophy

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

Reception and influence

A decade ago, he was described by Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier as "the most important unknown philosopher working in Europe today" and was described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as "engaged in one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy." The first English-language reception of his work has been followed with a slew of introductions from John Ó Maoilearca, 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.

Selected bibliography

;Articles translated into English
;Philosophie I
;Philosophie II
;Philosophie III
;Philosophie IV
;Philosophie V