Individu, Individuel(le), Individual(e), Individu-a-l, Individu-a-lité
Starting with François Laruelle’s self-published issues of Pourquoi pas la philosophie ? (1983-5) and his subsequent monograph Une biographie de l’homme ordinaire. Des Autorités et des Minorités. (1985; trans. A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities, by Jessie Hock & Alex Dubilet, 2018), he employs the term individual (FR) alongside “finite” and “minoritarian” with respect to the specific causality of the One or Ordinary Man. What complicates things is that individual (also written individu-a-l to draw attention to the ‘a’) is a neologism in French, individu and individuel(le) corresponding to the noun “individual” and the adjective “individual” respectively. Furthermore, Laruelle plays with the “duel” in individuel in reference to philosophical conflictuality, war, battle, the unity of contraries or opposites, or the unitary paradigm in general as well as the “dual” in individual referring to the irreversible precedence of the Real, the (non-philosophical and not metaphysical or arithmetic) One, or Ordinary Man to the World/Philosophy, or the minoritarian paradigm in general. We will not go into more detail than is necessary here. The first half of individual, the indivi-, also carries the weight of the distinction, evoking the French indivis (EN: undivided) Ordinary Man is “both” undivided and dual insofar as it is separated-without-separation from the World or Philosophy that, in its fullest transcendental gesture, presents as a Divided Unity or Differentiated Same, the unity-of-contraries. It is this sense of the undivided that will later also be evoked when Laruelle repurposes individu.
Rocco Gangle’s translation of Laruelle’s Philosophies de la différence. Introduction critique (1986), Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy (2010) is not only one of the first of Laruelle’s monographs to be translated into and published in English but is also the first translated published monograph to appear in English in which individual is translated. He mentions the -duel/-dual distinction in his translator’s introduction and, for the most part, renders individual as “individual” except for the one time that individuale (the grammatically feminine version of individual) is present, where he renders it as “individuale”.
The next Philosophy II monograph of Laruelle’s to be published in English is Taylor’s translation of Philosophie et non-philosophie (1989), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (2013). He tries something a little less idiomatic but perhaps more necessarily clear in a context where other translated resources are still sparsely available and misinterpretations can quickly add up. He renders individu and individuel as “individual” as one often does but chooses to render individual as “undivided-dual”. He appends the following translator’s note to page 40 where the specific rendering first appears:
Quote
4 “L’individu” is a noun that is equivalent with “the individual” (as noun) in English. “L’individuel” is functioning as a substantive noun here as well, but the word “individuel” in French is the adjectival form which also corresponds with the English word “individual” as an adjective. The word “individual” in French is a neologism of Laruelle’s, and it has been translated here as “undivided-dual” in order to emphasize the meaning of “indivis” (undivided) and that of the “dual,” which will be elaborated later on in this work. [TN]
Jessie Hock & Alex Dubilet’s A Biography of Ordinary Man (2018) faces a few challenges since the monograph it’s a translation of is the first of Laruelle’s non-philosophical monographs1 but could only end up being published in 2018 much after translations of several later works were already out. For one, individu is used here both in the sense of the noun “individual” as well as “undivided”. The translation renders indivis(e) as “undivided” but all instances of individu are rendered as “individual”. It is only in 1995’s Théorie des Étrangers. Science des hommes, démocratie, non-psychanalyse, inaugurating Philosophy III (1995-2000), that we find a rigorous and fully intelligible distinction between the individu as the undivided and individu as the individual, i.e., one of the several philosophical (and therefore specular) images of Man. We will come back to this distinction. A Biography of Ordinary Man occupying the special place that it does in the oeuvre, Laruelle is also compelled to draw attention to and point out his neologism which has him write it out as individu-a-l2.
Now is where we have to discuss a few works which we’ve mentioned before and that have only been partially translated mostly by Jeremy (almost all the available translations are his, they’re all available online at https://endemictheory.wordpress.com/translations/) and yours truly (I did a small section, The Body (of) the Stranger): the 6 issues of Pourquoi pas la philosophie ? (henceforth Pplp) and the monograph Théorie des Étrangers (TdE). TdE is clear and explicit in its (unilateral) distinction between the individual as one of the several anthropoids3 or specular images of Man and the Stranger as the real object of a rigorous theory of humans or “men”4, that which we all are before the World, and the organon (or that by/through which, being passive through and through, Man acts) of Man as real individual/undivided (see Jeremy’s translation of pp. 105-10) in the effectuation of the real critique of humanism qua non-humanism (this in no way implies that this is the superlative or only veritable philosophical critique of humanism in the broader and more precise sense in which non-philosophy employs “philosophical” but that it is a real critique insofar as non-philosophy distinguishes between real critique and philosophical critique). The issues of Pplp however are not always as explicit in making that distinction but the places in which it is made can be retroactively identified as Jeremy does in the few translations of sections that he has put up. Eventually, the latter usage of individu is abandoned altogether in Laruelle’s later works and it rather refers specifically to the individual as an appearance arising out of the confounding of the order of Man (or the Real) and its subject or organon5.
One would hope that the non-elision not only of the distinct words but of the distinct senses or meanings of the same word as employed will provide the richest or most rigorous possible engagement with the texts in which they’re deployed as well as the thought that the texts express.
Footnotes
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It is not quite the first, however 1981’s untranslated Le Principe de minorité is acknowledged in Biography as the break between Laruelle’s Philosophy I (1971-78) and Philosophy II (1981-92) periods but one that is still transitional and mixed. ↩
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He never repeats this with respect to individual but he does lean on the practice one more time 24 years later in Tétralogos, un opéra de philosophies (2019) for his portmanteau of Réminiscence and Science, Réminisc-i-ence. ↩
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Along with “the creature, […], the subject, the demon, the reflexive or thinking being, consciousness-of, the mind or spirit, being-in-the-World and Dasein, the under-man and over-man, the unconscious, the barbarian and the savage, the political / religious / language-based / metaphysical animal, etc.”, TdE, p. 104. ↩
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Plural of the general neutral term Man as employed in its non-philosophical usage and not its humanist (and, more generally, philosophical) usages as rather than sexed and/or gendered sense of Man. ↩
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These are further distinguished in Principes de la non-philosophie (1996; trans. Principles of Non-Philosophy, by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith, 2013) where the clone is the pure-transcendental organon of Man (as real rather than transcendental) and the Stranger is its apriorico-transcendental structure. ↩