Info
auth. Serge Valdinoci, trans. Sylvia.
pub. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 89e Année, No. 2 (Avril-Juin 1984), pp. 268-270.
Le Principe de minorité, by François Laruelle, Aubier: Paris, Collection «Analyse et raisons», 1981.
This essay, written with force but finesse, resonates foremost in a manner that is certainly strange. The title announces the intentions: against the philosophical principle of majority which reigns and forms the “Greco-occidental style”, the author wanted to form the thought of the after-philosophy, or the thought of the One against that of the relative. It entails, properly speaking, a de-marche out of step {d’une dé-marche hors les marches}, whatever the level of the latter; thus, idealism, materialism, criticism, phenomenologicism, hermeneuticism, Nietzscheanism, differentialism are sent back-to-back by the high tribunal of an as yet unheard of transcendental. This is the strangeness of a discourse that refuses the discursive style of philosophy, and that otherwise extracts the concept of minority from its usual emplacement, politics, to pose—in its sudden philosophical brilliance—atop the peak of the One or Absolute, which then refuses to let itself be placed, to relate itself to anything that relativizes (the conscious subject, history, etc.).
However, F. Laruelle vigorously tries to curb false interrogations from the start, all which in sum would make the philosophical manner resurface. It is in the eyes of an idealist thought that the minoritarian proposal will seem strange and finally displaced, or situated in a negative offscreen {hors-champ}. The first section proclaims the exigency of transcendental truth which is an abyss at the heart of all philosophical reasons, and which is deaf to its “transcendental background noise” (p. 30). The offscreen is here the positive center of a thought of unilaterality: the purified minoritarian subject is no longer the decal or imprint {décalque} of experience, which the Kantian and Husserlian subjects still remain. The author, in the second section, poses rules whose aim is not only to destroy, to negatively critique—what the “moderns” Nietzsche and Heidegger do—but to disperse (p. 38) absolutely. The true break, or unary transcendental reduction, deviates from the duplicity of all the breaks practiced in philosophy, which lets the “transcendent-transcendental” (Rule 2, p. 41) and “ontico-ontological” (Rule 3, p. 42) mixes subsist. The necessity of a “break supplement” destroys the principle of unity of experience (p. 55) which remains relative to experience. The supplementary break, the true transcendental reduction in sum, situates us beyond the Idea and Being; it no longer passes between the real and the ideal in view of a future synthesis, but it is the real itself (p. 62) and consecrates the primacy of beings or the entity {l’étant} as such. With the learning of this theoretical advance, the author assures—in the third section—a right of scrutiny over the moderns, notably Nietzsche and Heidegger. Their “superrationalism of difference” (p. 69) is only the purified and, so to speak, achieved Greco-occidental style: the repetition of difference integrates the latter into a totalizing Same which is also the Idea (that of the eternal return of the same, Being), and consequently a resurrection of Unity. In this, superrationalism is the technology which totalizes differences. On the contrary, the Device leads to the One against Being, to petition against repetition (p. 90), to the thesis against the synthesis. There exists an alterity of the Absolute (p. 103). The fourth and fifth sections perfect these still aggressive and definitively unprecedented learnings. Transcendental essence is “the a priori of the apriori” (p. 116), but this surpassing is not an “ideal overcoming”, it remains unilateral, so that the necessity is imposed to extract the One from the burying or burrowing {enfouissante} problematic of Being (p. 124) and unity. The One is minority, the zenith of immanence, or multiple and without complement; the One is “supplement of One” (p. 145), in semantic excess and without notional identity. Neither ipseity, nor syn-thetic activity (p. 174), the transcendental “disperse” (p. 168) arises from an absolute passivity without reason (p. 177). No passive synthesis of the Husserlian type troubles the impassibility (p. 179) of the “absolute residue” (p. 178). That is why time is not temporality, just as the condition is “otherwise” than the conditioned (p. 192); this is also why the unary break is not given to a consciousness but touches it without falling reflexively under it. Such is the transcendental resistance (p. 198), of the order of mystique and which thus liquidates in the Absolute the possibility of technological syntheses of philosophy. In these terms is formulated this unlimiting and multiplying unary mystique, the pertinence of which is to pour beyond the limits of ideality and of the concept, which separate the one and the multiple in order to conjoin them problematically in discourse or relation.
These fundamental elements liberate forces which resonate on “technological” philosophy. First, they fix its style from the exterior, which is the occidental ontico-ontological a priori or reign of the mix. This exteriority then authorizes to think “otherwise”, and to beg the positive unary, the unilateral Resistant which does not disjoin from itself, does not oppose itself within its differences, and then escapes its autoproblematization. The dispersive background noise is still an il-logical and constitutive silence within the absolute. Here is replaced within its sub-order the noisy transcendental problematic of the conditions of possibility which reigns since Kant in philosophy, but which equally makes the epistemology of the exact sciences and the human sciences work. Laruelle pushes us to take a qualitative step.
However, Laruelle still remains a debtor of philosophical technology: his path is traced in view of the history of philosophy. His thought, which is pointed, eliminates, radicalizes, finally disperses. It concentrates however on concepts such as “residue”, “passivity”, which, for being proclaimed asynthetic, still form a Husserlian reverse, and therefore relate to a philosophical reference. The il-logical works with remains of logic and thus technologizes the residue (for ex.). Let us note, among others, the terminological – and therefore semantic – weight of essence: is essence not the invariant (the One) distinguished from the multiple, but forming a relation with it? The terminology therefore imposes its logic, despite the vigor of the denials of thought. This is why Laruelle’s essay should ably confirm in a philosophy of dispersion, totally in-different, and which tends towards historical non-reflexivity, towards an antiproblematic of the One – which therefore surpasses the problematic organization of the same (even terminological) across differences –. It would go to the breaking which only breaks itself, which leaves nothing which was available for a new synthesis.
In this underlying context, we perfectly explain that Laruelle accentuates the absolutely straight path, triumphantly oblivious to problematizing technologies: such is the recourse to a mystique, which founds, by a petition which does not repeat. But, anew, the terminological weight of certain terms semantically engenders certainly pseudosynthesizable couples but asymptotically in synthesis formation. And certain parallels are surprising; passive syntheses emerge between unary mystique and traditional mystique: the One, the dispersed, the absolute relates tendentially to the positive Theos; to unilaterize is to attain the condition which does not conserve the relation with the conditioned; but is mystically offering oneself to God not touching what is never affected, in which then only the conditions are reflected? Likewise, the resistant One is not without evoking the “Active Night” or night of Sense in John of the Cross. What is more, the transitions between the One/God are not without analogies: the gap in relation to ideas, in The Minority Principle, is not indifferent to the mystical abandonment of the senses, then the ideas or “distinct apprehensions” in John of the Cross. Better yet, the fact of relegating the self, the world, temporality within the mixes resonates with the night of the senses, of the world, of the self, and of time within the experience of John of the Cross. The rules whose function is anti-ideality dream of spiritual exercises or prayers which help to detach from fallacious mixeds. Finally, the termination of the course, the passive Unary where the One equals the multiple does not enter into a tendential relation with the passive mystical Union, where the multiple soul is in a God-One? Such is the weight of terminology in Laruelle, that he imposes the quasi-idea of a synthesis between the two valences of mystique. In this way, with Laruelle, we quit the discursive edge – but not quite – and we touch the cursive edge of traditional mysticism (the accelerated arrow which breaks and is not concerned with the world and the self in which it breaks) – but only tendentially.
We commenced by noting that the book seemed strange. It is in fact a stranger book. The least we can say is that the work is courageous, harassed by enveloping bogging-downs {enlisements} and supports, but he prepares to invent a type of thought as escape that is active, positive, and unilateral, which vertiginously places the One and the multiple in the same camp, against all occidental habits. Consequently, the work really merits being approached with absolute respect and patience since he attempts a difficult and absolute intellectual enterprise.