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« Les Voisinages du programme », En tant qu’Un. La « non-philosophie » expliquée aux philosophes, Paris: Aubier, 1991, p. 173-6
auth. François Laruelle, trans. Sylvia Nambiar
Sylvia's Note
Several other translations from this book by Jeremy R. Smith, including the sections immediately preceding and following this one, can be found at endemictheory.wordpress.com/translations.
“Opening Address” (p.9-13)
“First and Second Academic Presentations” (p.17-21, p.22-28)
“Rumor and Knowledge” (p.41-46)
“Why We Must Speak of ‘Science’” (p.47-53)
“Homo Sive Scientia” (p.54-60)
“Science and Philosophy: A Global Re-Evaluation” (p.79-115)
“Difference and Identity: Theses on the Future of Thought” (p.116-121)
“Invent Philosophy!” (p.145-171)
“A Lesson on Non-Philosophy” (p.177-197)
“Heresy: Interview with Jean-Didier Wagneur” (p.207-225)
“The New Spirit of Heresy: Interview with Didier Cahen” (p.224-242)
To clarify the “Non-Philosophy” project, we will define it in relation to a certain number of vicinities with which it could be confused. This entails ensuring the success — on more real and theoretically rigorous bases — of a certain number of projects indicated here and there in the history of philosophy, but which we can consider as failures for lack of both real basis and theoretical spirit.
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Realizing what the Vienna Circle indicated: a critique of philosophy founded on a veritable science, on the essence of science rather than what would still be an (empiricist) philosophical idea of science. The Critique of metaphysics in the name of logic and experience conjugated together is not a scientific critique, it is a philosophical auto-critique and moreover a philosophy. One must substitute for empiricist positivism a transcendental positivity that is alone capable — and alone worthy — of the philosophical Decision, without betraying or denigrating it.
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Realizing what Marx indicated: a rigorous science of philosophy, i.e., one that is theoretically founded and therefore founded in a transcendental mode rather than a transcendent one (materialism). This entails struggling on two fronts: ceasing to diminish philosophy by submitting it to an unfounded materialist and empiricist “science”; making this science (of) the real go from its exterior and transcendent state to the state where it is founded in itself on a rigorous transcendental basis. One will thus find the phenomenal givens that form the content of reality of the non-philosophical practice (of philosophy) that Lenin leaves “ontologically” indeterminate and that therefore tends towards politico-sociological forms. To recognize the full right of the philosophical Decision, one must in any case renounce making a historical science, renounce going from history and sociology to social representations: the philosophical Decision is more potent than these feeble theories that derive from it.
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Realizing what Husserl indicated: a real suspension of every philosophical position and not just some of them, i.e., one that is radical or absolutely anterior to them; a suspension of positionality as such. An absolute science only merits its name if it is capable of not including in its essence, like philosophy does, the traces of operations that would have been necessary to access it. It is current or is not, it straightaway excludes every access or entry, every recommencement or repetition, those for example that would require a reduction that would only be a simple difference from the World and philosophy. If there is a “transcendental reduction”, it must be actual or current and discharge irreversibly from an unconstituted transcendental instance and not be necessary for constituting it. Constitution rests in general on a ground of reality that is inconstitutable by definition and therefore within an experience and lived experiences that are non-thetic (of) themselves.
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Realizing what the “History of Philosophy” indicated: a science of philosophy but one that would not be a simple auto-application of it, a simple vicious circle reproducing, in a particularly reified manner like the extreme point where it goes to fail, the auto-paralysis, the auto-inhibition of the philosophical Decision. The “History of Philosophy” is the extenuation of this, programmed by itself as one of its possibilities. A science of philosophy, bracketing the latter, should equally bracket its “history” which is only secondarily necessary.
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Realizing what Kantism indicated: a theory of the transcendental Illusion but one that is extended to every possible philosophical Decision; an extension rendered possible on the basis of a more rigorous concept of transcendental science. This must no longer be the mix of an empirical (physical or logical) science and a transcendental decision, but the science (of) the essence of every science, i.e., rather than mathematical physics or logic having become transcendental, absolute science as transcendental science that is non-decisional (of) itself.
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Realizing what deconstruction indicated: but without postulating, like it still does in the manner of the most naïve philosophical Faith, the reality (or the participation in reality) of the philosophical Decision, when it would only be to deconstruct it; and without moreover postulating the identity of the real to the Other. But founding itself on the real as knowledge that is non-thetic (of) itself, in any case given in a manner anterior to the Decision and even the Other. The identification of the real to an unthought and non-founded Other consummates the philosophical hallucination of the real.