Info
It’s my pleasure to be here and talk with all of you regarding a subject and research program to which I’ve dedicated the last few years.
Questions and determinations of gender, sex, and sexuality under the aegis and auspices of philosophy, common sense, contemporary political movements, and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, gender studies, sexology, and others break up and down into a fabric of fractional notions, concepts, and images bound up in the bodies of mundane or worldly subjects. However, their ultimate philosophical scope and authority — vis-à-vis Philosophy as non-philosophy treats it and not some philosophical image of philosophy — remains unquestioned and unexamined in its most intimate structures for the lack of the means to describe these phenomena without folding back into them. It is this task that I hope to begin to address in this talk.
The title of my talk pays homage to François Laruelle’s yet untranslated Theory of Strangers although it will not be entirely focused on that text alone. The talk is structured into three sections that will not be very neatly distinguished but will instead weave and crash into one another. Firstly, I will delineate the various treatments that this thematic receives across Laruelle’s oeuvre as well as, occasionally, that of Anne- Françoise Schmid, who we’re fortunate enough to have in attendance today, not to synthesize an account of a history but rather to trace its development with a particular focus on Theory of Strangers since it is the one monograph in the oeuvre where the most ground is covered. This exegesis will be paralleled by staggered, fragmentary descriptions of the stages in which non-philosophy and now non-standard philosophy has developed, both synoptically and in terms of the theoretical apparatus. The first section functions as a sort of introduction and preparation for the second, where I will outline and detail the elements of what we could provisionally call Non-Sexuality, i.e., what becomes and remains of worldly Sexuality writ large (not “sexual orientation” which is also a notion that must be worked upon, but the effective field of experience that sexual difference and the relations of sex and gender trace out and legislate over, a universalization in a philosophical mode of what Wittig describes as the battlefield of the sexes) stripped of its pretention to suffice for itself and the real. Then we’ll delve into the invariant of etho-techno-sexuality among others and draw some non-ethical and non-technological conclusions regarding Sexuality and the Body as well as point to some of the open trajectories of this research program that remain to be examined. To that end, the synopsis in the first part will sketch out the most relevant points between the cave and the starry sky of Laruelle’s oeuvre that inform this talk while retro-referring all of it to the current and accomplished apparatus of Non-standard Philosophy.
A problem or, rather, design constraint I dealt with while constructing this talk was ensuring no compromise in terms of theoretical rigor without resorting to unnecessary difficulty, complexity, and jargon. I think I’ve achieved some success in that regard but for when I haven’t, I request that you bear with me, and I promise I’ll do my best to make sure we stick together for the duration of this talk.
Before I begin, a brief note on the names of the texts: when a text in French has been translated, I will use the translated title to refer to it but in cases where a translation has not yet been published, I will refer to the text with a transliteration of the French title.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of Katarina Kolozova, Stanimir Panayatov, Benjamin Norris, and Michael O’Rourke who have all sought to find common points of approach between Non-Philosophy and Feminism, WGSS, and Queer Theory.
In Laruelle’s 1985 book A Biography of Ordinary Man, which follows 1981’s The Minority Principle and the 6 issues of his self-published written notebooks Why Not Philosophy?, both of which are transitionary works from his previous machinic and political materialist works to what we would come to know of as non-philosophy, we see the first address and treatment of the thematic of sexuality. Here, Sexuality is understood as an Authority, i.e., an experience of “Universals, Continua, Unities, {and} Totalities”1 like the World, History, Power, Language, and Philosophy which are both a distinct experience from that of the finite, radical, or ordinary individuals as well as that to which they are subjugated. Anyone familiar with non-philosophy would know that the “Non-” doesn’t refer to a total negation or exclusion of philosophy, as it does in Deleuze’s What is Philosophy? for example, but rather a generalization and universalization in a novel mode of Philosophy’s intimate structure as well as a partial negation of that which is harassing or dominant in Philosophy, its spontaneous sufficiency.
As the inaugural but not the first monograph of what was already periodized as Philosophy II, Biography jumps right into the non-philosophical gesture without the latent philosophical residue that Laruelle still found to be present in The Minority Principle. Biography affirms, in the first of its five key theorems2, Man’s real existence and Man’s real distinction from the World. As we’ll see, Man here is neither the sexuated nor humanist name that we’re all familiar with. These Authorities that I just mentioned (History, Power, Language, Sexuality, etc.) are understood as the destiny of Ordinary Man, organized by Man’s condemnation to both action and philosophy. The fifth and final of the “human theorems” that guide the text states the possibility of a rigorously founded description of the life that the individual or ordinary man leads between the poles of the minorities and the authorities. These minorities are distinct from those that derive from and are still inscribed within the sphere of the Authorities, i.e., effective minorities but are rather what we can call real Minorities, which are of another order altogether. The text proposes and seeks to shatter the alliance of Man and authoritarian predicates like Sex, Desire, Power, and the State. It is worth noting here, in relation to our primary topic, that in Biography, Sexuality is a Universal that over-determines Man but also that Sex is a Universal predicate that over-determines concrete individuals in a predicative or formal-causal manner. It is also worth noting here that the individual does not refer to a term opposed to the collective nor does it refer to the modern subject, ethico-legal personhood, or any other metaphysical or philosophical image of Man. Rather, the indivi_dual_ operates and affirms this radical and irreversible separation of Man and World with the “structure” known as the Dual, Ordinary Man as the Last Instance capable of really determining the Authorities. Biography introduces Ordinary or Real Man as the Last Instance or the “irreflective” One (echoing Michel Henry) as the instance of the Real as well as the Dual by which Man is distant or remote in-the-World.
In Laruelle’s following book, 1986’s Philosophies of Difference, he develops a non-philosophical concept of Difference as a variable invariant and syntax of articulation of the (philosophical) real through a real critique of the “constellation” of philosophies of difference exemplified by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. Laruelle’s analysis accounts for Nietzsche’s Distanz (from which Deleuze’s and Foucault’s category of Difference derive), Heidegger’s Differenz, Derrida’s Différance, and, to an extent, Lyotard’s Différend and Hegel’s Konzept by not only examining their ideal and empirical components in relation to systemically internal notions of Finitude (as is the case with Heidegger, Derrida, and Hegel) but also by taking them as the guiding thread for the Finitude of Ordinary Man, which is a precursor for the later non-philosophical term of Identity. The topo-logical dimension of Difference is also examined with respect to the relationships between continuities and breaks that each type prioritizes. While acknowledging that each type of Difference (that of Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida) has its own manner of conceiving itself as universal and reducing the others to being a deficient or inferior modality of itself, Laruelle extracts an invariant that characterizes the most profound gesture of each of these and any other possible type of difference: the denial of the One for the benefit of Being, i.e., the philosophical Decision or the coupling of Unity and the Dyad.
Without going into as much detail as the book does and assimilating some developments that occur later, Difference in Non-Philosophy comes to be one way of naming or symbolizing an invariant and, in its non-philosophical sense, also accounts for other philosophical topologies like the Dialectic and Structure that can mediate the relationship between terms. Difference, as we mean it in non-philosophy, is then a way of specifying an invariant relationship of terms while suspending the philosophical determination as to any of the specific or local relationships that those terms may undertake with each other, whether they be those of Convertibility, Reversibility, Reciprocity, or any other philosophical form of bilaterality as well as the other actual relationships these terms take up in specific systems.
This is especially important for this talk because I will be using Difference to name and refer to many of the invariants that I will be bringing up. However, not every invariant can be named this way due to lexical constraints. Nonetheless, this book accomplishes a gesture that The Minority Principle instituted: the unilateral precession of the real break over unitary continuity and a rigorous analysis of the topology and typology of Difference.
Until this point, non-philosophy, formulated as a transcendental and rigorous science of philosophy (rather than philosophy as rigorous science à la Husserl), de-limits philosophical sufficiency by and through the immanence of the scientific posture, rather than, as many have made the mistake of thinking, a particular science or a philosophical image and/or reduction of science as derived from philosophy and epistemology. This composition is fully accomplished in 1992’s Theory of Identities, where the fully elaborated structure of Non-Philosophy in Philosophy II is developed and understood as a uni-lateral duality of the science (of) science or the science of the essence (of) science — the bracketing of the “of” operating a suspension of every possible bilaterality and “essence” referring to the non-philosophical a priori par excellence at that point — and a science (of) philosophy or the philosophical Decision. Although this is accomplished without falling prey to scientism or positivism, which are both reversals of Philosophy’s domination over Science and thus ultimately philosophical instantiations of Epistemo-logical Difference — the invariant of the relations between Philosophy and Science —, Laruelle acknowledged that there was still a risk of falling back into Epistemo-logical Difference and course-corrects accordingly.
Thus, it is 1995’s Theory of Strangers, which inaugurates Philosophy III (1995-2000), that this formulation gives way to that of the Unified Theory. Where the primary operation of Philosophy II’s Non-Philosophy was the inversion (but not reversal) of philosophical and Greco-occidental hierarchies — instituting in their place the irreversible primacy of the ontic over the ontological, the break over the continuity, Minorities over Authorities, the One over Being, Science over Philosophy —, Philosophy III instead establishes the apparatus of Unified Theory which extracts the intrinsic, pure-transcendental identity of the terms anterior or prior to their scission. “Pure” here does not give rise to or derive from a circle of purity and defilement as in Kant or is often at play in racial, caste, and gender politics, for example, but rather refers to a state unlike the general mixed or blended form of effective philosophical decisions that results from their operation of a continuous idealization of the empirical. The mix or the blend here is that of the empirico-aprioric doublet that belongs to and is conditioned by a decision. Nonetheless, the term “pure” is later abandoned, and purity is more rigorously understood as the ideal, dream, or telos of the mix or blend that every philosophical dyad is party to. The transcendental at work at the order of identity is that of and sanctioned by radical immanence or the non-philosophical Real, an immanence that is only immanent (to) itself rather than something else and with the transcendence of the “to” suspended unlike in Deleuze’s plane of immanence, which instantiates only a relative and ultimately transcendent immanence rather than the radical immanence of the real, which we also distinguish from absolute immanence. In any case, the distinction between radical immanence and philosophical immanences that are relative, absolute, and possibly relative-absolute is not apparent unless the doublet-form of philosophical transcendence is accounted for. This extrication of the identity builds upon Theory of Identities but also results from a discrete break from it. However, this can only be understood in its full scope when one also considers that it allows for the instantiation and description of a full elaboration of the non-philosophical subject: the Stranger as simple and not double transcendence or exteriority determined by the Real.
Each of the three chapters of Theory of Strangers — and the subsections therein — is, in a way, centered around a specific invariant, specifically Anthropo-logical Difference, Ego-xeno-logical Difference, and the Philosophico-analytic Complex, except that the second section of the final chapter deals with the trifecta of Familia-logical, Sexual, and Phallo-andro-logical Difference.
Anthropo-logical Difference in Chapter I is, simply put, the invariant of the relations of philosophy to man, which allows the confusion of real man with “anthropoid entities” like the cogito, the soul, thought, the overman, and Dasein or, to summarize, a doubled and divided being. Anthropo-logical Difference is the universal invariant that nourishes the human sciences and philosophical humanism and, like any philosophical Decision, is structured as a Dyad (“soul/body, myth/reason, subject/object, given/givenness, nature/society, subject/sovereign, individual/society, structural difference, etc., and the one that condenses them all: anthropos/logos”3 and a Unity that forms a Triad. The totalizing limit of Anthropo-logical Difference is then the convertibility of Man and Philosophy. The Ego-in-Ego (another first name for real Man) and the subject it determines, the Stranger, are non-anthropo-logical and the Stranger is neither inhuman, all-too-human, superhuman, nor transhuman. As Jeremy R. Smith has pointed out in his research, Anthropo-logical Difference summarizes, supersedes, and continues a lot of work from Philosophy II including the invariant of Demo-logical Difference4, i.e., the invariant of the relations of Philosophy and the People.
Chapter II’s Ego-xeno-logical Difference is the invariant structure of the relations of the I and the Other, which is the primary Dyad but usually multiplies into four terms in the case of the dominant reciprocal duality of the terms, i.e., two Is and two Others derived from the philosophical principle — exemplified in Kant and Fichte — that is also elsewhere known as the majority principle: “think by yourself by putting yourself in the place of others”5. Ego-xeno-logical Difference is the basic structure of philosophical Intersubjectivity & Communication and, as Laruelle notes, the superior form of racism or anti-humanity that every philosophy shelters. To clarify, “superior” here refers to Nietzsche’s definition of the Overman as the “superior form of all that is”6 as well as Deleuze’s identification of the Overman and the Eternal Return through the same statement7 and, in Laruelle, indicates the transcendental form of an invariant from which philosophy critiques the inferior avatars of the same, generalizing Deleuze’s identification to the ultimate mechanism of every Decision. As such, Anthropo-logical Difference is the superior form of humanism and Ego-xeno-logical Difference is the superior form of racism or anti-humanity. This chapter of Theory of Strangers also develops a description of the non-unitary Body (of) the Stranger as an apriorico-transcendental structure independent of empirical —for example, physiological, anatomical, social, and economic — givens but maintaining a relation of occasional causality with them. The Dual, here, is elaborated as two causalities: the real-transcendental causality of the One-in-One or the Ego-in-Ego, i.e., Determination-in-the-last-instance, and the apriorico-transcendental causality of the Stranger which treats the World, effectivity, or the empirico-aprioric zone as a motivating occasion. The two poles of the philosophical Body are clarified as that of the object-body (which is the amphibology or confusion of objectivity and the object) and the subject- or proper-body (which is the amphibology of subjectivity and the so-called subject), poles that are traced out across Anthropo-logical Difference and Onto-logical Difference. These are the beginnings of a critique of the Principle of Sufficient Body as well as of the Judgement of Corporeity.
The first section of chapter III introduces the Philosophico-analytical Complex as the invariant of the relations of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis to present it as the symptom, signal, support, occasion, material, and model for a unified theory of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. This non-psychoanalysis is the basis for the real critiques or dualyses of Familia-logical Difference — the invariant of the relations of the parent and the child complicated by Sexual Difference —, Sexual Difference — the invariant of the relations of masculinity and femininity including the dominant hierarchy and its local reversals —, and Phallo-andro-logical Difference — the invariant of the relations of the phallic and the masculine. Familia-logical Difference and Sexual Difference receive more complete solutions elsewhere, but Laruelle indicates the immanent non-phallus or the de-genitalized and de-symbolized phallic identity as transcendental and non-technological organon which loses its libidinal charge while integrating non-auto-deprivational Desire and Jouissance as its moments.
Laruelle also distinguishes two models of love in Western thought with a view to a non-erotics but which also informs sexuality. The first of these is the Greek androgynic or androgynous model of the separated or divided One, the Dyad that aspires to become the Triad that it is, as exemplified by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium but which also includes, shall we say, the andro-andric and gyno-gynic, or the triadic couple in any case. The second model or template is that of the transcendent phallus or the One-of-lack that forbids substantial or reconciliatory love as in psychoanalysis. These act as materials for the transcendental phallic identity and, in Tetralogos, the non-dyadic Couple of Universal conjugation. More broadly, the model of the divided One, whether as a Triad or a Multiplicity, informs and grounds the notions of sexual orientation and attraction.
The Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, put together by the Non-Philosophy Collective consisting of Tony Brachet, Gilbert Kieffer, François Laruelle, Laurent Leroy, Daniel Nicolet, Anne-Françoise Schmid, and Serge Valdinoci, formulates non-erotics as the “set of non-philosophical modes of approach and formulations of duality that constitute the Stranger-subject into a uni-sex subject.” This uni-sex subject, or in Laruelle’s and Anne-Francoise Schmid’s 2003 essay Sexuated Identity, uni-sexuated subject, is the non-erotic state of the Stranger-subject that each one is in-the-last-instance and distinct from the sexuated subject one is in-the-sex-World as well as the alleged sexual indifference of unisex commodities. The uni-sexuated subject, as the subject or agito of the transcendental a-sexuated identity, operates a pragmatics of usage of sexual difference and sexual norms as means as well as, for example, “sexual affects, organs, and representations”8 that fall under its authority. In any case, it is recognized that Man is anterior and foreclosed to Sexual Difference, which is a sort of uni-versal castration or non-castration of philosophical individuals over-determined by instantiations of sexual difference.
2007’s Non-Philosophical Mystique for Contemporary Use, the final book of the Philosophy IV period, with one foot firmly planted in Philosophy IV and another in Philosophy V, is notable here for a more developed solution to Familia-logical Difference — the subject as Child (of) Man and the adoption of the World by Man — that will crop up elsewhere in its non-theological scope, its work concerning non-erotics, and the determinations as to the immanent erotic body of the Loved as an ecstasy that is non-unitional (of) itself. As such, the unilateral distinction of the body-without-corporeity as the lived-without-life — the materiell a priori to which we can reduce the non-auto-donational structure — and the body-world is exceedingly important with respect to the full scope of the generic body.
For the sake of brevity and to avoid redundancy, I will cursorily sketch the relevant textual points of Philosophy V and instead focus more on its intricate apparatus. Those points, specifically, are Non-standard Philosophy, The Last Humanity, Tetralogos, Laruelle’s essays Gender Fiction, Of Conjugal Reason in an Intense Philosophical Milieu, and The Gnosis of Anne-Françoise Schmid, as well as Schmid’s essay Liberate Feminism Epistemologically which reprises much from Sexuated Identity and another essay of hers, Women in the Time of Philosophers. This is not to assimilate Schmid’s Generic Epistemology entirely into Laruelle’s oeuvre but rather a result of the compatibility of their apparatuses of thought that both rest on the generic.
Philosophy V, inaugurated by Introduction to Generic Sciences and Non-standard Philosophy, introduces the generic, quantum, and algebraic apparatus that comes to define Non-standard Philosophy, constructed with a triplicate of minimal contributions from philosophy and mathematics deprived of their respective sufficiencies and quantum theory deprived of its positivity. A minimal algebra of the imaginary number, non-commutativity, idempotency, matrices, and vectors and a minimal quantics, so to speak, of complementarity, superposition, and entanglement, trace out the elements of the generic quantum apparatus, one that is not to be confused with the ontologico-mathematic generic production of truths as in Badiou derived from Cohen or generic essence or Gattungswesen in Marx and Feuerbach, often translated as “species being”, even if both serve as models and materials for it. The generic here indicates an immanent posturality that sub-tends human experience in general and one of the biggest leaps made here is from the transcendental to its forcing or generic extension as the immanental. Of course, the non-philosophical transcendental that we know is not abandoned entirely and finds employ in the structures known as the in-the-last-humanity and forced philosophy as specified in The Last Humanity and Tetralogos respectively.
The vector, as an elementary modulus-phase machine, is substituted for the global Immanence/Transcendence pair, which is “at the same time {their} superposition {…} within their generic inseparability as well as their non-commutativity or unilateral complementarity.”9.The structure of unilateral duality that we find earlier is specified in a generic quantum manner as the unilateral complementarity (which is not a contradiction of terms, as some insist) of the wave and the particle and then the corpuscle that is deduced from the particle by decoherence of the generic posture. The imaginary number, the square root of negative one or symbolized geometrically as the quarter of the turn, stands in for and functionalizes the opacity and foreclosure of the Real or radical immanence to the World and Philosophy.
The generic matrix, on the other hand, is the machine or apparatus that allows us to conjugate heterogeneous givens like science and philosophy, for example, as variables rather than compelling their unity in a philosophical or differential mode. This supersedes the apparatus of unified theory as well as reprises the matrixial gesture that we begin to find at the tail-end of Philosophy III. The notions of separability and inseparability are vital here, separability denoting the philosophical or differential dyad and inseparability denoting the state of the variables fused or superposed in the matrix and the becoming-inseparable of the terms in the dyad. The fusion takes the form of the following statement: the fusion of immanence and transcendence under immanence. To quickly summarize the structure of the matrix regarding its fundamental operation of quantification: we have the discrete and coherent flux of the inseparability or superposition of the variables and then the variables themselves that are now entangled and multiply to form non-commutative products. However, looking at the matrix from the perspective of its principal operation of subjectification or subjectivation, we have the before-priority or before-first generic Subject of-the-last-instance and the Strangers cloned by the Last Instance from individual philosophical subjects in-the-World. This is the simplest version of the schematism of the subjects but that should be enough for our purposes here. The Marxist duality of the fundamental and the principal is taken up here again in a non-Marxist and unilateral manner.
With the aid of the generic matrix, both Laruelle and Schmid suspend the Principle of Sufficient Sexuality as well as the dominant Principle of Sufficient Heterosexuality to decompose Sexual Difference and treat masculinity and femininity in an altogether novel manner: as variables rather than opposites. Building on that and taking some cues from Gender Fiction, I will describe the structure and function of the matrix as it concerns sexuality.
Before that, to avoid a litany of confusions, we need to delineate and put aside the several specific relations of gender and sex as we may find them enunciated in antiquated, modern, and contemporary discourses and philosophies.
As such, there are two general tendencies:
The first is sex and gender treated as reciprocal. This is often sex and gender as the physiological and psychological manifestation of the same phenomenon or gender as psychological interiority and sex as its exterior correlate. Apart from the psychological/physiological or the mind/body pair, we find the distribution to closely follow that of social/natural (the latter specified rhetorically as biological) or, in general, Anthropo-logical Difference that organizes the division and redistribution of various empirical sexuated givens vis-à-vis concrete humans. The dominant hierarchy in this tendency is that of sex, in whichever way it is understood, over its complement or contrary in gender and is often specified by means of the reduction of sex to specific empirical givens that are anatomic, endocrinal, or chromosomal and that are preliminarily idealized in a dyadic manner. As in any dyad, the dominant term intervenes twice. The trans/cis and intersex/endosex pairs derive, in a somewhat topological fashion, from the relations of the centers, margins, peripheries, gaps, and breaks that result from the above schema. Butler’s thesis that sex is the gendering of the body does not break from this as much as it redistributes the givens.
The second tendency is to treat sex and gender along the lines of the duality of the material and the formal, which can, at its limit, devolve into that of the intraphilosophical disjunction of materialism and idealism (whether that is intended in its Greek, Platonic sense or the modern one).
As for the functions of Man and Woman in the sexuated and philosophical sense, the former is a function of the philosophical subject or individual produced from the confusion of Man-in-person and the subject while the latter, Woman or La-Femme which in Wittig denotes the necessary and mythical second term or party of the heterosexual contract, is designated more broadly and aptly by Schmid as a function of suture or stability for philosophical systems. This is to say nothing of concrete women, men, or other genders but specifically of the philosophical functions that these names may symbolize. Nonetheless, the ego-xeno-logical, or should we say ego-xeno-sexual, structure that subtends patriarchy, transmisogyny, cissexism, and, more generally, sexual conflictuality and that puts whichever division of the sexes or genders in face-to-face or hierarchical relations must be unilaterally parenthesized.
A few philosophical solutions that must be rejected or excluded straight away as solutions but not necessarily as materials are Deleuze’s n-sexes which deduces singularities within a sexual multiplicity, Badiou’s disjunction of desire and love as homosexual and heterosexual respectively, Irigaray’s philosophical ethics of sexual difference submitted to the dyad and onto-logical difference, and Lacan’s “there is no sexual relation”.
To these two tendencies, which condense a lot, we will oppose the unilateral complementarity of an undulatory sex and a corpuscular sex as well as the particulate form of the former as an immanental hylomorphism or materiell formalism. This matrix, which we could call Sexuality-in-person, and its undulatory and particulate stages, Genesis and Genema respectively (in reference to Husserl as well as Laruelle’s own use of Noesis and Noema and the variations he generates therein), is structured as follows:
· The Force (of) Gender or Undulatory Sex, the coherent inseparability of masculinity and femininity as variables in the matrix indexed to the pre-undulatory imaginary number superposed with itself in an idempotent manner.
· Sexuality or Corpuscular Sex takes on the specular structure of the various doublets and is subject to sexual difference as well as the relations of sex and gender as specified before.
· The entangled and conjugated variables masculinity and femininity extracted from the philosophical sexuality that is under-determined, and which are assumed by an indeterminate and particulate uni-sexuated subject = X cloned from the material of the specular sexual doublets.
Each individual or philosophical subject in-the-world, which is sexuated in a worldly manner — i.e., masculine or feminine, trans or cis, intersex or endosex, and the exceptions and combinations therein — is a uni-sexuated clone in-the-last-instance and can assume and accomplish the messianity of the generic posture. Each clone can go back to inhabit the Evil-World of struggle and the battlefield, i.e., the World-as-History clandestinely as an aleatory subject that it is coupled with but nevertheless inhabits the Just-World or the World-as-Cosmos, which results from the generic use of the means of the Evil-World. The duality of these Worlds is quasi-gnostic. The aleatory subject produced from these operations can then be forced as a generic Messiah by extending or elevating the World to the state of the Universe.
The stages of genericity and the subject as well as the sites they inhabit are much more complicated than what we can go into here but a significant function of the Universe in sexual terms, that of coupling as the sexuality of the Universe10, bears mentioning.
The Couple that results from the conjugation or coupling of two subjects is in no way specifically monogamous or monoamorous but what we could call uni-amorous, a non-specular and non-dyadic Two that is achieved or completed without being closed off and refuses the divisibility of the platonic, romantic, and sexual. This does not, however, indicate a dualism, but rather that coupling or conjugation in-the-generic-body occurs Two by Two without giving rise to a Dyad and that the superposition or interference of the immanent liveds of desire in the discrete flux of the generic body deconstitutes the individual bodies or subjects and reconstitutes a full and open body regardless of the techno-sexual conditions of existence of amorous, erotic, and/or sexual acts in the World which are under-determined.
This brings me to the thematic of sexual and techno-logical non-ethics which we have already addressed considerably during this talk without calling attention to it. Nonetheless, some clarifications must be made.
The body, neither the worldly body nor the generic body, but the trans-finite particulate body (of) the Stranger indivisible into neither soul, mind, and soma nor objective, subjective, and lived — the latter of which acts as the common presupposition for the human, medical, moral, and theological sciences11 — is treated as a vectoriell machine rather than a biological one or a decisional one which it nonetheless makes use of as a simple and not doubled means as well as an under-determined end, the latter allowing for the former. Sexual affects, organs, representations, and norms are also reduced to the state of simple means and the etho-techno-logical correlation of the individual and the rule that grounds cisheteronormativity and obligatory heterosexuality, the anthropo-techno-logical disjunction of the natural and artificial, and the bio-techno-logical circuit of the innate and the acquired are all disempowered. This implies a suspension and weakening of the Principle of Sufficient Finality as well as the substitution of metaphysical and techno-logical causalities, i.e., formal, final, material, and efficient, for the dual causality of determination-in-the-last-instance and occasional causality. The generic body or matrix can thus be axiomatized as the mediate-without-mediation and necessitates the care of every means, the inseparability of the means and the effects, and invention of new uses for those means by generic extension.
The cloned body or Stranger-body, as the subject of the generic body, performs a function of a priori or generic defense or struggle-for-the-World against the harassment, persecution, and alienation brought on through sexual, corporeal, and other mores of Man- or the Victim-in-person, rather than auto- or self-defense that results from the confusion of Man and the subject and grounds philosophical aggression and violence. Action within the limits of the generic impossibilizes or prevents harm by the suspension and weakening of the Principles of Sufficient Philosophy, Mathematics, Sexuality, Heterosexuality, Corporeity, Finality, etc. as we have indicated but not without undertaking the doing of a minimum of harm to philosophy which is this very suspension and weakening. This is not a prohibition that requires a supplement of enforcement but a before-first prohibition or an ultimatum for-the-World.
Footnotes
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Une biographie de l’homme ordinaire, p. 85. ↩
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Ibid., p. 7 ↩
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Laruelle, Théorie des Etrangers, p. 89. ↩
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Jeremy R. Smith_, The Cave and The Stars: On the People and Democracy of Non-Philosophy. ↩
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Laruelle, Pourquoi pas la philosophie ? IV - Le philosophe sans qualités, p. 51. ↩
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Cf. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo ↩
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Deleuze, Différence et répétition, p. 16. ↩
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Laruelle and Schmid, L’identité sexuée ↩
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Philosophie non-standard, p. 249. ↩
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Cf. Laruelle, Tetralogos, p. 86-8. ↩
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Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, p. 518. ↩