Alexander Galloway's Laruelle: Against the Digital provides a potent explanation of the difference between politics and ethics for Laruelle, as we saw in chapter 3. The political is often taken to be the name for the mechanism of decision, and in this way philosophy = politics (and we may read this equation both from right to left and from left to right). Thus, politics is about world-making in the sense of the French word for globalization (mondialisation) but also in the sense of the capturing and englobing of humans within the decisional parameters of that world. Galloway sums up the difference between politics and Laruelle's understanding of ethics, writing:
In any case, the ethical is a question of the withdrawal of the law. What replaces the law is not so much a new super-law, a new law of laws, but the absence of all mundane commandments in favor of a single principle of unification. For this reason the ethical is best understood as a kind of virtualization, because it withholds decision in favor of a superposition of indistinction. And this is why, while there are many possible forms of political organization, there is only one kind of ethical organization – communism – a truth promulgated by Jesus just as much as by Marx.1
What does such indistinction or indivision (as Laruelle will say) mean with regard to how we live, though? What are the implications of such a division between politics and ethics? Does this division result in a political quietism?
To this last question, this chapter will reply with a forceful “no.” As we will see, Laruelle's sense of ethics shares a great deal in common with militant practices, but it is not politically determined because, like these forms of militancy, non-philosophical ethics rejects the world, rejects the englobing function of the world. It rejects the world because the world is precisely a political world. The world is made by distinctions between friend/enemy, black/white, slave/free, even migrant/refugee – all sorts of scissions that are set by the world and perpetuate it. The Stranger-subject refers to a kind of subject that may have the end of the world as its object, without naming exactly what this end of the world might look like. Of course, this terms does not valorize some simple cataclysm, but rather refers to the overturning of the structures of the world such that the world as world would no longer be recognizable. It is akin to the way in which Frantz Fanon misquotes his former school teacher, Aimé Césaire, in an oblique but evocative way:
This attitude, this behavior, this shackled life caught in the noose of shame and disaster, rebels, takes issue, challenges, howls, and as that's how it is, we ask him:
“What can you do?”
“Start.”
“Start what?”
“The only thing in the world worth starting: the end of the world, of course.”2
This is a certain kind of deracination, but it shares very little in common with the popular form of Anglo-pessimism with its hymns to Cthulhu and glee at the site of the impending destruction of humanity at the hands of an unrestrained techno-capitalism. It is more akin to the Afro-pessimism and critical theory of those like Frantz Fanon, Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Jared Sexton, and others. Their pessimism, which is not derived purely from seriousness but has a kind of humor to its naming, is not derived from white fantasies and horror-fiction novels, but from the lived history of the world, the world as it is, its foundation formed by the deaths of millions of victims who are refused even the recognition of their victimhood by this same world.3 Despite the fact that there is always a sense of things being unilaterally related to the One or the discussion of radical immanence (the etymology of “radical” being the Latin term radicalis meaning “of or having roots”), non-philosophy is not a project of rootedness but of deracination. Both non-philosophy and Afro-pessimism share an understanding of deracination in relation to the figure of the world (almost always capitalized in Laruelle's work). For Afro-pessimism, the Black subject is cast as an object by literally being cut off from natality and subjected to social death (explained in depth below). For non-philosophy, there may be a kind of “rootedness” in the One, but such a rootedness is beyond representation and beyond recognition. Philosophico-political rootedness takes place in the world, where one is recognized as belonging to this worldly family or this worldly tradition or this worldly history. This is a rootedness of relation and, insofar as the One or the radical immanence of the human is foreclosed to relation, there is no rootedness as such. The One is incommensurable with the world and so human (beings) are radically deracinated at the level of their lived identity. Therefore, Laruelle's own victimological pessimism has much more in common with this position than it does with those grim priests of a hostile capitalist future or with the liberal intellectuals paying lip service to the ideal image of a victim silenced by the same media that broadcast the image of the intellectual superimposed on pictures of the dead. Laruelle sobers up those of us captured by these narcotics of contemporary theory with the direct question, “What if this flood of ideal cadavers carried along by the black river of History hid from us the river bottom, its bed lined with very human victims?”4
Let's begin this chapter by laying out the stakes of Laruelle's ethical theory as bluntly as possible, by making it impossible to see this ethics as a political quietism or even a rejection of militancy, as its militancy proclaims a kind of messianity. Let's begin, then, by turning to a philosopher whose dedication to philosophical sufficiency discloses perfectly how such philosophico-political world-making accommodated anti-Semitism, if it was not directly grounded upon such a friend/enemy distinction and decision. Recently debate over the depth of Heidegger's anti-Semitism was reignited with the publication in German of what are being called the “Black Notebooks.” Some of the most egregiously anti-Semitic passages were translated by Richard Polt for a paper he presented to the Heidegger Circle. Two of these passages will serve to bring out sharply the stakes of Laruelle's ethical theory, though my aim is not to interject anything into this debate about Heidegger, only to use these quotes to frame our discussion here.
First, Heidegger writes of the worldless character of the Jewish minority: “One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded.”5 Second, he goes on to write of the “world-historical task” of this worldless identity,: “The question of the role of world Jewry is not a racial question, but the metaphysical question about the kind of humanity that, without any restraints, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical ‘task.’ ”6 The worldlessness of European Jews is the locus of a metaphysical question regarding the identity of humanity for Heidegger, and in this very specific way it is interesting. Heidegger's anti-Semitism is, of course, despicable and ugly, even if at the same time we should not allow focus upon his prejudice and hate to comfort us as though the general structure of anti-Semitism was not found in a number of intellectuals today and accepted as part of various debates in the West that are not recognized as despicable and ugly (with regard to the figure of the Muslim or generalized anti-Blackness, for example). Let's say instead that Heidegger is wrong, but not for the reasons one might think. He is not wrong in marking an oppressed minority identity (European Jews in early twentieth-century Europe and Germany, in particular) as “worldless,” but precisely in his negative valuation of that worldlessness of European Jews, manifested prior to the Holocaust. As Jared Sexton has recently remarked, there is a possibility for a “deracination of everything” evidenced by the natal alienation or the refusal of kinship that the middle passage and lingering social effects of slavery bestow on Black people marked by their Blackness (as Jews were marked by their Jewishness for Heidegger and other anti-Semites).7 Following Sexton, we may say that Heidegger is right about a certain kind of people, a certain kind of subject, that can destroy the coherence of the world. Marx called this subject position “the proletariat,” Frank B. Wilderson III calls it “slave.” Theorizing that an identity with corollary subjects like Blackness or Jewishness could destroy the world, could carry out a generic deracination of “peoples” and “nations” and all such philosophical hallucinations of identity, is an ethical act that unifies in-the-last-instance as a universalization of the Stranger-subject. The end of the world as a self-sufficient and harassing world is what is at stake in ethics.
Philosophers have their image of victims, not unlike how the media and their intellectuals have their ideal victims alongside their vision of acceptable violence. Laruelle's ethical theory is predicated on a complete rejection of this sort of theodicy, a kind of victimadicy, that underlies so much of philosophical ethics. This leads Laruelle to strong positions with regard to the way in which philosophers take up the Jewish Shoah as the unthinkable event that grounds the philosophically sufficient thinking of victims. Laruelle is asked a question in an extended conversation with the journalist and philosopher Philippe Petit about the move from victim to persecutor seen in the experience of European Jews who were first victim to anti-Semitic violence and murder in the concentration camps before then taking up the role of the executioner of Palestinians with the establishment of the State of Israel. I will quote his answer in full, since the sensitive nature of the topic requires that context not be left out, but the question ultimately bears on the stability of the identity of a victim, and we see that for Laruelle the lived (reality of the) victim exists completely outside of this justification of the “best of all possible victims,” which may support a future violence in their name:
| Philippe Petit: | This is very dangerous. For example, can we say that the former victims of the camps have become Israeli persecutors? Is that an untenable statement? |
| François Laruelle: | It is entirely tenable, but what kind of necessity does it have? Primo Levi's remark does not apply only to the camps. It is a philosophical and universal law that is inherited, like memory, from the preceding generation. I have even said that it was possibly planned by a perfected Western philosophy. Within the greatest disjunction, within the greatest difference, there will be some affinity between the Victim and executioner, the tortured and the torturer, etc. This is a universal scheme that allows us to understand, at least provisionally, certain relations of force or events within history. That this should be considered a particularly dangerous formula for Israel, I entirely believe, but because Judaism has a totally different reading of history from the one that we find in Greek philosophy. Judaism thinks history as a contretemps of the relation of the chosen people to God, their persecutor. This relationship of infinite transcendence does not end in a totalization of victims and persecutors, a totalization which is eminently Greek and which implies a kind of reciprocal approximation of the Victim or executioner. This proximity is a problem that the philosophers are unable not to put forward.…It is philosophically legitimate and necessary to find some sufficient reason for violence – only philosophers locked away in their system can believe in the exceptions that they imagine and only they can believe in their logodicy.8 |
Laruelle here walks a tightrope. On the one hand he wants to indeed affirm that the Jewish people in Israel are tempted to, and may, fall into an easy reversibility of victim and persecutor. He recognizes that this reversibility is in some sense common, as we might see with the victim of a mugging then joining with the police to act as a persecutor of people systematically victimized by the State. Yet he also gives attention to the particularity of Jewish thought, identifying that within the radical aspect of Jewish thought there is always a rejection of the kind of “logodicy” that “Greek” (in the sense of European) philosophers cannot help but believe in.9
Because this is a fraught topic prone to misunderstanding, allow me to trace the structure of Laruelle's argument abstractly before bringing in the empirical element. Philosophy is marked by an ambiguous structure that brings everything back to relation. We have already traced the different forms this ambiguous structure may take in our survey of his theory of Philosophical Decision. When Laruelle talks about Jewish thought, he is specifically referencing the way Jewish thought has inserted itself into philosophy to resist philosophy's self-sufficiency. For Laruelle, this largely means Levinas and Derrida, as well as the discourse of psychoanalysis, which means it references the work of individuals like Lacan who were not themselves Jewish but were operating within a Jewish tradition of thought. The focus on alterity or otherness in their work arises out of Judaism without philosophy and so, when thought with regard to philosophy, acts as a resistance to it. However, insofar as Levinas and Derrida carry out a Judaic turn within philosophy, their act of resistance to philosophy ends up as susceptible to capture and colonization by philosophy. The other becomes relative, it is placed in a relation to Being, so that it becomes a part of the ambiguous structure of decision.
We may speak broadly of Jewish thought as understood outside its struggles with and resistance to European philosophy's attempts to colonize it or frame it. The particularity and power of such a distinct form of Jewish thought may be traced all the way back to the Book of Job (the first book collected in the scriptures of the Hebrew people), in which there is a sense of absolute or even unilateral otherness in the absolute monotheism of Yahweh. One may read this in Job as a transcendent and unilateral persecutor who does not relate to the unilateral victim. Job is the story of a man who is persecuted by the Adversary (the meaning of the Hebrew name “ha-Satan”), who was allowed to carry out this persecution by the only one who could authorize it: Yahweh. Job's friends try to convince him that he would not face such persecution unless it was just, and thus he must have done something to deserve it. There must be some reason, some act done in relation that would explain his punishment. Job, however, refuses this reasoning and demands that Yahweh manifests and explains the true reason. Eventually, Yahweh does appear to chastise Job's friends, but he offers no reason why Job suffers. There is simply no relation – Job remains a victim and God is simply God. One cannot think of Job's victimhood in relation to God, his persecutor, without falling into all sorts of paradoxes and ambiguities. The story resists such relational thinking – whereas in Greek philosophical thought there is always a relation. One cannot be a victim unless there is a relation of victim and persecutor that is recognized by some third aspect that stands outside of that relation while naming it as such. Israel manifests so much of the European project of settler-colonialism because Israel does not recognize the unilateral and immanent nature of the victim. The victimhood of the Palestinian is not recognized because Israel is cast as the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whereas the Palestinian is not memorialized, the Palestinian does not exist in a relation, “Palestinian” is literally not formally recognized as a national identity by “the West” (Europe, the United States, Canada, and some others). Western media-friendly public intellectuals dishonor the murder of millions of European Jews as the final and ideal image of the victim, using this image to shut down any discussion of the nature of victimhood. That they are able to do this without ever engaging with the lived (reality) or tradition of European Jewishness, or even awareness of other forms of Jewishness that are not European – forms of Jewishness that also face exclusion and persecution in Israel – makes their attempts at victimology unethical to the core.
What we need, in order to deliver on the wager of non-philosophical ethics, are “stranger victims”: victims who are foreign to the philosophical scene and impossible to capture philosophically. In this first section of the chapter we will trace Laruelle's work on the stranger or foreigner and its deepening through his theory of victimhood, before turning to an attempt to creatively bring non-philosophy into dialogue with some of the most radical voices in critical theory around the question of race – for it is in the image of the slave that we may find the stranger victim before which any kind of theodicy, logodicy, or victimadicy crumbles. The slave is by nature not recognized, incapable of being truly memorialized, and so forgotten without even ashes.
We are told as children not to talk to strangers. As citizens we are trained to fear foreigners. Even those in society who are pro-immigration couch their arguments within an overarching pro-assimilation paradigm that destroys or overcomes the foreignness of the foreigner. Laruelle's turn from politics to ethics marks a turn away from power to identity “in flesh and blood,” a turn away from strength to fragility, from the same/difference circuit to what might actually be generic. Let the Stranger remain strange, let our thought become stranger yet, if it ever hopes to be ethical in itself, to practice an ethics immanent to thought itself, a unified theory of ethics and philosophy. We saw the importance of the Stranger in the preceding chapter, in which we explored the status of science as philosophy's Other and then, more precisely, as the stranger to philosophy that conditions the entire democracy (of) thought which non-philosophy aims to be. We have already seen, in the discussion there, how the stranger functions for Laruelle in his construction of a democracy (of) thought. Here we will trace the development of that concept with specific reference to how the stranger breaks the sufficient form of standard ethical theory, and then how Laruelle provides a unilateral character to ethical thinking with his linking of the stranger to the victim. This linking refuses the usual philosophical move of convertibility between victims and their persecutors.
Laruelle argues that standard philosophical ethics is structured and determined by metaphysics. For him, the essence of metaphysics is found in the meta which refers to a “distance or ‘phenomenological’ transcendence that allows it to transgress towards the whole of being [étant] in its double dimension.”10 This meta character is repeated in ethics “as prohibition or obligation,” which are concepts that transcend the beings they are ethically saddled with. This distance marks a distinction, a division, between the beings and the form of transcendence taken to be ethical. In other words, standard philosophical ethics is not in itself ethical. Obligation and prohibition are not in themselves ethical, although they structure ethics, but require something other than those principles, i.e. beings, to inhabit or enact them. The beings subject to prohibition and obligation are always already unethical, for the distance marked by the transcendence of ethics means that there will always be a distance between those beings who carry out the ethical act and the transcendent ethical norms, regardless of whether that transcendence is simple, as in the “over” of meta, or a complication of philosophical decision, as in the Levinasian epekeina or beyond. In either case, what is at play is a form of decision and not a structure that seeks to find some way to be ethical and philosophical in a unified way. What is lacking is a unified theory of ethics and philosophy.
As should be clear by now, Laruelle's answer to the metaphysical–ethical mélange is to find some way to unilaterally locate the lived dimension of ethics. This is where the figure of the Stranger enters into non-philosophy and breaks the decision for sameness or difference, for self or other. The Stranger is the name for the most generic identity of human (beings). Laruelle understands identity to be something more lived than simply adding or subtracting a predicate or attribute to some abstraction or idea of the human. He writes, “Our principal hypothesis is that Identity is not only a property or an attribute, but that it exists ‘in flesh and blood’ independently of its use as an attribute.”11 Laruelle takes great care to think through and present how the non-philosophical understanding of identity is not subject to the usual philosophical decision that would direct our thinking of identity between the poles of difference and sameness. Within the field of ethics, this metaphysical framing comes to be inhabited by the figures of self and Other, even as self and Other are precisely structured by a distance philosophically located between them.
The Stranger does not exist in these coordinates. Laruelle crafts a fundamental theorem of his theory of strangers that may help us to situate how he understands the stranger to be foreign to the usual philosophical positional points of the subject. He writes: “there is no alter Ego, nor is the Ego an Other, there is no specular game between Self and Other, because Self and Self alone may also be the Stranger – if there is one – and the Stranger is in-the-last-instance this Me [Moi] that I am.”12 This might strike the reader as pushing back against philosophies of the Other, but in a particular way Laruelle is radicalizing such philosophies through the figure of the Stranger. He illustrates this through a reader of the popular phrase of Rimbaud usually translated as “I is another,” though the French reads “Je est un autre” – or, literally, “I is an other.” Such a distance, however minimal it may be in the construction of a philosophical subject, is marked by what Laruelle calls “ego-xeno-logic” that is marked by a reciprocal duality of self (ego) and other. What is lived by a human being as self and other is always still marked by a distance, by a necessary correlation of thought and Being – while the Stranger that I am marks my originary position in the world. To be a Stranger is to not be at home; to be a Stranger to oneself is not to be an Other to oneself, but to be without any stable reference point in the world, to be separated ultimately through one's radical immanence (to oneself) from the world. The duality of self and other is grounded unilaterally upon such an existent-Stranger, for it is this Stranger-being that we are which forms the ground for the projection of the thinking of self and other. This helps us to make sense of the theorem that follows the previous one, “Self and Other ‘are’ not the Same, ‘we are’ identical-in-the-last-instance. Identity and Strangeness [Etrangèreté] then cease to be confused – and their dyadic opposition belongs to their confusion and constitutes that confusion. It is in-the-last-instance-alone that they are identical rather than different or the same.”13
By basing his “human science” upon the Stranger instead of the philosophical mélange of self and other, Laruelle is able to shift the basis of ethics away from universalizable moral acts (Kant) or a kind of piety for the abstract Other (Derrida and – to a lesser extent in Laruelle's understanding – Levinas), or even from a kind of ethics of power that protects the weak from the strong (Nietzsche). Instead of such an ethics of power, always threatened with slipping into the worst kinds of oppressive violence or justification of that violence, or an ethics of abstract Otherness that within its own thinking is unable to think identity as such, Laruelle brings ethics under the condition of the victim. This might be surprising for those who have read Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection of the Victim, in which Laruelle remarks, “To be honest, I am tired of ‘after Auschwitz,’ which has become a slogan.”14 Yet his weariness at the sloganeering that happens around Auschwitz is not the same weariness that inhabits certain promethean forms of philosophy that grow tired of caution signs before their attempts to make good on their promises. Laruelle shares very little with the forms of acceleration that want to unhinge human intelligence from ethical concerns, subjecting them to the demands of inhuman ideas. Instead his weariness grows from the way such sloganeering continues the vicious circle of victim and victimizer. This is clear as he continues to say:
And “before Auschwitz,” what happened, nothing, only accidents of history, just forerunners to the Shoah? Or was persecution at play? The before interests me as much as the after. I think persecution is completely forgotten by the duty of memory, those persecutions of religious heretics, dualists, and gnostics. Victims are not “suitors,” like there are suitors for the truth [a reference to Plato]. This is the substantia nigra that flows through the veins of history. Still unimaginable crimes are for that matter readying themselves in its folds, still more invisible and more featureless, crimes according to the future.15
And so it is not some kind of anti-Semitism or universal abstraction that lies behind his weariness regarding the sloganeering around Auschwitz. The victimization of the Jewish people in the midst of the Shoah is real, and yet undeniably this victimization comes to be used as a victimadicy that turns the victims of the Shoah into the justification of a world where the genocide of another people is defended.
This fundamental point allows us to understand why in Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy Laruelle focuses upon the forgotten victims of history, rather than those who have a popularly remembered history. For Laruelle, the name of these forgotten victims – the gnostics – remains a quasi-religious name in the same sense that the Jews take on a religious name. Laruelle marks this difference between the Jewish victims of the Shoah and the heretical gnostic victims of a long period of Christendom through a distinction between being “burned out” and being “burned up.” As anti-Semitism gripped Europe, the Jews were repeatedly burned out of their homes, and in the Shoah that fire came to be a “technological fire” or an industrialization of this death. Yet, as Derrida and others have argued, there remain ash and cinders of the Jewish people that spark a memory. This is not the case for the murdered gnostics, who are forgotten – who, even as Laruelle references them, spark nothing within the readership in the way our remembrance of the murdered Jews sparks images of these victims, images that remain through their being circulated in the world. As Laruelle writes, “In one case our living memory of being dead remains in ashes, in traces that bind us to the dead in our unbinding them. In the other there is a radical consummation, without a trace ‘to light’ our memory. That without-remainder is the immanence of fire which ‘remains’ in itself, which ‘immanes’ as Man-in-Man.”16
Laruelle is not arguing against remembrance here, though he does add an abstract theoretical argument to other more empirical arguments like that of Norman Finkelstein, who warns against the ways such remembrance may be turned against its own spirit.17 Instead, he is moving toward a more generic understanding of the victim, an understanding of victimhood that might break such a circulation of victim and persecutor or victimizer. In such a generic understanding, there might be theoretical resources for resisting the insidious anti-Semitism of certain forms of remembrance of Jewish victims, as well as the way in which such remembrance makes new populations of human beings “killable.”18 It breaks the paradox produced by this remembrance of victimhood, which justifies victimizing: “The paradox that drives the holocaust – making the Other exist as Other by his total destruction but maintaining him in existence by consuming him – is thus resolved, there is no holo-caust, no ‘wholly burnt,’ of heretics.”19 By virtue of being forgotten, gnostic heretics produce nothing. They are not exchanged, they do not circulate within ethical thought. And, as non-circulating, they give witness to a more generic identity of the human, not through being stripped of predicates abstractly, but through their predicates having no philosophical use-value: “The heretics reveal to us that man is in an ultimate way that being, the only one, who endures crime and is characterized by the possibility of being murdered rather than simply persecuted and taken hostage, exterminated as ‘man’ rather than as ‘Jew’. Why ultimate? Because man is without-consistency, he is on principle, in contrast to other beings, able to be murdered, he is even the Murdered as first term for heretical thought and for the struggle that it performs.”20 In other words, Jewish victims are murdered precisely because this particular predicate is taken to be heretical within a certain system, thus it is as a Stranger, as one who is abnormal or perverse within a particular system of exchange that the Jew is made a victim; “Jew” is a heretical name for what is more generically human than the system of predicates allows, “gnostic” is an even more heretical name for this generic identity because there are no gnostics left (having been killed over the course of hundreds of years through various inquisitions), and “victim” is perhaps the most generic identity of the human stranger.
Those who have not read Laruelle's work on the victim may hold an immediate suspicion that Laruelle is making a certain use of victims that erases them as victim. But Laruelle takes a very different posture with regard to the victim, and through that posture comes to be able to say things about the circuit of victim/crime that are perhaps more insightful and more compassionate than standard philosophical ethics. While, in Éthique de l’étranger (2000), Laruelle argues that every crime is necessarily a crime against humanity, he summarizes this view succinctly in his very recent General Theory of Victims (2012, and 2015 in English translation), writing: “Crime is already an attempt to transcend a history once and for all, among other things a history of the ‘mean’ or the ‘tool’ object.”21 In other words, a criminal act has, in-the-last-instance, a human end driving it. Crime arises ultimately from the real separation of human beings from the world, from a transcendent or harassing history – it arises from an attempt to break alienation, even as it ends in violence and a form of failure for which there is no redemption. This is where the victim arrives without any sense of usefulness, without being something that thought comes along and dominates: “But the victim is not a tool to be damaged or capital to be destroyed; her essence is generic. And instead of appearing only to disappear or to survive, like a tool in the immanent circuit of being (of ontological pre-comprehension), she disappears radically in order to, perhaps, ‘survive’ and moreover to be ‘revived’ by superposition in Man-in-person.”22 Instead, Laruelle tells us, thought must come to think under the condition of the victim, which is the main argument of Intellectuals and Power and is found again in General Theory of Victims when he writes, “For us-the-Gnostics and us-the-generics, this is the role of the intellectual: to help victims in this uprising, to imitate and prolong this uprising in the human dimensions of thought.”23
The victim is not to be pitied, but co-suffered with (the literal sense of compassion), this being the condition under which thinking of the essence of the human takes place.24 And Laruelle is quite clear that victimhood is the cause-in-the-last-instance for insurrection and a kind of generic sense of resurrection which is not open to “heroes” or the victors of history.25 So, thinking under the generic name of the victim, how does non-philosophy create a kind of thinking that is in its very act of thought ethical? Laruelle argues for the creation of a “determined intellectual” as opposed to the “dominant intellectual” who takes to the television or op-ed pages to play out various set pieces of sub-philosophy. The determined intellectual is determined by nothing other than the victim, refusing to justify that victim's suffering, but to think that victim unilaterally: “The determined intellectual lets himself be motivated by, but not determined by, history. He only finds occasions or contingencies that allow him, not to think the Victim, but to do ‘victim thinking’ [penser victime]. The great difference between the dominant intellectual and the determined intellectual lies here, thinking the victim or victim thinking.”26 As I explain in a translator's note, this locution shares many of the same difficulties found in translating Luce Irigaray's “parler femme.” Laruelle's “penser victime” could be translated in a number of different ways, as could Irigaray's formulation, which has led her translators to leave “parler femme” untranslated. However, as this is not a phrase which recurs throughout Laruelle's work, I have chosen to translate it as “victim-thinking,” though it could also have been translated “to think victim,” meaning something close to thinking as a victim but without the sense of distance, and thus transcendence, implied in the “as.”
So how does this conception of a Stranger that takes priority (or as Laruelle writes it in his attempt to avoid the implied sufficiency, takes the prior-to-priority) break the principle of sufficient ethics? Such a principle could be formulated as the ability to circumscribe any ethical problem within a metaphysically structured ethical system of thought that as a system operates at a distance from ethics as such. This returns to an undeniably provocative claim made throughout this book implicitly, but most explicitly in the introduction. Non-Philosophy makes no real promise, meaning if it promises anything it does so outside the circulation of wager and promise inherent to the history of philosophy, in which one philosophy succeeds another by virtue of offering better tools for interrupting or changing the world – keeping in mind the understanding of world as the background and hinterland upon which a human (being) is thought and thrown into that world. “The world” is the name in non-philosophy for the set of various forms of transcendences that become alienated from the immanent ground of their genesis. “The world” is the name for the complex apparatus of authorities and the various forms that decision takes as it – at best – obscures or – at worst – eviscerates the human-in-person. To bring attention to the Stranger, to the foreigner, is to bring attention to what threatens the world, to what escapes the world, to what moves through the world without worldly recognition. But how does this threat to the world by the Stranger manifest itself? It is simply through the strangeness of the stranger, the foreignness of the foreigner, and the victimhood of the victim as manifest within thought itself.
We see an example of the way such ethical thinking or victim-thinking manifests in non-philosophy when Laruelle considers the figure of the sans-papiers in France. The term refers to those immigrants who are classed as étranger en situation irrégulaire, akin to “illegal aliens” or “undocumented workers” in the American idiom, but literally strangers and foreigners, who are unable to work legally within France. The lived (reality) of being undocumented is far from easy and those who are subject to the State undoubtedly hope to be left alone by the State so that they may simply live their life. Laruelle claims they do not want recognition of the philosophical sort. The usual form of philosophizing the undocumented involves, “a wholly negative subtraction by the philosopher who, himself, can then return with all the positivity of the Good Samaritan.”27 Rather than seeking to take away the predicates of a human being so that what one is helping is precisely “universal man,” Laruelle moves forward with his thinking of the undocumented as a name for generic humanity. Not a subtraction, but a generalization or broadening of human identity outside the coordinates of recognition by the world or State.
He thus reads the undocumented stranger as fundamentally a manifestation of the structure of the One. While the Human-in-Human is always already foreclosed as another name for the One, there is a projection of the subject in its thrown existence that plays out through the formal structure of One-in-One, (non-)One, and non(-One).28 This structure is the formal way in which non-philosophy expresses the causality of the last-instance and from such an understanding goes on to carry out its pragmatic use of philosophy. In simple terms, this formalism is a sketch of philosophy made relative, a disempowered philosophy that is no longer sufficient, but still acts within the world. The One-in-One names the radical identity that is the last-instance where the various dualisms of philosophy are identical or superposed, rather than being the Same or forced to circulate in an economy of vicious circularity. The (non-)One is an effect of the One-in-One, but acts as a kind of clone of that One in the world. There is a negation within it, but it remains suspended. The non(-One) is the actuality of a relative transcendence that has its genesis in immanence itself and acts as the relative negation of the One within the world. We have seen that this general sketch is used throughout Laruelle's work to model various relationships and think their relative stability rather than their absolute identity. With regard to the Stranger or Foreigner and her status as undocumented, this may be sketched as Laruelle writes:
The One being this time unifacial, there can be, according to the perspectives of the world, a thousand different images in which it is incarnated as posture, but only one each time – even if this unifacial image is also, ambiguously, as we say elsewhere, the (non-)One (the one and only document of the Stranger) and the non(-One) (his thousand documents), through which we have the sole access possible to the One. The One itself is not an external access to the world, but something immanent that goes or under-goes or that transcends, without giving rise to a double transcendence. The One advances incognito before its image, or traverses it.29
The force-(of)-thought manifest here is powerful and it is important to understand that non-philosophy is directed here toward thought. What are documents to an immigrant? They are the means to work, they secure an identity grounded in a transcendent form of authority as manifest – often, if not nearly always, violently – through the State. Thus, when Laruelle claims that the (non-)One is the only document of the Stranger he speaks to the fierce power of the undocumented who lives despite the world, despite the State. This is a kind of fugitive-being, a refusal of transcendent authority as the ground of identity, and taking identity only from the One as the authorization of one's Stranger-existence. Laruelle marks an anxiety that unites the good liberals of Western societies with their conservative counterparts. For the undocumented is at the border and she “has visas in my name” (as M.I.A. declares in “Paper Planes”). There are a thousand papers, a thousand documents, that the undocumented may pull from the act of negating the world's power. These thousands of negations, thousands of documents that mark an identity within the world, are also tools that may be turned against those State forms of transcendence as the undocumented may mutate that negation into her own negation. This is a negation which reflects the absolutely foreclosed nature of the One, who does not even pass through its own image, but is clandestine (clandestin being another term for the undocumented in French) and incognito in the world.
“What does such an analysis do?”, the politically minded theorist may ask, fancying himself an activist. Gloriously, it does nothing. To be more exact, it does nothing that can be recognized since such recognition is determined precisely by standard philosophical notions of decision and circulation. Such recognition is structured as a world, it englobes subjects with quasi-identities given from transcendent sources that harass the flesh-and-blood identities of those who, subjected, are cast into the world. The One does not grant us access to the world, though; it does not change or interrupt it. It refuses such recognition, even in the mirror, and is a generic deracination. In practicing this deracination within thinking itself, it offers a kind of end of the world. We will now turn to how such an ethics may be understood through a dialogue with a critical race theory that also seeks to understand such a deracination of the human as a form of good news.
After the previous overview, I want to shift from explication to a creative reading of Laruelle in dialogue with other theorists, in order to show the way in which Laruelle's work and non-philosophy may generally enter into vibrant and vital debates ongoing in critical theory. I will focus here on critical race theory, though others have found the work useful in other forms of radical theory, such as queer theory and gender theory.30
Laruelle's seeming obsession with oneness and the frequent use of the term “universality” (though often critical) might suggest that Laruelle's ethical theory is at odds with popular identity politics and the sophisticated theoretical projects that emerge around questions of identity, such as queer or post-colonial theory. Yet, on the other hand, his frequent use of the term “identity” and focus on the individual as another name for the One, and the human individual, might suggest a natural alliance between non-philosophy and these theoretical projects that bear on political and ethical questions. Laruelle is no doubt haunted by his being formed in a French and European milieu, and this probably manifests in certain ways that may allow some nostalgic individuals to hold up non-philosophy as another instance of the drive toward an Enlightenment vision of universality, but this arises from a surface-level reading and is largely uninteresting. If Laruelle were simply another French or European philosopher who advocates for a universality that just happens to match the cultural values of Europe, then his non-philosophy would remain all-too-philosophical. And while there may be remnants of this in his thought, there is also a radical anti-racist core to non-philosophy. As he remarks in a conversation with Robin Mackay:
If, within non-standard thought [another name for non-philosophy], the knowledge of human nature (to put it in traditional terms) remains entirely problematic, not at all becoming the object of some dogmatic knowledge, this only goes to show that there is no absolutely determined knowledge of the human, of man; and in particular it aids the struggle against every dogmatic definition of human nature – against racism, for example: if one has no absolutely certain knowledge of human nature, it is far more difficult to develop a racist thought.31
This anti-racism, rooted in a certain understanding of identity and the universal, means that non-philosophy may contain tools and analyses that could be brought together with critical race theory and neighboring discourses to add yet another weapon to the anti-racist, anti-colonial struggle to decolonize our theoretical structures as well as the others. In order to make this argument, let us begin with a seemingly difficult quotation, one from Laruelle's book Introduction to Non-Marxism that might at first glance appear to support the normal European sense of universalism that Marxism carried forth into non-European struggles as well in the so-called Third World:
It is also necessary to read the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, etc., as the symptom of a universalization in the process of a thinking-according-to-the-Identity within which it may have, not the singular, but the uni-versal; it is also necessary to stop criticizing uni(-)versality in the name of individual singularity, the authentically thought individual does not rise out of philosophical singularity and philosophical exception, but from Identity.32
Laruelle's argument here is subtle and requires attention. First, he is rejecting certain rejections of universality, written here in such a way as to emphasize its oneness and movement. In this case “uni” of course refers to “oneness,” while “versality” contains the French vers or “toward” and versalitié may be read as “towardness.” The term may be read then as “moving toward the One.”
We then see a rejection of the singular as the determining term with regard to this moving toward this universality or oneness. Often the singular is taken to be an instance of pure individuality. This is the popular image of thought critical race theorists labor under, but it also describes well the position of the radical philosopher Gilles Deleuze who rejects transcendent political structures on the basis of the radically singular nature of individuals as instances of pure immanence.33 For these reasons, one might be tempted to read Laruelle's rejection of the singular here as a rejection of the identity politics of critical race theory. For those reading it in this way, the universal should not be rejected on the basis of a singular identity like “non-European” or some more specific identity like “woman,” “queer,” “black,” or so on. But, in a very precise sense, this rejection of the singular is a rejection of this European vision of the universal. For what Laruelle rejects here is “individual singularity.” The individual singularity as found in Deleuze's pure immanence is an individual absolutely stripped of predicates in a way that looks a great deal like the claim of European universalism: that one should not be engaged with as a “black man” or some particular, but simply as a “human,” denuded of qualities. There is something of this in Laruelle, but it is far less delusional and less artless than the usual liberal proclamation that one “does not see race,” for someone making such a declaration often does not see race because they are white and their race, despite being largely a social construction, is never revealed as such.
Indeed, Laruelle does seek to strip away these predicates, but he does so in a way that is not about getting to some real essence of the human, but rather that posits a completely opaque identity of the human as lived. With regard to race this is important, because the identity of a (Black) man, for example, is created through creating a Black/white difference and so any attempt to break out of this system will require a destruction of the singularities produced by the dominant and colonizing term in this system: the whiteness which forces Blackness to circulate as Blackness. In fact, this whiteness is an example of the exception that the singular names for Laruelle. Bringing back to mind Laruelle's discussion of exception with regards to politics, the singular cannot express a democratic or communist form of thought precisely because it tries to step outside and circumscribe the One, it tries to create a differential system of politics rather than an ethical superposition of indistinction. Where do we see – or rather, not quite see, as the case may be with this opaque identity – the human? We see it in the lived identity of the victim of this decisional politics. In the case of the world structured by whiteness and casting a (Black) outside to define and undergird that world (quite literally since the wealth of the Western world is largely built off the slave labor of Black human beings) the victim takes the name of the (Black) slave.34 Note that (Black) is written in parentheses, a grapheme that I will return to and which relates fundamentally to the way, within the white world of philosophy, the (Black) functions both as a blind spot and as the structural negation of the human as philosophically overdetermined.
Universalism in the standard sense forms a philosophical amphibology with the singular. The singular slips into the role of the universal, and the universal into the role of the singular. When the singular slips into the role of the universal, it is a matter of stripping away all predicates without ending the world that produces those predicates, and when the universal slips into the role of the singular it is an example of the way universalism has played out historically, with Europe proclaiming itself universal and refusing to recognize others as human. These others are then able to be murdered in the service of setting up the universal. This “able to be murdered” is of course not recognized within this singular universalism since the (Black) slave is not recognized as human within this structure. This provides a strange and productive resonance with Laruelle's pronouncements that the Human-in-person (which is a human outside of the circulation of recognition) is not born and does not die.35
In many ways, nothing here says anything different from the standard schema of philosophical anthropology. To be a human is to be recognized and to recognize: that is, to be human is to form a world. In this terse proclamation, there are nevertheless deep resonances with Hegel's anthropology, along with Marx's, Heidegger's, and Sartre's. But we also find it in Fanon, albeit in a different mode – one that is closer to non-philosophy despite Fanon's use of the standard philosophical coordinates of self and other. However, in his mutation of philosophical universality he shows the white sufficiency at play in the philosophical construction of the world. As he writes, “The black man is comparaison.[…]Whenever he is in the presence of someone else, there is always the question of worth and merit.”36 This is powerfully illustrated by Fanon's phenomenology of the only way in which he is given recognition: as a black object, not a human, englobed in a white world. Owing to the power and clarity of this famous passage, it is worth quoting at length:
“Dirty nigger!” or simply “Look! A Negro!”
I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.…
“Look a Negro! Mama, a Negro!” “Ssh! You'll make him angry. Don't pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn't realize you're just as civilized as we are…”
My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, worn out, looking dismal on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal; the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro; the Negro is trembling, the Negro is trembling because he's cold, the small boy is trembling because he's afraid of the Negro, the Negro is trembling with cold, the kind that chills the bones, the lovely little boy is trembling because he thinks the Negro is trembling with rage, the little white boy throwing himself into his mother's arms: “Mama, the Negro's going to eat me.”
The white man is all around me; up above the sky is tearing at its navel; the earth crunches under my feet and sings white, white. All this whiteness burns me to a cinder.37
Frank B. Wilderson III expands upon Fanon's analysis to argue that the (Black) as the enslaved and colonized does not enter into the world as a human being, is not recognized and is not given the power to recognize. Yet, the (Black) slave is also treated as the excluded term that grounds all circulation. In a way, the (Black) slave is akin to the Real in the sense Laruelle intends, since it is outside of the circulation of the structure of the world, though with the caveat that this character is something that remains precisely in defiance of the world's death-dealing. And so everything unilaterally flows from the identity of the Real and there is nothing more unilaterally real in this way than the (Black) slave. Thus, the Slave, like the Real, is unrecognized or recognized as “nothing” – for slavery is constitutive of the world, both in terms of the grammars that allow us to construct discourses on the world and in terms of the means of subsistence for the world. Primitive accumulation is slavery.
But, in this way, as Wilderson and the early work of Orlando Patterson argue, the Marxist grammar of suffering, of exploitation and alienation, is insufficient for an understanding of the Slave. Work, or forced labor, Patterson argues, is not a constitutive element of slavery. The subjective dispossession of the Slave is more complete, the negation of the (Black) goes deeper. Wilderson writes:
Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state” – the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the (black) position – disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world.38
Wilderson goes on to say:
as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is […]generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversal in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world.39
Now, this requires moving outside of philosophy and engaging with empirical realities like the refusal to even discuss reparations or the way in which police officers are, in the last instance, allowed to murder unarmed black men. “No angel,” John Eligon writes of Michael Brown in the New York Times.40 In order to not be killable, the black man has to present as an angel. Writing as an intellectual fully embedded in the anti-black world and spontaneously reproducing its philosophy – in spite of his own subject position – Eligon could have simply written: “Michael Brown was no human.”41
Philosophy's structure is the structure of the white supremacist world as explored by Fanon. Laruelle's non-philosophy is – lest we forget – a science of philosophy and a form of thought that is generalized, thereby allowing for a certain use of philosophy. This is important precisely because the hallucinatory world – the thought-world not the earth – that we live in as subjects is structured by that philosophy. The thought-world may be the capital-world, again structured with the same self-sufficient faith as philosophy, but as a world it is formed of strata, and so we may also include the race-world or, more directly, the anti-black-world. This repeats the structure of Philosophical Decision and philosophical duality: from the perspective of the white, to be human is to be white all the way down – whiteness is even taken to be the stripping-away of color or specificity in our everyday speech. Yet this transcendent whiteness is rooted in a transcendental difference – that is, the white human is only known to be white in relation to the (Black) slave. This Black/white world now challenges the transcendent character of the white human by showing that the very empirical basis of that world (its primitive accumulation) is built upon some second thing: the (non)labor of the (Black) slave. Suddenly, there is an X and Y within the anthropological world, and European philosophers must perform the usual transcendental-empirical backflips to erase this difference, while attempting to exploit its founding move at the same time, forming once again an amphibology.
Fanon's and Wilderson's casting of the (Black) as object and the (Black) as slave operates as the negation of the philosophical human. We may write this subject position as (Black) to indicate that the identity is not given by the world, that this suspended identity is precisely closer to the Human-in-Human than the white human of philosophy. The universalism of European philosophy is an ersatz-universalism. The assumed “ordinary human” is not the same as the one cast by non-philosophy – indeed the only thing usually subtracted from this image are minority predicates like Blackness and the category of woman. To be ordinary is to be bleached, to pass as without the conditions of color. This universalism comes under critique by Laruelle as well and he opens up to a possibility of something beyond it – a grammar that takes up the immanent impulse or power within appeals to the universal, but that is built upon a truly worldless (Black) human.
Laruelle writes:
The supposed “universality” of philosophy gives place to the worst misunderstandings. It is not its universality that is dubious, it is its restrained character of “abstract” generality (metaphysics as “abstraction” of its objects), thus of partially empirical “generality” which appears too strict or too limited when it is measured by what the vision-in-One tolerates. Philosophical universality, as we know, is double or divided: at once generality and totality.42
Philosophical universalism is the name for the unilateral duality of the universal and the particular, or the universal and the singular. If we are to regain something of the uni(-)versal, then we must think beyond its capacities and move to the generic: “This is why non-philosophy announces itself from the outset as a universalization, of the ‘non-Euclidean’ type if you will, of the philosophical generality/totality.”43 We enter into this unilateral duality of the universal and particular and attempt to generalize this relation – generalization being the meaning of “non-Euclidean.” What would it mean to generalize the unilateral duality of the universal and the particular? Well, it would require we at least negate the white. And to negate the white we must, as Fanon's analysis suggests – and translated into the technical language of non-philosophy – think under the condition of the (Black) victim. As we will shortly come to see, Laruelle's victims are never passive or worthy of pity and contempt, they are the cornerstone of humanity and in their “no” is their insurrection and resurrection. As Fanon writes with reference to the same Fichte who is so important for Laruelle:
The I posits itself by opposing, said Fichte. Yes and no.
We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it.
Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity.
But man is also a negation. No to man's contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.44
This element in Laruelle, the general theory of the victim, when thought with the analysis of Fanon's and Wilderson's recognition of the non-recognition offered to blacks in the white world, helps us to avoid the objectification of the (Black) again and begins to reveal how non-philosophy may become more what it aims to be. It does so, however, through the further universalization of objectification, turning the white world's decisional globalization into material for human liberation. This requires objectifying in a certain sense the white/Black dyad cast by that political decision. But the purpose is always to break that world, to end the world so there may be space to be the humans we already know we are prior to worldly harassment.
Ethics is still differentiated from the way in which the Human-in-person lives her immanence. Philosophical ethics remains a matter of acting in the world and, insofar as non-philosophy fosters some kind of unified theory between philosophy and ethics, it is still a matter of disempowering and recasting those materials. When we turn to Laruelle's discussion of what he calls “philo-fiction,” we will see the way in which that ethics may be united more directly with positive projects by returning again to critical race theory, specifically the debate and mutual building of theory between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism as developed by Fred Moten, particularly in relation to aesthetic creations as a form of resistance. We consider this work in order to help ground Laruelle's vision of the philo-fiction of insurrection that comes from the victim, and that arises out of suffering.
What we have seen is that Laruelle's use of the universal stretches the capacity of the concept past its breaking point. To make it function non-philosophically he has to graphically break it as he writes “uni(-)versality,” to indicate the true sense of the concept (“moving toward the One”). He continues to deploy the term, but the concept of “the generic” comes to gradually replace it and functions with a greater capacity for his purposes. A generic ethics is then about indivision or indistinction, as Galloway says: “If the political is a question of points, of introducing a hard distinction into a hitherto smooth field, the ethical reverses the logic: not point but curve, not distinction but indistinction.”45
Yet, as we have seen, such an ethics of indivision takes place by situating itself under a condition, a figure produced by the division of victims and their persecutors. In taking up this division as material, such an ethics becomes also a pragmatic in the world. Thus, because ethics is a matter of universalizing the Stranger-subject or – it amounts to the same thing – thinking the true generic identity of the human, it refuses recognition as a goal. Recognition is the purview of the world. What we see in Laruelle is something shared with Wilderson and Sexton. To show the power in being incognito, or “incognegro” as the title of Wilderson's memoir has it, or being kinless as Sexton advocates, is what Laruelle's ethics does and this is presented as good news. But how could being kinless be good news? Because it is a breaking of the (political) world, the end of the world, since the world is all about distinctions for the purpose of exclusion and domination. Even as insurrection is always a kind of running, it looks for a stick, for weapons in that world it may turn against it, recalling again George Jackson's famous line taken up by Deleuze and Guattari. Insurrection is a movement out of the world, a movement toward indistinction. Generic deracination is one way of saying that the human only exists as a multitude of Strangers.46 Such a generic deracination is the only way to break the vicious circle of victim/persecutor. Furthermore, recognition of this deracination, as a kind of immanence of the future, is a way of saying that humans are always separate from the world, that the world does not truly determine humanity. We will see how this looks a bit more clearly in the next chapter.