Laruelle has used many names to describe his project. The term “non-philosophy” clearly has more prevalence than others, but he has always deployed other terms, to refer either to aspects of his thought – like “science of philosophy” or “non-epistemology” – or to the project in the general sense – as he has most recently with “non-standard philosophy.” But there is another term he has deployed alongside of these that appears to be both general, like “non-standard philosophy,” and particular, like “non-epistemology.” This term, “philo-fiction” and its variants (photo-fiction, christo-fiction, art-fiction, amongst others), is derived in part from his work in the standard philosophical domain of aesthetics (which I am framing here as “fabulation” because of my focus on fiction), and yet also refers to what non-philosophy creates when it enters into the various domains of philosophy with its logic of the “non.” When Laruelle enters into these domains, he does so without regard for an authenticity that would be granted by following the rules of discourse, even those of the art-World.
Instead, the purpose of fiction is a kind of counter-creation to that of the world. The act of creating fiction or “fabulating” is the goal of a non-philosophy – something is made by non-philosophy with the materials of philosophy and the world it creates. While non-philosophy also describes that world, as we saw in Laruelle's theory of Philosophical Decision, such a description is given in order to relativize and disempower what self-presents as sufficient and absolute. Stepping outside of the terms that Laruelle might himself use – but nonetheless consistent with the practice he engages with in his books – we might say that philo-fiction operates in a way similar to science fiction, though the kind grounded in visions of social justice and moving from the experience of the victim. We might indeed call this, along with Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, “visionary fiction.” As Imarisha writes in her introduction to an anthology of works of speculative or visionary fiction, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.”1 That is, in thinking how the world might be otherwise, how it might be stripped bare of its structures of authority (war, violence, prisons, capitalism), we engage in a practice of drawing from what appears in that world but under the logic of the without, of the otherwise: “Art is the world without the world, the entire world but without its over-determining concept.”2 Importantly, Laruelle is not arguing for the continuation of the world or even a better world. It is on this point that Laruelle may differ from a certain optimism found within even the most grim speculative fiction. After the creation of a fiction, whether it be philo-fiction or any other form, the radical immanence of the One still remains foreclosed. The radical (lived) human remains unrepresentable. But, as we will see, how that radical (lived) human lives in the world, how the radical (lived) human is performed, does matter. For while the coordinates of the world are not everything, while there remains something of the Human-in-Human always already foreclosed to the world, the existence of the human is performed in the world. Survival is important and should be relatively valued, even though survival always takes place by definition within the limits set by the world and through means derived from the world even if in-the-last-instance these means remain human. There is, for Laruelle, a way of valorizing fiction: as a force of insurrection that disempowers the world and operates without concern for its parameters.
This chapter is separated into two parts to attend to the particular material engaged with – again, that is fabulation – and then to see the way in which non-philosophy's practice is a philo-fiction generally. Our discussion of Laruelle's aesthetics will not focus on the particular object of photography, which has been the focus of two of his most explicitly aesthetic texts (The Concept of Non-Philosophy [2011 in a bilingual edition] and Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics, 2012), but rather focus on the general shape of his work on aesthetics as fabulation before looking at the way philo-fiction may play out as the performation of the subject.3 In attempting to craft a philo-fiction Laruelle is attempting to create a unified aesthetic and philosophical practice, both aestheticizing philosophy and philosophizing aesthetics. Because of the centrality of ethics to Laruelle's work, we return to his conception of this performation via problems posed by the specific critical race theory seen in the last chapter, as this allows the stakes and aims of philo-fiction to be seen more clearly. While art is never simply distinguished from ethics or politics, the way in which ethics and politics manifest in art is often covered over by philosophy by either making the art serve a didactic role or reducing art to a tool for philosophy's own use in playing the didactic role. As John Ó Maoilearca's work persuasively argues, Laruelle's conception of non-philosophy assumes that the regional forms of knowing (like visual art, fabulation, and aesthetics in this case) already think.4 We will explore then the way in which Laruelle's victimology drives his thinking regarding art. Keeping in mind that in this victimology – or, perhaps more accurately, “victim-fiction” and victim-thinking – the victim is not understood as weak and in need of saving, but as the very power of insurrection, as fiction-making or fabulating. Thus, his own conception of art as a form of thought is that art may be directed by the victim and join in her insurrection too, as crafting a form of life within the world.
There is a difference between art and philosophies of art. This might seem like a simple truism, but such a distinction is often elided between what philosophy says about something and that thing-in-itself. While philosophers (and perhaps theorists more generally) often claim to make something understandable, they often do so by disempowering the abstraction inherent in the object they are philosophizing. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in philosophical reflection upon works of art. While the multiplicity of different forms and styles of art makes general statements inherently likely to occlude various important nuances, nevertheless, when one stands before a piece of art, there is something abstract about the experience which remains even as one attempts to produce something discursive about that piece of art. Even classical or figural painting is abstract in this way. Perhaps this is what leads Laruelle to claim that artists are more sensitive than philosophers to the abstract nature of non-philosophy: “There is an abstraction to non-philosophy, but that abstraction is sometimes much more difficult for the ‘trained’ (or ‘formatted’ – meaning that they've been wiped to prepare them for philosophy) philosophers than it is for [psycho-]analysts or artists. Often artists are more sensitive to non-philosophy than philosophers themselves are.”5
The abstraction of art and the abstraction of non-philosophy are found not in looking for the underlying idea of art, but in the abstraction of its practice. Laruelle provides a succinct description of his understanding of how non-philosophy may produce a non-standard aesthetics, writing: “I propose considering every art form in terms of principles of sufficiency and no longer in terms of descriptive or theoretical or foundational historical perspectives. To do this, one must construct non-aesthetic scenarios, scenes, characters, or postures that are both conceptual and artistic and based on the formal model of a matrix. We will not start from a question, we will not ask what is art, what is the essence of a photo?”6 One of non-philosophy's hoped-for outcomes is to distinguish itself from philosophy's domination of those objects philosophy hopes to develop knowledge of. Non-Philosophy disempowers that domination by attempting to create a minimal gap between what philosophy says about something and how it does that. Badiou, as I have repeatedly claimed, is perhaps the most explicit proponent of the need to recognize philosophy's ability to come along and speak the truth for domains of knowledge that mutely produce those truths.7 In distinction to his contemporary, Laruelle instead hopes to perform these domains, but to do so in a philosophical way. When non-philosophy engages with art, then, it cannot simply be through writing a gallery catalogue, but must find a way to turn itself into a kind of artistic practice by using artistic materials.8 In this way, any aesthetics within non-philosophy must perform the art of thought rather than produce a thought about art: “Let us suppose that ‘aesthetics,’ to retain its name as such, is now of a superior power of art to thought, thought itself striving to be an art ‘in-the-last-instance,’ so an art of thought rather than a thought about art.”9
This calling upon forms so as to go under them as conditions of philosophical work is the impetus behind Laruelle's philo-fiction. This means the various materials will necessarily modify some of the ways in which non-philosophy manifests in each instance. With regard to his recent work on quantum physics, this has meant attempting to think of non-philosophy as akin to the style of science-fiction: “Philo-fiction is scientifically based and is not science-fiction that is philosophically based, it is ‘broadening’ of the term science-fiction in every sense of the word through its transfer to the terrain of philosophy so as to raise it to something besides literature alone.”10 Undoubtedly, Laruelle is taking a great risk here by the standards of what counts as respectable work in philosophy. For running throughout non-philosophy is a kind of aesthetic vision as he attempts to bring together various forms of thinking, but without endeavoring to provide the usual philosophical arguments regarding the conditions for scientific truth or judgment regarding the beauty of art. His engagement with a determinate science, quantum physics, risks being seen as “merely” aesthetic, especially when he makes claims such as this:
If it is necessary to justify this kind of attempt, we prefer to say that it is a matter of generically knowing, with an eye towards our human under-coming, the gnosis that constitutes the first forms of knowing that we are without knowing it. Philosophy alone does not suffice for all of this and even is opposed to it. Another form of knowledge is necessary, at once scientific and of some philosophical kind, one without reflection but through superposition of the quantum and philosophy. Without this no one can understand more clearly this formula: philo-fiction, indeed even theo-fiction, is a science-fiction with possibly its classical technology augmented with that of philosophy, but the sense of which is human or the vector that is “messianic.”11
After all, normally when we think of people bringing together various “messianic” ideas with ideas derived from the science of quantum physics, we think of controversial figures (sometimes simply described as “charlatans”) like Deepak Chopra. The crucial difference, however, is that Laruelle's non-philosophy does not make claims about the “true nature” of the world, and does not enter into debates regarding the ways quantum physics supports materialism or some form of vitalism or some other already constructed philosophical position.
In terms of non-philosophy's framing of the science of quantum physics, anything that science tells us about the universe is necessarily partial and open to being revised with new findings and when new models are developed. Human existence (what Laruelle refers to in his later work and is seen in the quote above as “under-coming”) speaks to a form of knowledge from which even scientific knowledge comes. We will examine in the next chapter what Laruelle means by the term “messianic” and its relation to his understanding of science. But we may begin to understand if we take him to mean that this human knowledge is already a kind of messianic act. For scientific knowledge about the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe speaks to the human under-coming into that universe, rather than being thrown (ex-isting) into the world. Again, to point out a difference between the universe and the world is to point to a difference between a form of existence that is not sufficient (universe) and a hallucinated totality that in reality refers to the set of actual but not necessary forms of authority (the world). Thus the proliferation of various kinds of fictions within the universe can be seen as a proliferation of various kinds of knowledge: not producing knowledge separate from those practices, but understanding those practices as themselves forms of knowledge – “To think ‘aesthetics’ in the form of scenarios, quantically conjugating a variety of arts and philosophies, would enrich and liberate possible productive forces and would justify the existence of art not as thought, as was talked about with post-modernists, but [as] a veritable art-thought, entirely specific and worthy of being called ‘contemporary’.”12
Laruelle's engagement with the arts is much like his engagement with the other domains we have examined, and perhaps is closest to his engagement with science, since science for Laruelle takes a fundamentally immanent stance within the Real in much the same way the artist does before being forced into a philosophically reflexive position regarding his/her work. When one thinks from a kind of naive and spontaneous realism of the photograph, it simply becomes a tool for the self-sufficiency of that spontaneous philosophy.13 In those instances, photography or any other kind of art “is a way of taking ontological care of being in its entirety in order to be surprised by being in its entirety, for example to be surprised that there are victims as if victims were ‘being’.”14 However, in the immediate experience of a photograph that captures something of suffering, the world fades away and instead the human may become outraged or “indignant.” Laruelle is making reference to the Spanish people's anti-austerity movement, the indignados, when he writes: “The photo is the way in which the world astonishes itself whereas it should be that in which man becomes indignant. Photo-fiction would rather be a way to take pity on the human rather than astonishing the world, the poor world that does not quit making war with itself via interposed photographs.”15 So there is here a human cause behind the art of thought. It would not be correct to claim that art is then subordinated to some purpose other than art, since the human herself lacks any purpose or end, but rather art raises up humans in a kind of “weak resurrection” by bringing attention to the human, instead of encompassing the human within the world.
Let us now put this vision of aesthetics as fabulation in dialogue with a problem raised in our investigation of Laruelle's work on ethics. Namely, how are we to distinguish the human as separated from the world, while still understanding the real effects the world's enframing has on the human as a particular subject?
In a certain sense, the world is already a fiction. Think of all the regional forms of knowing that philosophy deploys: ontology, epistemology, anthropology, and even the ways in which the Philosophical Decision may be traced through discourses around biology, cosmology, and so on. The Greek logos carried by the suffix in each of these terms is familiar to all of us. These discourses may be seen as crafting stories about the objects they claim to elucidate and reveal, whether they be Being, knowledge, the human, life, or the cosmos itself. With regard to anthropology or the fiction told of the human, (Western) philosophy has played its part in the fabulation of what it means to be human. We have seen in the chapter on ethics the argument that Black intellectuals like Fanon and Wilderson have made regarding the way this fabulation operates through a series of constitutive exclusions. Even when philosophy is unable to see itself as a tool, confusing its ability to fabulate and the fictions it crafts with the Real itself, philosophy still operates as a tool. It joins and sometimes drives what Alexander G. Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages” in construing “race not as a biological or cultural classification, but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.”16 In his own fabulation of certain fictions, Laruelle joins major thinkers in Black studies like Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter in attempting to “disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with western Man” (despite his own subjective position as a white European French man).17 Here we will again elucidate Laruelle's position through contrasting it with work carried out in Black studies. Not because Laruelle, as a white European man, has the better position, but precisely because those in Black studies are clearer about the stakes behind various subject-fictions. They also allow us to locate a dualism that runs throughout non-philosophy, between the Real (the Human-in-Human which is not a subject) and the world (where various subject-fictions operate as the force-[of]-thought within theory).
Laruelle's non-philosophy offers resources for thinking through a debate within critical race theory today, between the position of Wilderson's Afro-pessimism and that of Fred Moten's “Black optimism.”18 Of course, and this bears repeating, this is not about offering the solution to the debate. It would be, as has been stated, a rather (white) philosophical move to think that a white American male explicating the work of a white French male could come along and enter into a difficult debate amongst black theorists and simply proclaim that a philosopher living in Paris has already solved this problem of the social death and social life of Black people in the anti-black racist world. It is, rather, to show the ways in which non-philosophy may be yet another tool, either as framework or as offering particular concepts, for such debates, if those involved wish to take it up. The form of the political world I sketched in chapter 5 is largely faithful to Wilderson's own and it is an analysis of the world that I think is correct. In Laruelle's terms, the world is not everything, and Wilderson would probably agree even though he directs his attentions toward a diagnosis of the world. His diagnosis shows that the discourse of the world takes place philosophically through the discourse of Being and thus the differential between black and white that structures the anti-black world is a philosophical discourse about Being that ultimately denies Black (slaves) their being, such that ontology cannot account for blackness. Fanon makes this claim, writing: “Ontology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores lived experience [vécu]. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.…The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”19 We see here a resonance again with Laruelle as ontology (or philosophy more generally) is found wanting in terms of being useful to understanding the (Black) human, because it does not take into account the vécu or the way in which such a subject position is lived.
Moten – whose project is marked by a distinction from Wilderson's, but overall they share much – is concerned with thinking through what he calls a “paraontological” analysis of blackness in this world as a site of resistance, and as the way in which oppressed people manage to live “in the break” or in the midst of violence and the denial of their humanity within the (white) world. This performs the reversal of valuation that we see in non-philosophy with regard to authoritarian philosophy that seeks to interpret or change the world, as we gleaned to be inherent in Heidegger's anti-Semitism and its explication through his philosophical terminology. In non-philosophical terms, we could say that the Black and white in this sense are subjects and so determined or in some form of relation or lack of relation to the world, but the lived (reality of) blackness is beyond such ontological concerns. This matches well with Moten's double injunction concerning blackness: “On the one hand, blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another; on the other hand, blackness must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology's sanction against the very idea of black subjectivity.”20 While Moten has not yet published a full exploration and analysis of this “paraontological” distinction, he is clear about the demand that has conditioned the conception of the idea when he writes: “The paraontological distinction between blackness and blacks allows us no longer to be enthralled by the notion that blackness is a property that belongs to blacks (thereby placing certain formulations regarding non/relationality and non/communicability on a different footing and under a certain pressure) but also because ultimately it allows us to detach blackness from the question of (the meaning of) being.”21 There is something lived and performed outside of the parameters of Being, outside of the parameters of the world, that no philosophical grammar has attended to. That something is blackness and, as Wilderson has argued, it looks like death to the world: “Because, I contend, in allowing the notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one would have to lose one's Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to say one would have to die.”22 As Jared Sexton has argued, those seen within the world as the walking dead have a life in the world that manifests as social death.23 This notion of social death as the story of blackness is a philo-fiction, it is the fabulation of a new conception of lived (realities of) humans that challenges the story of the world.
Laruelle allows us to make clear that the social death forced upon certain subjects takes place within the world: it is the purview of subjects that emerge from the Human-in-Human foreclosed to worldly representation or recognition. The paraontological distinction between blackness and Black people is an instance of philo-fiction, but in the same way as the non-philosophical distinction between the Real and the world more generally is also a philo-fiction crafted by thinking from the radical immanence of the Real-One or Human-in-Human. Wilderson's distinction of these worldly subject positions into Human (white), Savage (indigenous), and Slave (Black) speaks to the structure of the world as such. Wilderson's remark that freedom for the Slave (“the end of the world,” since the world is constructed on the basis of a decision between free and slave, master and slave) comes with hyperbolic demands also speaks to the radical immanence of the One that underlies and is foreclosed to these subject positions: “For the Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential, question.…the riders that one could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolic – though no less true – and ultimately untenable: freedom from the world, freedom from Humanity [another term for white subjectivity in Wilderson], freedom from everyone (including one's Black self).”24 Why freedom from this Black self? Precisely because the self is the subject formed by the world. It is the fiction one lives, and if one lives it according to the standard rules of narrative then one lives the world with all its attendant harassments – and, in the case of the slave subject, as socially dead. That the fact of this freedom is possible – even though hyperbolic and untenable, at least within the frame of the world – speaks to the fact that one's lived immanence underlies any fiction, any creation of the subject, and moreover that this possibility is not provided for on the basis of any universal subject, but on the basis of a radical immanence of a (lived) identity.
So the principles of non-philosophy would allow us to affirm both the position of Wilderson's Afro-pessimism, which claims that within the parameters of ontology the subject position of the Black is cast as nothing, and that of Moten's Black optimism, which claims that there is a paraontological distinction between the subject position and the immanence of blackness that disrupts the world as such. Laruelle's theory allows us to be clear on why both positions are tenable in the way that Moten and Sexton have tried to think them together – for the position of a subject may be produced by the world, but there is a potential underlying that encompassed subject that may disrupt the world through which the subject is ontologically determined. To expand upon this and the ethical drive behind philo-fiction, let us move away somewhat from the technical language of Wilderson, Moten, and Laruelle.
When one engages in critical theory around the question of race, it is not uncommon for well-meaning individuals to ask whether it is truly anti-racist to recognize and name another person as raced in any way whatsoever. Race is, after all, a fiction, or what Laruelle would call a hallucination of the (lived) human. So is it right to engage with that fiction, when it has driven some of the most sadistic violence imaginable against other human beings? Would it not be better, such a well-meaning individual will ask, to drop this fictional account and treat all human beings simply as human beings? Does not such treatment arise out of a refusal to recognize racial difference or distinction? It may even seem as if such a question is grounded upon strong non-philosophical commitments to the generic nature of the (lived) human. The reality, as can be derived already from the preceding two chapters, is very different. Laruelle's theory is interesting precisely because of its strangeness to standard liberal conceptions of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Such liberal accounts, even when they are radical liberal accounts, are largely dependent upon a philosophy of recognition and representation played out between two terms that occludes a third term which determines that relationship. This is another way of saying, of course, that such a philosophy manifests the structure of Philosophical Decision, but it surfaces in a different way why there might be something of Philosophical Decision to resist and struggle against. The occluded third term of Philosophical Decision may come to oppress or control in nefarious ways the other two terms, and it is naturalized or normalized in such a way as to be beyond criticism.
How does this abstract structure relate to the question of insisting on a certain set of names as privileged fictional names for the Human-in-Human that lies beyond naming? With regard to the way the fiction of race manifests in the world, the two terms could be many things, but if Wilderson and others are correct that there is something fundamental to the construction of race that is rooted in the systematic dishonoring and subjugation of Black people by white people, then it would not simply be correct to say these two terms are “white” and “nonwhite.” It is more rigorous to name them as white and Black, for the way in which race is constructed ultimately depends upon these two extreme poles. While in the past such a relationship was dependent upon a recognition of “not black,” as the white human secured his humanity in not being a slave (that is, in not being nothing), this has changed in an age of “color-blind racism” or “racism without racists.”25 Now the demand is that the Black and white poles be recognized simply as two people, and that they enter into mutual recognition based upon some basic commonality. This is often what lies behind the refusal to take into account very different material conditions for a white subject and a Black subject. While segregation of communities continues, this is thought to arise “naturally,” ignoring the ways in which Blacks and whites have very different access to business and housing loans or health care or education, or any number of other institutions that correspond to quality-of-life indicators. The demand is that one strip away various determinations of one's subject position so that recognition takes place simply between two people, instead of between a victim and her oppressor or one complicit with making her a victim. What is left unthought, occluded from vision altogether, is that there is an implicit whitening of what it means to be human here. There is a third term – what we might name as the anti-black world since it englobes the other two – that determines the relationship of the two. One does not see the world, for the world is the name for that framework through which you see everything else and you do so seemingly spontaneously. To be a recognizable person, entering into a relationship of good faith with another person, is to enter into certain conditions of the world. In simple terms, when the demand is to “treat people like people” this means ignoring the ways in which the world determines who gets seen as a person and who is not extended that privilege. It ignores that the demand is to see the person in the way one sees a white subject. Others have discussed at length Laruelle's valorization of cosmic blackness and they have done so with skill.26 They tell us that Laruelle valorizes and names the blackness of the universe because it is more generic than light, it is less than light – as a visual metaphor within philosophy, which has social consequences, it is valued less than light and thus it is named and celebrated by non-philosophy. From the universe to the breaks in the social world, it is blackness that names the radically lived and unrepresentable.27
The subject position of the black is created by the world, and one names that blackness precisely because of the way in which the world has attempted to construct that subject as socially dead. Of course, from a non-philosophical perspective too, humans should all be treated as equal. But until the world that constitutes their inequality is ended, then one names these subjects either as Black, or victim, or (as we will see) Christ, because the (socially) dead may rise and in so doing disrupt the very world that brought about their death. This is how Laruelle understands victims. Not as weak and in need of saving, but as a fiction – as a subject – that is produced in a relative way by the world but that manifests a radical immanence that breaks from the dialectics of the world:
By its intrinsically in-person real, the victim is the counter-witness to nihilism, the same way that before it was the counter-example to creation ex nihilo. The victim carries with it resurrection, or rather the prior-to-the-first insurrection, against the dialectic of being and nothingness, which has no real or lived sense. The victim is a power of “awakening” or “reprise” in the order of the lived experiences opposed to the simple dialectical or differential repetition of survival. Survival reinforces transcendence, an act that exceeds death or persecution and prolongs the world, whereas insurrection, which is the root of resurrection, weakens or debases this transcendence of a world to the state of lived experience.28
The rising of the dead outside of the dialectic of being or nothingness is a way of speaking within the world of what is “beyond” the world, or otherwise. In the next chapter, we will see how non-philosophy submits religious materials (taken to be a kind of fiction as well) to such victim-thinking.