Non-philosophy and the limits of philosophy: G. Deleuze and F. Laruelle

Abstract

The article analyzes two presentations of non-philosophy, which was the main subject of a discussion between Gilles Deleuze and Francois Laruelle. The context of actualiza­tion of non-philosophy, the principles and content of its implementation in the works of G. Deleuze and F. Laruelle are revealed. From the comparison and identification of controversial points inherent in these two views, the hypothesis of the positive limit of philosophy is singled out. The latter, in contrast to the appropriated and abolished nega­tive limit, points not to the incompleteness of philosophy and the intensification of its totalizing aspirations, but to its inconceivable possibility. The author shows that for­mally and structurally, the non-philosophies of G. Deleuze and F. Laruelle are identical. In non-philosophy, we are not talking about the end or overcoming of philosophy. Non-philosophy is not antiphilosophy, not the exteriority or the other of philosophy, but a “foundation”, an unthinkable place to which philosophy always already belongs, but which it is unable to describe. The discrepancy between the two presentations of non-philosophy is most clearly manifested when discussing this unthinkable place. For F. Laruelle, this unthinkable place is the radical immanence of the One-Real; for G. Deleuze, the plane of immanence bordering on chaos. The article concludes that the projects of non-philosophy, with all their differences, reveal the fundamental princi­ple of insufficient philosophy. On the one hand, no form of description can exhaust the multiplicity of the real. On the other hand, the possibilities of thought are irreduc­ible to the idiom of philosophical cognition. The plurality of descriptions raises before us the question of their combinations, the forms of their interaction, the language of their mutual understanding.