François Laruelle: Principles of Non-Philosophy (1996/2013)

Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle’s mature philosophy.

As well as presenting the method and principles of non-philosophy, it includes a history of the development of non-philosophy, a novel conception of science, a discussion of non-philosophical causality and new theories of the subject and object of thought. Providing an introduction to Laruelle’s novel theory of ‘non-epistemology’ or ‘unified theory of thought’, this volumes challenges the way we think about the traditional philosophical problems.

Bringing together all the elements of his thought developed over twenty years and laying the foundations for his later work, Principles of Non-Philosophy is arguably Laruelle’s magnum opus.

Originally published as Principes de la non-philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996
Translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith
Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, 2013
ISBN 1441177566, 9781441177568
344 pages
via falsedeity

publisher
google books

Download (removed on 2013-6-22 upon request of translator)

Ian James: The New French Philosophy (2012)

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle.

The book situates the writing of each philosopher in relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself.

This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought.

Publisher Polity, April 2012
ISBN 0745648053, 9780745648057
220 pages

review (Marjorie Gracieuse, review31)
review (Shelly Walia, Spectrum)

publisher
google books

PDF

François Laruelle: Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics (2012)

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.

Translated by Drew S. Burk
Publisher Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis, 2012
ISBN 1937561119, 9781937561116
85 pages

publisher

PDF (English only)