François Laruelle: Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy (1986/2010)

A crucial text in the development of François Laruelle’s oeuvre and an excellent starting point for understanding his broader project, Philosophies of Difference offers a theoretical and critical analysis of the philosophers of difference after Hegel and Nietzsche. Laruelle then uses this analysis to introduce a new theoretical practice of non-philosophical thought.

Rather than presenting a narrative historical overview, Laruelle provides a series of rigorous critiques of the various interpretations of difference in Hegel, Nietzsche and Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. From Laruelle’s innovative theoretical perspective, the forms of philosophical difference that emerge appear as variations upon a unique, highly abstract structure of philosophical decision, the self-posing and self-legitimating essence of philosophy itself. Reconceived in terms of philosophical decision, the seemingly radical concept of philosophical difference is shown to configure rather the identity of philosophy as such, which thus becomes manifest as a contingent and no longer absolute form of thinking. The way is thereby opened for initiating a new form of thought, anticipated here with the development of a key notion of non-philosophy, the Vision-in-One.

Originally published in French as Les philosophies de la difference Univeritaires de France, 1986
Translated by Rocco Gangle
Publisher Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2010
ISBN 0826436633, 9780826436634
228 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-26)

Raymond G. Stokes: Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990 (2000)

With a cloud of blue smoke and a high-pitched whine, Trabant cars carried many East Germans westward after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. The car’s 1950s design, obvious environmental incorrectness, and all-plastic body became a symbol of the technological limitations of East German communism. Though unfair and oversimplified, the famous image from the early 1990s of the rear of a Trabi protruding from a dumpster seemed to imply that the car, like the system which had produced it, had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

But as Raymond G. Stokes points out in Constructing Socialism, eastern Germany in 1945 was one of the most highly developed, technologically sophisticated industrial areas in the world. Despite the evident failings of its technology by the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic maintained advanced technological capability in selected areas. If the system itself was fundamentally flawed, what explains successes under the very same system? Why could the successes not be repeated in other areas? And if examples of success are so isolated, how did East Germany last as long as it did?

To answer these questions, Constructing Socialism examines the system of innovation that delivered some minimal level of technological excellence into the East German economy and industry. Focusing on success rather than failure, Stokes offers a general history of East German technology between 1945 and 1990. He combines an overview and synthesis of emerging scholarly literature with an examination of newly opened archival material in order to explore issues that include automation, standardization, technology transfer and technological tourism, and espionage.Constructing Socialism investigates specific technologies and machines but also emphasizes the people who designed and implemented them and the cultural context and meanings of technological systems.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000
Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology
ISBN 0801863910, 9780801863912
260 pages

google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Félix Guattari: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, new ed. (2008)

“Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking theories of “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari’s post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari’s writings and interviews on the cinema (such as ‘Cinema Fou’ and ‘The Poor Man’s Couch’), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his “Letter to the Tribunal” addressing the French government’s censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing “a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts”). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including ‘The Plane of Consistency,’ ‘Machinic Propositions,’ ‘Gangs in New York,’ and ‘Three Billion Perverts on the Stand’—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by François Dosse
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350601, 9781584350606
300 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)