John Mullarkey: Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006)

Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central figures: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey’s analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a ‘showing’, a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006
Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy series
ISBN 0826464610, 9780826464613
260 pages

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Ray Brassier: Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007)

Nihilism is not an affliction to be overcome, but a vector of intellectual discovery which philosophy should try to push to its ultimate conclusion. Rather than trying to safeguard the experience of meaning-construed as the defining feature of human existence-from the incursions of science, philosophy should strive to demystify it and deploy its considerable speculative resources to facilitate science’s labor of disenchantment. Disregarding the orthodox division between analytic and continental traditions, this book tries to forge a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and speculative realism in contemporary French philosophy.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
ISBN 0230522041, 9780230522046
275 pages

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François Laruelle: Dictionary of Non-Philosophy (1998/2009)

“Non-philosophy is a concept developed by French philosopher François Laruelle (formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Laruelle’s non-philosophy, he claims, should be considered to philosophy what non-Euclidean geometry is to the work of Euclid. It stands in particular opposition to philosophical heirs of Jacques Lacan such as Alain Badiou.”

Keywords: occasionalism, performativity, non-philosophy, psychoanalysis, cloning, Husserl, epistemology, ontology, Heidegger, phenomenology, transcendence, Nietzsche, Kant, non-Euclidean geometry, metaphysics.

Originally published as Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie, Editions Kime, Paris, 1998.

Compiled by Nick Srnicek and Ben Woodard
All translations by Taylor Adkins unless otherwise noted.
Free for noncommercial use and distribution with proper attribution.

Review: Ian James (Parrhesia, 2014).

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