This would be a particularly brutal caricature, yet it nevertheless contains a grain of truth: there is indeed an undeniable respect in which Derrida (along with Heidegger) and to a lesser extent Deleuze (along with Nietzsche) provide the most immediate reference points for understanding Laruelle’s thought, in which the negative characterization of philosophy provides the precondition for the positive creation of ‘non-philosophical’ concepts.Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p.134
This reminds me slightly of that trope of the synthetic construction of new cultural material, common in film (Alien as 'jaws-in-space' etc) and music (xband sound like yband meets zband) and seemingly accelerated or concentrated in the current cultural climate of hyper-information, epitomised by the 'mash-up'.
Ads has an interesting post about this, porn and modernism, and Evan(who with every post makes me embarrassed to be pretending to write at the same time as him) has had a mini-project on this for a while.
I know it's stupid but I quite like the idea of imaginary cultural artifacts defined by their being explicable in terms of a dyadic synthesis. Think of it as perhaps a kind of Borgesian fiction for the internet age, or something banal like that. More seriously I do think it is symptomatic of a greater relinquishing of novelty, for the fallacy "nothing new under the sun" is ever-increasingly taken for granted...
ps- the main reason for this post is to ask if anyone strongly recommends or discourages reading Laruelle. Should I bother investigating? Is it worth the effort? There's an ironically entertaining debate between Derrida and Laruelle that has been translated online, which consists mostly of Derrida raising objections to Laruelle's non-philosophy, to which the response is usually "Aha! You're doing it again!"...
3 comments:
I can't really say either way, except that I find it ferociously hard/weird - which can be good or bad... There was a chapter summary by Laruelle published in Angelaki in the excellent issue edited by Peter Hallward on contemporary French thought. If you want it email me and I can send the pdf.
Wow. I'm really getting the sense of difficulty from Ray's exegesis. I wonder if it's really something that I would find all that useful, but I'd like to at least give the horses mouth a listen, so by all means send me the pdf (email address is on my profile).
I note that 'non-dialectical negativity' is something that has much more relevance to what you're working on...
well I twist and turn on whether 'my' negativity is dialectical or not, generally it probably is, although I still tend to think it isn't. My version doesn't approach Ray's density on this question. I'll send the pdf, but probably not bothering is wise - I hate saying that though as a teacher...
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