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!"...
