This is the final chapter of Les Philosophies de la différence and by far the most important for future work by Laruelle. It ends in a kind of failure, which is interesting in itself, but a failure on philosophical terms that opens up to the work of Philosophy III where Laruelle breaks from sufficiency of philosophy more rigorously. I’ll be posting the notes as a PDF tomorrow with a final wrapping up post. – APS

“From the Undecideable to the theory of the philosophical decision”

Every system of Difference (philosophy), even those of Finitude, have posed the question, what is the essence of the philosophical act? But they have not been able to pose that question outside of that essence and that is the problem of a real logic of the philosophical decision and the status of a principle of real non philosophical [no dash in original] choice in philosophy. The only point of view that is radical immanent and transcendental to the philosophical decision is that of the “immediation” of the non-thetic (of) self, that is the One.

“The (non-)One and the contingency of the philosophical decision”

What are the effects of the One on the philosophical decision? Laruelle says there are two kinds. This section explains the first and the following explains the second. The first is the manifestation of a hallucinatory character of the non-real of the decision that is rejected in turn through a radical contingency that is the correlate of the One.

Laruelle gives a general definition of the philosophical decision: “In general, a philosophical decision is a break [coupure] – repeated and revived – towards an empirical or, more generally, given singularity and, at the same time, and an identification with an idealizes law that it gives, supposing itself then real, a transcendence towards the truly real. It is a relation and it adjusts itself each time according to the real assumed given and reduced, and of the real assumed achieved and affirmed (215).” Continue reading “Laruelle’s Les Philosophies de la différence – Chapter VII: Theory of the Philosophical Decision” →