Stephen Squibb at n+1:
In his 1974 “social sculpture” I Like America and America Likes Me, the artist Jospeh Beuys spent three days locked in a gallery with a wild coyote. I often think of Beuys when I think of François Laruelle, the enormously important French thinker who died Monday morning at age 87, and who spent his entire career locked in a similarly intimate and dramatic confrontation with philosophy.
Why would such a confrontation be necessary? Consider Friedrich Engels’s famous quip that, in what would become The German Ideology, he and Marx intended to “settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience,” thus clearing the way for their departure from a post-Hegelian “utopian” socialism to a more “scientific” kind anchored in the critique of political economy. The possibility of this move—from something called philosophy to something more scientific—is the all-consuming theme considered by Laruelle over six decades and countless books since completing his dissertation at the École Normale Supérieure under Paul Ricœur. This is his immense project of “non-philosophy,” which, in a kind of everlasting dance of participation and description, seeks not so much to transcend or escape philosophy as to show what such an exit strategy might require.
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