The Performance of Non-Philosophy

Are we ready for a return to Deleuze? The question might seem odd to the American reader, since the philosopher’s infl uence only continues to grow in the graduate programs that function here as the inculcator of critical theory. It is perhaps inevitable that this most elusive of thinkers has become the favorite among students who mistake the expostulations of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus as a release from all logical constraints. Given a climate in which the name of Deleuze is all-too-often invoked as justifi cation for the lazy or the inarticulate, the work of Alain Badiou has begun to function as a desperately needed corrective. But Badiou is not nearly as new or as fresh as he may seem. His fi rst major work, Theory of the Subject, was published in France over thirty years ago, and yet the recent growing fascination with Badiou has given birth to a virtual publishing industry, in which even the philosopher’s offhanded comments and class lectures merit hardback books (The End of History, In Praise of Love, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy). For those who have been reading Being and Event for nearly 25 years, the recent explosion of Badiou’s popularity must itself seem in equal need of a corrective. Enter François Laruelle’s Anti-Badiou: on the Introduction of Maoism Into Philosophy. Lauded in the pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy for his development of a “non-philosophy,” Laruelle follows in Deleuze’s footsteps of upsetting less the suppositions of traditional thought than the deep schematics that govern it. Laruelle has developed his non-philosophy as a method by which he can circumvent what he identifi es as the fundamental fl aw of philosophical thinking: a decision made at the outset of any philosophy that the subject under question, before any analysis, consideration, or even naming, must fi rst be separated from its essence. This process of separation produces not the subject itself but a “specular” version of it, an abstraction more easily manipulated by philosophical thought. This process, inherent to all philosophy, proceeds to think the artifi cial abstraction it has created through the difference between such an artifi ce and that which is inevitably left over from the procedure. What philosophy does, in Laruelle’s mind, is