Arguing for “Monstrously ” Radical Concepts

The project of François Laruelle’s non-philosophy consists in creating a methodology that will enable surpassing dualisms of theoretical thought inevitably and endlessly produced by Philosophy. Laruelle’s first work of his post-Derridian, i.e., of his “non-philosophical period, ” Philosophie et non-philosophie (1989), is an exhaustive demonstration of the thesis according to which (all western) Philosophy is based on a constitutive split produced by Reflection as its defining cognitive tool. Philosophy is trapped, claims Laruelle, in the vicious circle of “auto-mirroring. ” One of the axioms upon which the non-philosophical methodology of stepping out of the aporia of auto-reflexivity is based is the “Thought-in-terms-of-the-One. ” The latter consists in an epistemic procedure generated by a “posture of Thought ” that correlates with the Real of the object of investigation rather than with concepts within philosophical “uni-verses ” ( = doctrines). In this respect, non-philosophical interrogation (of philosophical phenomena) resorts to copying (“cloning ” as Laruelle would put it) the model of modern scientific thinking