On truth and gossip: The position of ‘communication’ in Laruelle’s non-philosophy

In an essay from the early 1990s, François Laruelle characterizes philosophy as ‘that rumour which, speaking with itself and speaking only of itself, extends itself across the entire boundaries of the West’, a discourse which ‘propagates itself on the basis of its menacing vacuity and impending ruination’ (‘La rumeur et le savoir’), counterposing it against a more rigorous science or knowledge of the One. And although he would soon abandon such recourse to scientificity, his derisive description of philosophy as a constantly circulating form of rumour, gossip, or hearsay remains consistent. Accordingly, in this paper, I argue that Laruelle’s critique of ‘mediatic communication’, which he views as having supplanted sophism as the nihilistic abyss into which philosophy leads us, representing a total unification of worldly experience under the aegis of a universal exchangeability, as well as his broader characterization of philosophy as a kind of gossip, maintains a rather common philosophical presupposition: namely, the inadequacy of both everyday speech and technologically-mediated communication in accounting for the real. Of course, Laruelle does not claim to wholly reject such communication – instead, at various times across his oeuvre, he makes gestures toward a uni-lateralization of the ligature between philosophizability and communication, which would treat the latter term as a philosophical material from which a non-philosophical practice might be realized – and yet, ultimately, he stills appeals to a pre-communicative experience that claims to determine all communication in the last instance, and a pre-worldly subject unsullied by any logos that would situate them as a Being-in-the-world. By considering this attempt to both disrupt and reappropriate the communicative, dialogic function of philosophy in relation to the Heideggerian notion of ‘idle talk’, I propose that Laruelle’s non-philosophy is beholden to a markedly philosophical distinction between truth and doxa that ultimately comes to regard all communication and exchange as a transcendence that alienates us from the radical immanence of our lived existence