Victims without Philosophy: Intellectuals and Power; General Theory of Victims

There does not exist an easy way to discuss François Laruelle and it is impossible to be ecstatic about his writing. The two books under scrutiny here—Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims—are, however, a relatively accessible introduction to the machinic parlance that Laruelle superposes onto philosophy’s presumed legibility. The human instance he discusses in both works is that of the victim. These two books could be both beneficial for and alienating to the wider readership in humanities: not for lack of originality (or even clarity), but due to the signature-style of conceptual resistance in Laruelle’s language. Virtually every-one—from gender studies to nationalism studies scholars—willing to submit herself to the conceptual skirmish dramatized in these two books has a lot to gain in order to renew her approach to the agency of the victim, the criminal, the survivor. The cunning proviso of the gain—to say this without diplomacy—is to take the unruly voyage of Laruelle through the syntactical mutilations of thought and language. Only then can one enthusiastically “recommend” these writings