Theory of Identities

Preface to the English Edition: Retrospection (2014)¹

“Philosophers always present their undertaking with the seriousness of ferrets at work and usually without much humor” (ix)

“Saving their irony for the world or for their predecessors, they are more reluctant to take on their own fictions, their ‘novels’” (ix)²

“And yet they dream … these reveries are philosophy’s matrix, its preparation or the lying-in-wait of its rationalization” (ix)

“We hesitate between two modes of classification grounded in the style of our object, a corpuscular mode earlier … an undulatory mode now. Each of non-philosophy’s works contains all of this in an indivisible or ‘holistic’ way” (ix-x)³

“the division into stages or steps,” the passage from corpuscular to undulatory theory, “serves to mark doses or proportions, nuances and accents that should not be dogmatically isolated. Non-philosophy is a system of stages as much as of phases, of particles as much as of flows or waves” (x)

“We dreamed of a joyous Iliad that left too hastily to look for its Odyssey, that believed it reached this Odyssey from time to time, and that wandered from shore to shore without ever finding solid ground, doomed to sink in the contemplation of immobile stars that the river Metaphysics carries along” (x)⁴

“Let’s say immediately and clearly: non-philosophy is a dreamed philosophy, a reverie or a fiction that owes a great deal to a certain power of dreaming peculiar to music” (x)⁵

“Theory of Identities is the book of the milieu, of the middle” (x)⁶

“The work’s milieu, its middle, is a way of rejecting the system. And there are many possible rejections” (x)

If a “caesura, the milieu determines a philosophy’s fairly rigid and definite order of exposition (Heidegger and Wittgenstein) … the sure sign of a will-to-system and to-unity that failed” (x)

“Treated more positively as a continuous milieu of existence, it [the milieu] does not exclude modalities, nuances, and accents” (x)

“Non-philosophy is a thought of the duality that began through a reclamation of the One rather than of Being” (xi)

“Theory of Identities is—after Biography of the Ordinary Man—the retrospection on the construction of a philosophy, the central arc of a bridge open to the circulation between the first construction of non-philosophy and its current or ‘nonstandard’ forms” (xi)

“it is a synoptic book, a systematic capitalization of acquired knowledge” (xi)

“Within this [book], we introduce the central theme of identity as a weapon against the postmodern theme of difference, but it does not yet reach quantum indivisibility” (xi)⁷

“Here fractality anticipates the future use of quantum mechanics” (xii)

“Generalized fractality rather than textuality” (xii)⁸

“‘artificial philosophy,’ which anticipates a mode of nonstandard philosophy or of philosophy through the quantum model” (xii)

“Each work [in Laruelle’s oeuvre] has a near-absolute autonomy; each restarts the trajectory that assembles the various phases or brings the entire problematic into play” (xii)

Non-philosophy is better understood through “leitmotifs” than “discursive themes” (xii)

Non-philosophy has “a musical organization or tissue. Vertically, it is a spiraled thought, contrapuntal in spirit or with superposed themes … Horizontally, it is a melody that exposes and reexposes the themes. Its profound or desired model is musical … music is the placenta that has to give birth to non-philosophy” (xii-xiii)

Non-philosophy “is born of relatively precise obsessions, of repetition through a system of variations” (xii)

“A work is a retrospective self-knowledge, the permanence of solutions and of obsessions, a theoretical confession of faith” (xii-xiii)

“What does it mean to philosophize in a nonstandard way? … It always involves philosophy, but in new relations to science, to art, or to religion” (xiii)

“We touch on all these old relations, but their confusions would denature ur project” (xiii)

“the knowings [savoirs] that are our materials (empirical but also philosophical knowings, which we no longer distinguish as the philosophical tradition does)” (xiii)⁹

Laruelle’s “gnosis” does not operate through the “traditional relations founded on the hierarchical distinction between philosophy and some knowings, since philosophy now forms part of these empirical knowings” (xiii)¹⁰

“We are not specialists of the postures called science, art, and religion (we are not even specialists of philosophy, which, to begin with, is any posture whatsoever). But we assume them each time as materials or variable properties of an object = X to be determined” (xiii)¹¹

“we posit the identity of the variables of science and of philosophy, to be conjugated in view of this object = X” (xiii)¹²

“we also distinguish as quantum and generic the knowledge of this knowing … the generic object par excellence, which can only be humanity. Not the humanity of humanism, but the humanity of the last-instance” (xiii-xiv)¹³

Laruelle asks: “How can we gain or produce this … ‘gnostic’” knowledge? (xiv)

1. “the first operation … the first product, is specifically quantum in spirit and consists in reciprocally weakening the brute spontaneity of the two opponents and in transforming them into simple inventive, productive, or variable forces for a nonart, a nonethics … that will therefore be deprived of every principial [principielle] and dominant value” (xiv) ¹⁴

1. “the second product, the inverse of the first, deprives the concept as brute variable of its instinct for domination and does so by means of quantum algebra (the imaginary number). We thus transform the brute properties of the primitive reserve into variables (nonbrute this time, but quantum) within the chamber where the struggle between disciplines unfold” (xiv)¹⁵

“we prepare a wholly new—and this time generic—determination of the struggle, which will interiorize in its own way the quantum struggle that neutralized the opponents” (xiv)¹⁶

“The outcome is an equalization of variables and a quantum knowledge, probable rather than certain, a way of asserting quantum indetermination” (xiv)¹⁷

“For the moment, and at this stage [in quantum mechanics], the indetermination is neutral” (xiv)

This neutrality is a “reciprocal double interpretation,” a “symmetry, give or take an inversion” (xiv)

This inversion “implies noncommutativity itself for symmetrical instant” (xiv)¹⁸

Noncommutativity “implies the primacy of one or the other variable or of any product whatever” (xiv)

“Symmetry is still formal or indifferent and, in this sense, has to be broken” (xiv)¹⁹

As a consequence, “a new (this time ‘generic’) decision has to be grafted onto the quantum” (xiv)

“It will no longer be a decision of overdetermination or of mutual reinforcement in view of a superior knowing à la philosophers. It will instead be a subtraction by the real, i.e., by science, which ratifies quantum noncommutativity” (xiv)²⁰

“Either the quantum symmetry remains in itself as a virtual third term or instance of overhanging [surplomb] or the break in symmetry pertains to a nonquantum origin, even if it also affects the quantum” (xv)²¹

“It is a matter of actualizing the quantum and its still-formal indetermination” (xv)

“We cannot stop at this pure formalism of products. We have to tie them together, if only to find a real order between them” (xv)²²

“The instance that has to carry out this passage from the quantum to the generic and break the quantum’s still-formal symmetry—by realizing it concretely in the experience of the real—is what we call idempotence, a fundamental algebraic notion” (xv)

“Idempotence is what subsists of the One when it is affected by the imaginary number” (xv)²³

“In reality, we distinguish the double transcendence or the doublet of the philosophical variable and the absolute instance of the One-of-One, which is also specifically affected by the imaginary number of the quantum real. We introduce here the One that finishes the philosophical edifice. And so, there are three variables to be considered and not only two. The One must also be brought face to face with the imaginary number, it has to be affected by it as idempotence. But this number, at least insofar as it is multiplied or interpreted by philosophy as a simple variable, is also stripped of its philosophical sense in order to become a variable or a productive force, as we have already said. We understand by this that the productive forces are multiplied by one another and are so retroactively from the generic One of idempotence, an instance that is superior to transcendence itself. In one way or another, and in the more or less long term, all the strata of philosophy will be affected and reduced by the imaginary number or the real” (xv)²⁴

“The paradox is that the formalism, which continues to reside in the quantum, is realized and broken only if an instance intervenes that breaks the formal symmetry by relating it to human experience” (xv)²⁵

This will be a “general reduction of philosophy” to “the theory or image of humans,” but specifically “the generic humanity of the last-instance” (xv)²⁶

As such, non-philosophy “is also the unification of quantum theory and of Marxism” (xv)²⁷

“We have surpassed the thematic and even the theoretical level of Theory of Identities. This suggests the direction in which our future research will develop” (xvi)²⁸

“Our practice mobilized scientific as well as other models (quantum, Gödelism, Euclidism, photography, theology . . . ). These are forms of dual thought; they conjugate two objects or two postures. The one is not specifically philosophical, but the other is necessarily so, as if it were each time a matter of the unification of philosophy (which has become a simple empirical theory) with an empirical discipline elevated to the state of paradigms” (xvi)²⁹

“Nonphilosophical practice has no proper and well carved-out object; it seeks fluid models of the undulatory, the fluvial, and the oceanic rather than the topological. Or again: the river’s unhurried drift, the casualness of the great wave, the furor of the tsunami, and among them the hesitation of the drunken boat that transports us” (xvi)³⁰

“These models are purified of their positivity, universalized and idealized. They become Ideas or paradigms. Scientific, artistic, and religious theories in their multiplicity are our Ideas, our paradigms. This is not a dogmatic and terrorist purification of a discipline, which is transformed into a constraining model, but a double transformation, a purifying idealization, a realizing subtraction, and, in the middle, an idempotence of the drunken boat” (xvi)³¹

“musical metaphysics … is a microphysics” (xvi)

“Provided we understand it as a quantum superposition and not as an identification, nonphilosophy … is theory interpreted as music and music interpreted as theory … this is the most profound, perhaps the most absurd dream. A multiplication of music and theory by each other as variables, their noncommutativity, their fusion as generic human properties, the utopia of a musical philo-fiction for generic humanity” (xvi)³²

Preface to the French Edition (1992) ³³

“This book is a contribution to a few local problems that philosophy is currently examining, like ‘singularities’ and ‘fractals’” (xvii)

“It does not comment on texts; it forges new tools for thinking” (xvii)

“It does not question yet again its origin and its historiality, but asks how it can afford philosophy a future other than that of memory and nostalgia, commentary and deconstruction” (xvii)

“the philosopher is a hero, but he is a fatigued hero whose life is a life of survival and whose vigor is the vigor of sudden fits and starts. How can we make this discipline enter into the concert of the sciences?” (xvii)

“How can we finally satisfy this requirement of reality and rigor that philosophy has only ever been able to half-fulfill by its own means, but without reducing and weakening it in a positivist way?” (xvii)

“A scientific reform of the philosophical understanding—such is the program that four fundamental concepts punctuate: identities-of-the-last-instance, nonepistemological conception of science, generalized fractality and chaos, and artificial philosophy” (xvii)

“the problem of singularities and differences, partial objects and critical points, catastrophes and effects, disseminations and language games . . . All of these objects were directed against “logos,” “presence” or “representation,” “metaphysics” and so on … But from our point of view, they represent a half-solution, an unfinished attempt at the critique of metaphysics” (xviii)

“Why? Because they always associate with these singularities of various types an identity, but as at least equal to them or reversible with them. Identity thus falls back on the singularities, appropriates them, capitalizes or traditionalizes them, subordinates them to an indeterminate generality, and so forth. This solution entails their erasure or drowning” (xviii)³⁴

“At their origin, nevertheless, those objects were scientific and belonged to thermodynamics, differential calculus, the theory of sets and of critical points, the theory of catastrophes and of fractals . . . But their appropriation by philosophy (ontology, Kantianism, Nietzscheanism, structuralism) and their placement in the service of Being, Desire, and Language contributed to limiting their scope. Their philosophical generalization partially effaced them” (xviii)

Laruelle’s aim is to “restore to these singularities their positive and critical vigor” (xviii)

To do so, “he will reinscribe them in the content of science rather than of philosophy; but the content of a science that is itself rethought and described in its essence in a new way” (xviii)

“science also ‘thinks’ … it is a specific and original way of relating to the real, distinct from the philosophical way; [and] it can thus describe itself” (xviii)

“We call this conception epistemic and no longer epistemo-logical” (xviii)³⁵

“science and identity entertain the most intimate relations; but this identity no longer has its traditional essence (transcendence) nor its philosophical functions (totalization and closure)” (xviii)

This identity is “Identity of-the-last-instance” (xviii)

Identity of-the-last-instance is: identity “not alienated in that of which it is the Identity, in its effect, and correlatively that it autonomizes this effect without folding back on it or reappropriating it” (xviii)³⁶

“this Identity emancipates singularities that are at last radical, fractals that are no longer subjected to it” (xix)

This identity “authorizes the constitution of an autonomous order of singularities in the form of chaos” (xix)

This book “has a ‘fractal’ nature: each chapter reexposes in a distinct mode, at different ‘scales,’’ and under variations of objects the same structure of nonphilosophical inequality or irregularity” (xix)

The concept of “Identities-of-the-last-instance … serves here to describe the chaos-essence of the real and that of science” (xx)

The concept of Generalized Fractality” takes as a “theoretical signpost B. Mandelbrot’s works” and forms “a novel theoretical tool” (xx)³⁷

The concept of “Artificial Philosophy” is a “a search for conceptual formalisms and rules of theoretical treatment, of algorithms, which allow the use of philosophical statements in view of the production of synthetic statements” (xx-xxi)

Artificial philosophy asks the question: “Can a synthesis of philosophical statements be imagined that retains a philosophical or nonpositivist type of value, but that is realized by means of science?” (xx)³⁸

“Philosophy’s future … surely does not lie in its infinite commentaries or its interminable deconstructions, and even less in its naive, more or less positivist practice” (xxi)³⁹

“This research would like to have contributed … to the global reevaluation of the relations between science and philosophy, to the destruction of their unitary (epistemological or philosophical) theory, and to the establishment of a unified (scientific) theory of thought” (xxi)⁴⁰

Introduction: Science, Identity, Fractality ⁴¹

Commentator’s Note: Like Laruelle’s Biography of Ordinary Man, I also dropped off this book and haven’t returned.

Notes