Something Banned - Brassier and Laruelle (Nihil Unbound - Chapter V, part II)

5.7 Determination in the last instance

The real qua being-nothing is no object, but unobjectifiable essence of the object. So ‘objectivity’ in essence is quite independent of the object, and it indexes what subsists independently of conditions of objectification such as those specified by transcendent subjectivity, Dasein, Life, the Ego, or otherwise (basically the whole repertoire of correlationist transcendental agents). Brassier esteems Laruelle as having defined conditions for thought under which it mimes the real foreclosed to objectification: what he calls determination-in-the-last-instance (henceforth DILI), in thought’s identity with the real. But Laruelle defines DILI as a causality, of the object indissociable with cognition as real, thereby suspending the dialectical mediation between transcendent subject and its object. In the end DILI stipulates that the object as much as the subject are within the cognitive determination as the real, where the distinction between thinking and being disappears, so that in the end “what is foreclosed to thought in the object coincides (albeit non-synthetically) to what is foreclosed to the object in thought.” [Pg: 139]. Having disposed of the auto-positional status of representation, thinking mobilizes the causality of a real that is without intuition; DILI renounces intellectual intuition as much as objectifying representation.

The object is not apprehended or reflected; thought coincides with what is not an object in the object itself, the unobjectifiable, unconstituted, being-nothing of the real. The identity-in-the-last instance obtains between thought and being:

being-foreclosed to the object in thought = being foreclosed to thought in the object.

being-nothing as the real

Thought is what remains of the object X as being-nothing, just as being-nothing is the remainder of thought in the object. This putative indiscernibility in the last instance Laruelle calls ‘unilateral duality’. The duality of thought and object is not unified synthetically; it is without unification and thus axiomatic. Because of this the duality remains non-conceptually defined, but immanently transparent. Being and thought are conterminous in-the-last-instance, as being-nothing. This presumably avoids the idealist reincorporation of the real to the ideal, or object to thought, insofar as the object is not given to thought, but the latter is in the end determined as mimicking itself with the subsisting unobjectifiable essence. The object thus cognizes-in-itself, the latter which occassions its own thought and own object at the same time, cause and patient, i.e. realism is possible insofar as the essence of the object coincides with cognitive mimicking of being-nothing as occassioned by the object. The subject is not transcendental, or constituted; the disjunction between thought and being is non transcendental. Cognition can be both its own subject and object insofar as both thought and object coincide with the real in the last instance, insofar as they remain non-correlationally determining themselves.

“The old problem of the possibility of knowledge is not resolved by invoking a transcendental subject or foundation but by the real’s being-foreclosed to knowledge, or by every object’s being-foreclosed to its own cognition; a being-foreclosed which does not render knowledge possible but rather determines it.” (Laruelle 2000: 48–9)

The object in this way ‘cognizes’ itself, since it is as much its own subject as its own object; qua the essential remainder of the real. Thought’s miming activity, the objectifiable essence coincide insofar as they are as being-foreclosed to the real. We can thereby see the intuitive appeal for Laruelle’s insight: it doesn’t provide an ontological architectonic, but axiomatically defines the subtractive determination which renders the object of thought immune to transcendental constitution, thereby unbinding the correlationist auto-positional mediation between an a priori tethered to symbolic/subjective determination (as consciousness, Dasein, Life, absolute subject, or any other correlationist variant). The disappearance of the a priori qua subversion of the empirical/formal domain is enforced by an absolute where thought and being coincide in the last instance: as real, thought is reduced to the real determination which prohibits the auto-positional correlationist logic of synthetic reflexivity.

But it should be noted that thus far Laruelle has not given an account of change, subjective life, or the determination of the non-essential objectifiable ‘something’ from which being-nothing is but the unobjectifiable essence. It only tells us thought effectuated the unobjectifiable identity-in-the-last instance between thought and being, being-foreclosed and the real, not how or why in ‘every other instance’ the object’s being-nothing is given: and it does not show yet how this gap can be filled without the necessity of thought’s decisional activity. When Brassier writes that 'thought effectuates identity in the last instance' what exactly precribes this effectuation outside the object? Why must thought mimick the unobjectifiable remainder? Thought's effectuation appears ambiguous between dualist apprehension and idealist constitution. It remains that the precise role of objectification is only uninterestingly excluded from the real, as being-foreclosed. This ‘foreclosure’ indexing being to the real ‘in the last instance’ drives Brassier and Laruelle’s account through something of a ‘monistic axiomatic’, where the ‘real’ is strategically assumed to constitute the remainder of both thought and being, an ontological minimalism in which every-thing, every occassion of the object as determined, can be safely precluded from reality insofar being and thought are in-the-last-instance determined, as an overarching nothingness or being’s foreclosure. Furthermore, this gesture is one in which the putative identity can finally exhume scientific realism insofar as philosophy’s old inventory of categories no longer serve to mediate reality in a constituting auto-positional manner; ontology’s deliverance of thought to the nothingness of the void or the real, levels the object and its cognition. Objective stratification does not supervene on philosophical correlational mediation, or any transcendental operator of auto-positional decision.

However, this makes the status of the axiomatic particularly difficult, since it must remain foreclosed necessarily to the philosophical decision; the non-decisional suspension which posits the axiomatic cannot be characterized as emerging from a subjective non-ontological decision or anything of the sort; since this would be to blatantly reintroduce a transcendental operator which Brassier finds in Badiou’s discursive figure of subjective intervention. But then what is the precise status of the axiomatic as such in Laruelle’s work? What exactly conditions axiomatic idealization once dispensed of the decision? Laruelle’s idea that the axiomatic is non-auto-positional by effecting the identity-in-the-last-instance of thought and being makes this ‘last-instance’ rather mysterious. For it cannot be in the last instance for thought alone, but also as being; the un-determination of the real finally operates like the inscription of a primitive disjunction between the ideal and the identity in the last-instance between thought/reality, such that thought is subtractive from the ideal. But what is the precise status of this non-ontological ‘ideality’ which operates througha 'minimum given of objectification' within the axiomatic? Doesn't this 'minimum of objectivity' merely reinstate something of a Heideggerean 'opening of being', with the additional difference that it is here the object itself which occassions its determination in thought as ideal cause. What governs the requirement to equate thought/being as being-foreclosed and which regulates the difference between immanence’s real causality and the occasional causality of objectification? Perhaps for this we need to see more clearly what ‘causal’ status this real is presumed to obtain within Laruelle’s system.

5.8 The thinking object

Laruelle fuses two causalities in his notion of delimitation in the last instance: immanence as real cause, and objectifying transcendence as occasional cause. Here the real shows itself as unilateralizing force: being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being, but the latter distinguishes itself from the former. In order for the real to determine the object in its identity to the real as immanent cause, it must be caused by objectification. That being-nothing is foreclosed to thought means the latter presupposes a minimum of objectification. Since this unilateralization is not reflexively determined (not transcendentally given to thought) it is also non-positional. But Brassier’s gloss here is unavoidable when he evokes unilateralization’s non-thetic effectuation. How exactly are we to understand thought's (non-interventional) effectuation, without making it a mediation between the object as occassional transcendent cause and the real as immanent cause identical to the object in the last instance?

The disjunctive unilateral duality ‘effectuates’ this disjunction by positing the ideality of the occasional objectifying cause as ultimately the one reified element in the whole sequence. So we move from the minimum of objectivity given to thought to posit the real immanent cause retroactively as separating the ideality of objectification from the being-nothing of the real, with which thought finally identifies itself, as well as the essence of the object. But of course this seems to dangerously approach something like a Lacanian variant of the correlational idealism, whereby objectification is the mere 'imaginary unity' given to thought, to which finally thought subtracts itself. For this ultimate indiscernibility between the object as occassional cause and its essential unobjectification is nonetheless not on the side of the real: thought effectuates the equation of being/thought as real, and the distinction between unobjectifiable immanence and objectifiable transcendence as a free-floating duality 'given' to thought from nothingness. For in the end it is only the real which is mimicked by thought; while being-nothing is the only essential determination of the object and of thought in its identity with the real. It is also unclear why the form of the object must assume the form of transcendence as occasional cause. We can stipulate this allows the retroactive disassociation of the object’s consistency with the immanent real cause in the last instance, but it is not clearly stated in this account. It is particularly unclear why or how is thought able to operate in order to obtain this objectification, unless one somehow reintroduces something akin to the imaginary in objectification. The unilateral movement of thought’s effectuation finally makes the object coincide with its own subject and agent, thought as real immanence, as the real cause.

“Thus determination in-the-last-instance requires objectifying transcendence even as it modifies it. And it modifies it by bequeathing the unilateralizing force of the last-instance to the object which has been transcendently given or objectified: instead of being objectively manifest as the correlate of an objectifying act, the object becomes the subject which determines its own objective manifestation; it is taken up in and as the agent of thinking which unilateralizes its own transcendent objectification. Determination-in-the-last-instance thus converts the object qua agent of the occasional cause into a subject qua patient of the real cause.” [Pg: 140]

It is the real’s equation with being-foreclosed which provides the object the capacity to forever distinguish itself from its own objectifying transcendence, even if it is occasionally ‘caused’ by it: it is in thought’s effectuation of the last-instance which gives unilateralization the capacity to relegate constitution by its thought. The object distinguishes itself from being-nothing, not the other way around. Since no synthetic operation is possible, the identity in the last instance and the difference triggered by the object is irreducible, since the object is simultaneously the disjunction between its real and objective (non) being, and the ultimate identity between being-nothing as being-foreclosed, it is indifferent to their difference. It turns thought into a thing as the unilateral identity of known object and its known subject and the difference between the object and its objectification. Non-reflexive effectuation is ideally occasioned by objectifying transcendence, but the retrospective determination in the last instance is not synthetically reflected bilaterally, it makes the last instance of the real coincide with the object, the object becomes the subject which determines its own manifestation as real immanent cause, “in and as agent of thinking”. The object is thus the stand-in for the cause in the last instance qua real.

So there’s two moments: the objectification of difference between object and being-nothing, and the unilateralizing identity of being-nothing with the essential being-foreclosed of the object. No ‘objectifying thought’ surveils this movement, and so it remains irreducible. This means that even though the unilateralizing movement begins as thought’s relational disassociation of the object from the real essence it mimics, this unbinding is not elevates on the side of the subject, but immanently attributed to the object as its own subject: thought can mimic this real cause, but cannot identify itself with objectification since it is without distinction. This is difficult, dense and provocative material which Brassier needs to explain more thoroughly.

5.9 Transcendental unbinding

Here things turn even more confusing. Let us stay close to Brassier, and hope paraphrasing leads into clarification. Unilateralization restrains dialectics structurally. Unilateral duality composes non-relation (the objective essence qua identity between being-foreclosed and being-nothing) and the relation of relation and non-relation: objectifying thought distinguishes between the identical aspect (real…) and differential objectified condition, identity and difference. So objectification is a one sided duality with the two moments: the side of objectification as difference split between the object as immanently caused identical to the real, and as the relation between itself and its objectifying condition. So instead of dialectically attributing the relation between relation-non-relation to reflexivity, unilateralization shows the non-relation of relation, and non-relation. The side of objectifying transcendence is thereby split in its separation from the identical immanent real cause and its objectification, which makes it subject, and so avoids its dialectical reinscription.

“Unlike every variety of reflection, whether transcendental or dialectical, determination-in-the-last-instance effectuates a unilateral duality with only one side – the side of objectifying transcendence. Since the latter is always two sided, i.e. dialectical, determination-in-the-last-instance effectively unilateralizes dialectics. Thus unilateralization cannot be dialectically re-inscribed.” [Pg: 142]

Here is where the problems really begin. Any soul capable of shedding light into this will be appreciated. Brassier claims that at the ‘deepest level’ of Laruelle’s analysis we get the separation between dyadic objectification (objectifiable/non-objectifiable) from already-manifest unilateral duality separating the objectification of this dyad from its unobjectifiable duality. The idea seems to be that this last ‘unobjectifiability’ is the banning of the transcendental synthesis, insofar as it forbids thinking the two sides of the dyad as given unitarily to reflection. The disjunction in the dyad is not only unilaterally given on the side of the differential of objectifying transcendence. More crucially still, this disjunction and the indifference of the real as thinking determines-in-the-last instance the real’s foreclosure to objectification as the being-foreclosed of the object. This is what Laruelle calls axiomatic ultimation which enacts the identity-in-the-last-instance between the object as transcendentally given occasion and the immanence as real cause without synthesizing them. But this means that DILI is the transcendental operation which renders objectification in the object and so difference ultimately indifferent to the real immanence, which is why the unilateralization comes after as a meta-transcendental level determining determination [Ibid]. So the transcendental determination of disjunctive ideal and real objectivity as in turn determined from the unilateral duality of unobjectifiable identity and objectifiable difference.

5.10 Absolute and relative autonomy

Let’s proceed to some technical clarifications. Unilateralization qua ‘determination of determination’ conjoins two causes: the immanent real cause as necessary but non-sufficient (necessary), and the ideal as supposedly sufficient cause (relative). The former is always-already given determining the conjunction, the latter is determinable: the objectification is given as occasional cause and is then determined by the real cause in-the-last-instance; a duality enacted ‘in and as’ thought. The real cause becomes effective for thought as occasioned by the ideal cause; the objectified singularity which turns its objectifiable identity into the real agent as being-foreclosed of the being-nothing which determined. This is why the self-sufficiency of the objectified occasional cause it remains relative to the real as being-nothing. The real which is already-given is retroactively posited as determining unilaterally the relativity of the transcendental objectification. The radical autonomous last instance allows thus the synthesis of object and objectification, before the unilateralization then determines the determination:

“Real immanence neither absorbs nor annihilates transcendence, it is not opposed to it, but is capable of ‘receiving’ it and of determining it as a relative autonomy. Real immanence is so radical – rather than absolute – that it does not reduce the transcendence of the world – whether philosophically or phenomenologically – it does not deny or limit it but on the contrary gives it – albeit in accordance with its own modality: as that being-given-without givenness of transcendence which, whilst remaining ‘absolute’ or auto-positional in its own register, acquires a relative autonomy with regard to the real.” (Laruelle 2000: 50–1)

Ontological objectifying transcendence is never autonomous ‘in-itself’, in accordance to the dyad of objectifiable transcendence / unobjectifiable immanence. Rather, it is given not relatively to a constituting subject, a polar reflexivity, but to the real immanent cause as already-given. It is thereby not autonomous, not self-positing, not given to any reflexive outside gaze, but readied for the unilateralizing dyadic split of identity and difference as relativized to the real. Transcendent givenness-without-givenness is not phenomenal, but is still given-to-thought as sufficient and yet relative to the immanence of the real, which causally determines it immanently, apart of all external subjective constitution, “an occasional but non-determining cause to be determined-in-the-last-instance by the real qua necessary but in-sufficient cause.” [Brassier 2007: 144] This putative identity between known object and the object of knowledge seems to reinstate the correlational coding insofar as it bilaterally determines through the real the identity of thought and being, real and ideal.

However, Brassier insists in that this move is not correlationally encoded in Laruelle’s work. The real’s foreclosure from objectifying synthesis is not given conceptually, it is ‘separate-without-separation’, writes Brassier. The real is not ‘unthinkable’ but its foreclosure implies its indiscernibility from objectification in-the-last-instance; it knows neither opposition nor negation. Objective opposition is finally the occasional cause which identifies in the last instance the foreclosure of being-nothing and the foreclosure of objectification in unilateralization. In the end, there is only one ‘thing’: objectifying transcendence as occasional cause: “Between’ the real’s foreclosure to objectification and determination-in-the-last-instance’s foreclosure to objectification there is neither identity nor difference but only an identity-of-the-last instance occasioned by objectification itself.” [Ibid: Pg 145] The real can be foreclosed insofar as it is occasioned by objectification’s synthetic unity of object and objectification which causes its own determination in unilateralization.

5.11 Non dialectical negativity

The real’s necessary autonomy empowers it to determine rather than cancel the alleged sufficiency of transcendence. The latter ultimately presupposes real immanence. Transcendence simultaneously defers and necessitates being-nothing, which allows transcendence to be given-without-givenness, without ‘receptor’. The real however can only assume this autonomy as occasioned in the last-instance by transcendence. So this last-instance of the real remains necessary but insufficient, and this requires the intervention of thought to untie objectification in turning itself into the thing. Via determination-in-the-last instance the negativity of the real’s sufficiency transmits to objectification to which it then becomes identical in its essential being-foreclosed to the real. So this last instance suspends the autonomy of synthesis but disjoins it by unilateralization so annulling the correlational bilaterality, and its givenness to reflexivity. This Brassier calls a ‘positive negativity’; a dismembering of the synthesis in the last instance, which is the real’s unilateralizing force.

And once the dichotomy between philosophy/non-philosophy is recast as the separation between correlationism/non-correlationism the real’s positive negativity can be deployed intra-philosophically without being encumbered to the banning of decision, this time understood only as outline for correlationism. This is what sustains Brassier’s commitment to deploy the non-contradictory coincidence of the real’s positivity with its negativity as non-dialectical negation, as it suspends and disjoins synthetic unity. Once the real assumes the power to unbind that which supplements its negativity as unobjectifiable, which in unilateralization allows in the last instance to become a positive power to effectuate a non-dialectical splitting:

“This is precisely what unilateralization means: not just the suspension of thetic reflexivity and the generation of new concepts which somehow ‘float’ above philosophical discourse, supposedly irreducible to the element from which they are generated (as Laruelle seems to assume), but rather a surgical intervention upon the body of transcendental synthesis, severing terms from relations, amputating reciprocity, and sharpening one-sidedness. Every synthesis is double-edged and hence reversible, but to unilateralize synthesis means to endow it with a capacity for achieving an irreversible, one-sided cut.” [Pg: 147]

In this sense Laruelle’s account seems to continue along the lines of subtractive ontology proposed by Badiou, offering a transcendental rather than ontological version via the decision to place being-nothing as real presupposition determining ontological discourse, avoiding the recourse to the signifier of the void since it is identified as being-nothing irrespective of discursive specificity. It can thereby dispense of all the equation of ontology with mathematics, since the real of being-nothing is not the void to which ontology is sutured, but the undetermined immanence intractable to discursive presentation (not even within the deployment of the inconsistently multiple). This way Laruelle also avoid having to ratify the ontological register with meta-ontological suture of the real to being-nothing, so philosophy can no longer mediate between discourse and world, science and reality. So to supplement Badiou, Brassier thinks the transcendental hypothesis in Laruelle: identity-in-the-last-instance between the foreclosure of being-nothing and the being-foreclosed of thought. Badiou stipulates being is nothing, from Laruelle we thereby draw that through determination-in-the-last-instance philosophy itself to nothing to effect the unilateralizing duality of being-nothing as being-foreclosed of being and thought: the two of the void is unilateralized as the zero level of being-nothing: “Non-dialectical negation is this ‘voiding’ and the logic of its effectuation is that of the unilateral duality, the irreversible cut.” [Pg: 148]

5.12 The identity of space-time

Laruelle’s singular breakthrough is to provide a formal alternative to Hegel’s dialectical logic. This logic allows us to think through the diachronicity of what Meillassoux designated as ‘absolute time’, where the latter risked a reintroduction of correlational synthesis by his invocation of intellectual intuition. Instead, Brassier proposes non-correlational objectivity is explainable in terms of the asymmetry of the unilateralizing duality. Laruelle challenges the correlationist critiques to metaphysical realism by proposing a transcendental realism where the object is a cut in ontological synthesis: the object forces thought or occasions thought to think it in unilateral duality where the object thinks itself through the subject. It is this power which is proper to diachronicity, expressing the identity of space-time in the identity of the object with thought, instead of the correlationist surrendering of space by duration of temporal ekstasis. So Brassier will develop the diachronic autonomy of the object without resort to such ontological temporalization of space, but solely rooted in the “voiding” of being-nothing itself. This will occupy us next.

Something Banned - Brassier and Laruelle (Nihil Unbound - Chapter V, part I)

Brassier esteems Francois Laruelle’s most notable accomplishment as being having rendered transcendental realism possible, while at the same time sidestepping the obstacles presented by the idealisms of inscription (Badiou) or intuition (Meillassoux). We can anticipate some results to be developed:

1) 1) A non-phenomenological conception of being-nothing.

2 2) A contestation with regards the characterization of ‘non-philosophy’.

Provisionally, Brassier seeks to demystify Laruelle’s extensive work by distancing it from deconstruction and obscurantism. With regards to the former, Laruelle pairs the Heideggerean/Derridean characterization of metaphysics as ontotheology into a more nebulous network which defines philosophy as ‘decision’, and The One within a series of names to determine and suspend philosophy. As for accusations of obscurantism, Brassier recognizes how easily Laruelle’s work lends itself to be interpreted as a messy and extravagant hodgepodge of the worst aspect of Derrida and Deleuze: the former’s sterile preoccupation with declaring itself outside metaphysics and the latter’s constructivist pomposity with respect to his excesses in language.

But even if Brassier reckons that Derrida and Deleuze remain pivotal in order to understand Laruelle’s work, insofar as the latter begins its conceptual deployment from a negation of philosophy, there is a distinctive philosophical import in his work. Specifically, in spite of his prescription to renounce philosophical ‘decision’, he proposes to find ‘equilibrium’ between (transcendental) critique and (metaphysical) construction. This is envisaged in Laruelle’s work in the prospect of a philosophical interpretation of non-philosophy. And Brassier’s philosophical interpretation will consist in denying that Laruelle achieves a suspension of non-philosophy, but rather “uncovered a non-dialectical logic of philosophical negation: viz., unilateralization.” [Pg: 120]

Brassier indicates six texts as providing the source for his reading of Laruelle, which we here list for the interested: The Philosophies of Difference (1986), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (1989a), ‘The Transcendental Method’ (1989b), The Principles of Non-Philosophy (1996), Introduction to Non-Marxism (2000a), and ‘What Can Non-Philosophy Do?’ (2003).

5.2 The essence of philosophy

Non-philosophy is not anti-philosophy; it operates as an independent locus of theoretical production which studies philosophy as its own matter. For this, non-philosophy theorizes philosophical operations and opens unforeseen possibilities within it. For this, non-philosophy demands a suspension from the spontaneous deliverance to traditional problems, questions, methods and terminology implied by the philosophical practice; in order to open a domain inaccessible/irreducible to philosophical thought or, as he calls it, ‘decision’.

So non-philosophy is emphasized in its potentially emancipatory aspect, and opposed to philosophical repetition. Brassier’s own contention is that Laruelle conflates his criticism of certain kinds of philosophy as being a characterization of philosophy tout court, one which is underwritten by his insistence to find a trans-historical constant in philosophy which determines its ‘identity’. This vocation he presumably inherits from Heidegger’s attempts to provide a description of Western philosophy in the form of a historical critique of metaphysics, in which the history of the forgetting of the question of being was articulated.

Brassier describes this general motif, in Heidegger’s own project, as perhaps characterized by how certain interpretation / mode of being finally occludes others: substantial/representational Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) occludes pre-theoretical Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) just as metaphysics of presence occludes being’s call in the open. So although Laruelle rejects this Heideggerean Destruktion or Derrida´s appropriation of deconstruction, as characteristic of philosophical ‘decision’, he maintains the notion that an overarching structural characterization of philosophy may be given. And he does this without attempting to provide a discursive thread by engaging the entire history of philosophy, but rather he does so in direct notional exchange with Heideggerean and Derridean thought. Furthermore, Laruelle conflates deconstruction to the ultimate result of the Greek epochal determinations; but unlike Heidegger’s attempt to determine these departing from the question of the Greek ‘essence’ which historically unfolds in its multiple periodizations (traceable in his exhaustive textual exegesis of the history of philosophy which forms his Seinsgeschichte) he simply assigns the latter to the constraints of the primitive philosophical ‘decision’. As should be noted, Brassier underlines that this move simply ‘evades evades the vexed issue of the relation between non-philosophy and its own determinate historical preconditions.” [Pg: 122] We must see, then, what are the specific parameters which constitute, according to Laruelle, the philosophical decision.

Behind every attempt to provide a determination of philosophy as a whole, Brassier diagnoses the necessity to subsume the contingency intrinsic to the historical ruptures in philosophical thought by appeals to some ‘absolute’ underlying its historical variations. In the case of Laruelle, this absolute comes in the way of ‘radical immanence’, and a characterization of philosophy in conformity to it is properly outside philosophical speculation. Indeed, we can propose here that Laruelle seems to merely repeat the typical philosophical gesture of converting a presumed philosophical a priori to the empirical conditions for a determination of philosophy as a whole: just like metaphysics becomes the object of transcendental philosophy’s critique in Kant, and the latter becomes itself integrated into the network of ‘philosophy’ which precludes thinking proper in Heidegger. But Brassier contends that we can relegate the attempts to determine the essence of philosophy and rescue from Laruelle’s thought the suspension of a specific philosophical argumentative strategy and set of problems. We can thereby anticipate that the consequences of this suspension can be well taken even if ‘radical immanence’ is itself subject for philosophical critique.

5.3 Philosophical decision as transcendental deduction

For Laruelle, philosophical decision becomes articulated around three terms: immanence, transcendence, and the transcendental. In this triad, immanence occurs twice. First, have the giveness of an immanent empirical datum given through an a priori transcendent factum. Second, we need an immanent transcendence in order to unify the two as enveloping the entirety of ‘experience. It is thus simultaneously the empirical support for the transcendent and the guarantor for the transcendental synthesis of the two. The following diagram straightforwardly presents these relations:

Laruelle marks the presence in philosophy of this general structure ever since Kant’s ‘transcendental deduction’; and claims that it underlies all variance in specific ontological/epistemological commitments. In ‘The Transcendental Method’ he proceeds to identify three structural moments proper to the philosophical decision:

1) An analytic inventory of the a priori - Based on empirical reality/experience in order to seek for their conditions of instantiation. For Kant these were the forms of time and space and the deduction of the categories for the forms of judgment, just as for Heidegger this was the ecstasies of temporal individuation in which Dasein’s temporal specificity was predetermined.

2) Unification of the categorical a-priori in the universal a priori – Effectuating the unification of all different regional a priori conditions to the singular transcendental a priori which articulates experience as a whole. This is the moment of Transcendental Immanence, which in Kant appears in the Transcendental Unity of Apperception. Through this unifying function it is possible to knit the a priori to the entirety of experience, and not merely relatively to some particular region/domain of experience. Laruelle insists in that this commits the philosopher into embracing some form of transcendent entity: like the Husserlian Ego or Kant’s ‘I think’. These compromises the purported absolute unconditioned nature of the transcendental immanence insofar as it remains bonded to a reified transcendent entity.

3) The unifying transcendence which exhibits the immanent co-dependence of the empirical and the a priori in its constitutive relation to experience – Since the immanent unity of the a priori and the empirical in experience conditions the a priori itself, the underlying immanence of the conditioned and conditioned are co-dependent: the unity of possible experience in Kant, or being-in-the-world as ‘care’ in Heidegger. This transcendental synthesis thus finally exhibits the bilateral unity of experience in the structural integrity of empirical and a priori.

Brassier notes the underlying Heideggerean resonance whereby Laruelle reverts the multitude of transcendent a prioris to empirical immanence via the immanence of the primal indivisible synthetic unity, thereby delimiting the intrinsic conditions of transcendental speculation to the limits of experience itself. This thus simultaneously determines the specificity of the empirical according to the a priori, but the former’s (conditioned) deduction folds back to limit the latter’s (condition) real possibility:

“Through deduction, the movement from the metaphysically transcendent categorial manifold to the transcendental unity which makes that a priori manifold possible is turned back towards empirical experience in the form of a transcendental synthesis binding the a priori to the a posteriori, the logical syntax of the ideal to the contingent empirical congruencies of the real. In this way, deduction simultaneously circumscribes the empirical insofar as it is concerned with its a priori condition, and delimits the transcendent by folding the a priori back within the bounds of empirical sense and forbidding metaphysical attempts to loosen it from its moorings as defined according to the limits of possible experience.” [Pg: 125]

Laruelle reckons the decisive import of this ‘bilaterality’ in the synthetic a priori, without thereby ascribing to its reification in pure apperception, detecting in the dyadic poles of mutual presupposition (ideal and real, logos and physis…) a characteristic facet of philosophical decision. It is the force of this de-objectifying, pre-subjective priority of ‘unity-in-difference’ which is the consummating moment of philosophical decision, and which gives the figure of ‘the One’ [Ibid]:

“The telos of the transcendental is fulfilled by deduction and this constitutes the real: not in any empirical or contingent sense, but in the superior or specifically philosophical sense which is that of the concrete synthetic unity of the empirically real and of a priori or ideal possibility.” (Laruelle 1989b: 697)

We can now understand what Laruelle means when he says that decision co-constitutes the real: it is the simultaneous delimitation of the empirical by the a priori and of the latter by the former in the transcendental synthesis which exhibits their mutual implication. This necessarily unified decision is thus isomorphic to the unity of experience, simultaneously de-subjectifying the operation (since it is constrained by the empirical real) as de-objectifying it (since it is constrained by the transcendental conditions of instantiation). It is only in the decision to affirm the opposite poles of the immanent empirical real as possibility with the immanent transcendental conditions within the differentiating unity as the One-of-the-dyad and its circular, doubling structure. Here, the philosopher inscribes his own activity in the ambiguous combinatory of the ontic-empirical and ontological-transcendental. The philosophical decision can thus be described within the abovementioned tripartite structure:

We can explain the decisional structure as follows:

1) Empirical event – The decision always situates itself within the structure to be explained: so the structure of experience synthesized transcendentally/ontologically includes its own positing within the field of empirical facts which obeys to the structure it explains. However, in order to think of itself as empirical event, it also thinks itself as conditioned by structure which opens the possibility. For example in Heidegger, the possibility of fundamental ontology is given within the structure of fundamental ontology itself as a thought from being’s opening.

2) Thought of being as event – Being’s opening is thought as the form of 'the event' under which the decision is situated. It sees itself thus conditioned by being’s evental opening. In Heidegger, however, given by being’s opening givenness as Dasein’s own being-towards-death as preconditioning the care of beings and the actual empirical existence of fundamental ontology qua empirical event in the world.

3) Being of thought as event of being – Finally it is thought itself which is correlate to the event of being, in which the empirical ‘situatedness’ of the decision is thus concomitant to the decision to being’s opening given synthetically as also being of thought. Finally, it is Dasein’s immersion in the world thrown-ahead-of-itself towards its own past in the threefold temporal esctasis which unifies fundamental ontology’s giveness as datum and as factum for the transcendental opening to beings: thought reveals itself both as the mutual implication between conditioning and condition. As a radicalization of Kantian finitude it shows ontic specificity as determining also the metaphysical condition qua the exposure to being in the open from Dasein’s outmost possibility (for death).

In a sense Laruelle credits Heidegger for giving the basic schema for philosophical decision, but simultaneously requires the additional shift to non-philosophy as a suspension of decision altogether. This might seem provisionally again not dissimilar from the later Heidegger’s call for a posture of Gelassenheit, however. One should anticipate that for Laruelle, however, non-philosophical suspension of the decision is rather active, and not the simple negative suspension from philosophy. For this, he proposes to radicalize Heidegger’s thought of Dasein’s (or Ereignis) transcendent non-objectifiable being as not of ontico-ontological transcendence in thought’s delivery to the event of being, but of a radical, non-ontological, unobjectifiable immanence. Brassier credits this move to Michel Henry’s phenomenological critique of Heidegger, allowing the delimitation of philosophy tout court as involving the necessity of transcendence. This way the tripartite structure of decision is made to supervene on unobjectifiable immanence which for Laruelle is kernel of ‘the real’.

5.4 Naming the real

Laruelle identifies radical immanence with man, in spite of all his precautions, as that which remains forever foreclosed to philosophy. He thereby subscribes to the essence of man in the One as nothing-but-subject or absolute-as-subject as finitude [Laruelle 1985: 15]. This reveals his adherence to post-Kantian delimitation of man as finite and the Heideggerean radicalization ‘pathos of finitude’, assigning the One unilaterally on the side of the subject and not of the object (not to mention this rather obscure reference to the term ‘essence’ which would seem to fall precisely within the motifs of philosophical decision).

According to Brassier, this betrays Laruelle’s own axiomatic. For radical immanence is presumably not given within the decisional synthesis, but outside of it as a non-constituted real, which should lie outside the event being just as much as outside its transcendent correlate as event of thought. The real is thus axiomatically defined as a presupposition, already constituted, given prior to any operation of transcendental synthesis which would require thought’s positing as the sway of beings in the open. Brassier then offers six definitions adapted from Laruelle’s Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, which we cite here in full [Pg: 128]:

“1) The real is the phenomenon-in-itself, the phenomenon as already given or given-without-givenness, rather than constituted as given via the transcendental synthesis of empirical and a priori, given and givenness.

2) The real is the phenomenon as already-manifest or manifest-without manifestation, the phenomenon-without-phenomenality, rather than the phenomenon which is posited and presupposed as manifest in accordance with the transcendental synthesis of manifest and manifestation.

3) The real is that in and through which we have been already-gripped rather than any originary factum or datum by which we suppose ourselves to be gripped.

4) The real is already-acquired prior to all cognitive or intuitive acquisition, rather than that which is merely posited and presupposed as acquired through the a priori forms of cognition or intuition.

5) The real is already-inherent prior to all the substantialist forcings of inherence, conditioning all those supposedly inherent models of identity, be they analytic, synthetic, or differential.

6) The real is already-undivided rather than the transcendent unity which is posited and presupposed as undivided and deployed in order to effect the transcendental synthesis of the empirical and the metaphysical. (Laruelle 1989a: 41–5)”

We should understand the words ‘already’ and ‘without’ as indexing the axiomatic character of the real qua immanent background as autonomous, necessary and unconditioned. To move away from the circularity of the decision’s trajectory from the empirical to the transcendental and back, one must refuse the necessity of the decisional parameters, and so for thought to have always been outside decision. But Brassier reminds us that this idea of ‘standing outside the circle’ through the invocation of non-conceptual alterity is symptomatic in all post-Critical philosophy: from Heidegger (thinking, not philosophy or metaphysics), to Adorno (thought’s wager against metaphysical instrumental reason), to Levinas (the absolutely Other); all of them share the aspiration by locating some radical non-conceptual transcendence outside philosophy.

However, as we saw in Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, it is the very assumption that reality must be given as the transcendental synthesis of thought with its object that becomes a naïve and obstinate impediment for realism, which renders the former a perpetual variant of idealism. It is transcendental synthesis as locus for the real’s unity-in-difference which Laruelle seeks to call into question. It thus situates the real outside empirical giveness or transcendental constitution, fixing radical immanence prefiguring axiomatically as the unconditioned ‘real’ which stands outside the circular movement of transcendental synthesis, ‘always already’ outside of it. It places a determined before all thought of conditions of determination, a hard kernel not prone to the circularity of appropriation by the dyad of thought/being and thus immune to determination, immaterial, and so without ontological specification.

“Determination is not an auto-positional act, a Kantian-Critical operation involving the primacy of determination over the determinate […] It is the determinate, the real as matter-without-determination, which effects the determination. If radical immanence has the character of the given, it is not in any specifically empirical sense – as is the case with Bestand [standing reserve]. Rather, it entails the primacy of the given over givenness, of the determined over determination.” (Laruelle 2000a: 45)

This undetermined, undivided real is the precondition for all binding, thereby all decision, subsisting outside all transcendental synthesis, phenomenological notion of givenness or operator for manifestation, finally “…a non synthetic disjunction between the real and its intellection”, since no description subsumes it or gives it to bonding or to ‘being’s’ transcendence. There is room for metaphysical positing of its empirical given, or the latter’s presupposition of its metaphysical condition through the synthesis of condition and conditioned: it is “non auto-positional” or as auto-donation.

5.5 Ventriloquizing Philosophy

For Laruelle, it is not actually Heidegger, but Hegel who provides the blueprint for philosophical auto-positing: its self sufficiency of a cogito bloated to the size of the world, thought as the limit of all philosophy [Laruelle 2004: 30]. The ‘I think’ formalizes the world, positioning everything inside the possibilities of philosophical speculation. Philosophy becomes tantamount to the totalization of auto-affecting thought, while the thought of the identity of this movement of totalization which is the concern of non-philosophy proper, since it is the philosophical essence to be auto-positional.

But Brassier notes that this points to Laruelle’s non-philosophical germ as a negative determination of philosophical decision as such, becoming incapable to capture the immense specificity of themes and formations which transpire within philosophy, due to non-philosophy’s almost pristine generality. So the non-philosophical treatment of philosophical themes seems lacking in detail and cursory in comparison to even orthodox philosophy. Everything seems to support the refining of non-philosophy while philosophy seems relegated to a mere tool dealt with as mere support material. Laruelle has no option but to fix uniformly all philosophical conceptualization to the rubric of the essential decision, to yield a set of all-too formulaic non-philosophical theses. But these appear so uniform that their putative differences are made to disappear and what is drawn from them cannot but appear as limited.

So we are in a position to ask: why try to characterize philosophical essence; where Brassier proposes to acknowledge philosophy in its varied material formations, and it is left for Heidegger and the like to inflate philosophy by way of a purported deployment of its inner-truth in the epochal unfolding of its latent essence. In the end, clinging to this idea of a characterization of philosophy as a whole in its auto-affecting seems to reinstate the very bloated Hegelian gesture by totalizing philosophy as the aspiration to totalize. So Laruelle seems to face the disquieting disjunction between asserting all philosophers are Hegelians or relegate those outside this trajectory (Hume, Churchland…) outside philosophy altogether, in which case description of philosophical decision starts to seem more like a characterization of correlationism than of philosophy tout court. Brassier thus writes: “It then becomes possible to re-interpret the term ‘decision’ in Laruelle’s work as a synonym for transcendental synthesis, or more generally, as a cipher for correlationism. By the same token, Laruelle’s account of decision can be seen to provide us with something like correlationism’s genetic code.” [Pg: 134]. This way one can rewrite Laruelle’s contribution as having provided a framework for a philosophical thought not constraint by intellectual intuition or correlationist doxas, rather than effecting non-philosophy as such. This way Brassier proposes to read Laruelle as making possible to think of realism and an answer to Hegelianism in all its forms, by deploying a non-dialectical logic of negation rather than a sterilization of philosophy as a whole.

5.6 The evacuation of the real

Kant delimits metaphysics making reason depend on sensibility; Laruelle makes philosophical decision and with it the autonomy of ontological transcendence or ‘being’ dependent upon unobjectifiable immanence. Unlike Heidegger, who in Laruelle’s reading identifies Dasein’s finite transcendence (facticity) and ‘mineness’ (Jameinigkeit) as the unobjectifiable determinant of objectification in the immanence of the human which auto-affects, Laruelle’s real supported by radical immanence remains non-ontological. He thereby seeks to exorcise the immanent from all phenomenological residues. In Henry’s own proposal, it is precisely this phenomenological adherence to a separation between pathos and concept in passive auto-affection that he was incapable of proving the necessity for the externalization in intentional consciousness or ekstatic being-in-the-world. Laruelle notices Henry introduces the necessity for conceptual in thought, which is what he strived to defer. Here Henry faces two equally problematic possibilities [Pg: 136]:

1) Conceptual transcendence is external to pathic immanence – In which case the autonomy of transcendence becomes determined by the necessity to repulse away as extraneous conceptuality, rendering the latter both presupposed but unintelligible.

2) Pathic immanence preconditions conceptual thought – Then the disjunction between unobjectifiable pathos and objectifying thought is reversible in a transcendental function, as are the disjunctions between real-ideal, immanence-transcendence.

To avoid the synthetic idealization of immanence he de-phenomenologizes it and renders it operationally in axiomatic abstraction. Thereby radical immanence in the human is devoid of essence, its real identity inconsists and resists all appropriation in the symbol. Mistaking the symbol for the real is the deviation of all idealism in philosophy: immanence in itself as the indivisible and hence absolutely simple. Laruelle is here striking:

“Once it has been rigorously defined rather than given over to the realm of unitary, metaphysical or anthropological generality; once it has been axiomatically determined rather than presupposed through vague theses or statements, what we are calling ‘man’ as identity is so in-consistent, so devoid of essence as to constitute a hole in nothingness itself, not just in being. […] Real identity is impoverished, impoverished to an extent that is unimaginable for philosophy, but it is not impoverished because all alterity has been abstracted from it or because it has been stripped bare through a process of alienation. It is indeed articulated through a symbol, and its effects are in turn articulated through a play of symbols, but to confuse the real with its symbol is precisely the mistake of theoreticist idealism and the root of all philosophical illusion. […] The expression ‘One-in-One’ or ‘vision-in-One’ indicates the absence of any operation that would define the latter; the fact that it is not inscribed within an operational space or more powerful structure; its immanence in itself rather than to anything else; its naked simplicity as never either exceeding or lacking, because it is the only measure required, but one that is never a self-measurement, one that measures nothing so long as there is nothing to measure.” (Laruelle 2003: 175–6)

But for Brassier, identifying the real with the human expressly re-ontologizes it; since this immanence cannot be equated with myself unless I repeat the Heideggerean move of identifying Dasein as ‘in each case mine’. So to privilege the name-of-man over any other nomination effects the equivocation of the real with the symbol and imposes a ‘rigid designator’ to fix in a decisional manner the essence or locus of the real. It is impossible to reconcile the being-human of the real with its inconsistency, since any pre-ontological understanding of the human is to derive back to the Heideggerean hermeneutics of Dasein. Of course, here we should point that Brassier carelessly introduces the term understanding where in all likelihood Laruelle would simply point to the indiscernibility of the immanent, indeterminate real with the human: it is not given to the understanding in any pre-theoretical form as the realm of Zuhandenheit is, for example, given to Dasein’s transcendence; nor does it appear within the constraints of Dasein’s finite transcendence. Nevertheless, to equate the human with the real puts Laruelle in the difficult position of having to explain its ‘un-determination’ as it repels the compulsion of philosophical decision, in such a way that seems to repeat Henry’s irreconcilable partition of pathic immanence and conceptuality, or as Brassier dubs ‘his own pathetic egology’. Worse still, it risks a transcendental individualism where decision is finally a human determination of philosophy as a whole, which reeks all too much of Fichtean solipsism.

Rather, the real needs to be thought of as the being-nothing which Badiou sought. Less than nothing, , the real is the degree-zero of being, without even the minimal consistency generated within ontological presentation for Badiou, which severs the presentation of inconsistency from the consistency of world, and demands the metaontological intervention of thought, reinstating the idealism it sought to ward off. Brassier thus concludes the section with these powerful words:

“The real is not the negation of being, since this would be to re-constitute it in opposition to something, but rather its degree-zero. What is given ‘without-givenness’, or ‘non-auto-decisionally’, suspending the entwinement of givenness and given, neither withdraws from presence nor subtracts itself from presentation; for it is precisely in doing so that it becomes transcendently co-constituted by the relation to its own contrary. Rather, it is immanently given as ‘being-nothing’.” [Pg: 138]