I'm pleased to announce the publication of a new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital. My position is a bit idiosyncratic. Rather than offering a synopsis or critical annotation of Laruelle's work, the book aims to collide Laruelle's non-standard method with the concept of digitality. I say concept of digitality because the book does not discuss the Web, computers, video games, or even binary numbers. Instead the book addresses a general principle that subtends and facilitates all of these kinds of technologies.

I define digitality as a process of distinction. Thus I see an immediate resemblance with Laruelle's notion of the Philosophical Decision. Philosophy and digitality both require a fundamental act in which something is divided into two. For example metaphysics requires the notion of a division between essences and instances. And on a computer chip data is modeled and processed by means of voltage differentials. This fundamental action is important: distinction, division, decision, or discretization. Not so much the proverbial “zero and one” of computer culture, I'm focused here on “one and two,” or what it means to move from one to two. Continue reading →

(This is the second of two excerpts from my talk at “Superpositions--A Symposium on Laruelle and the Humanities” hosted at the Center for Transformative Media at the New School. Read part one.)

In preparing for this conference, I was reminded of the many different kinds of undertakings represented here and elsewhere. With his background in philosophy and religious studies, Anthony Paul Smith has produced a treatise on a non-standard theory of nature and ecology. And I am just finishing Katerina Kolozova's book Cut of the Real on Laruelle and poststructuralist feminism, which I find to be an incredibly original and courageous undertaking, not least because she's taking on some of the most fundamental assumptions of the entire field of feminist theory! Continue reading →

(This is the first of two excerpts from my talk at “Superpositions--A Symposium on Laruelle and the Humanities” hosted at the Center for Transformative Media at the New School. Read part two.)

Newcomers to Laruelle often find his work challenging. There is little familiar in Laruelle to serve as anchor, particularly for those of us reared on marxism, poststructuralism, or cultural studies. Laruelle is no sixty-eight radical like Guy Debord or Michel Foucault. He is not a public intellectual cast from the Sartrean mold like Alain Badiou. He does not practice phenomenology or dialectics, and he has little sympathy for today's reigning Hegelianism championed by the likes of Slavoj Žižek, Catherine Malabou, or Judith Butler. His is not a familiar way of thinking. In fact it is a genuinely “strange” one, or as Anthony Paul Smith has called it, a stranger thought.

Laruelle gives a basic instruction, one that reveals the distinction between philosophy and theory--or “science,” as Laruelle, Althusser and others often prefer to called it. His instruction is that the best response to philosophy is not more philosophy. The best response to philosophy is to stop doing it. Continue reading →

We live in an age of heterogenous anarchism. Contingency is king. Fluidity and flux win over solidity and stasis. Becoming has replaced being. Rhizomes are better than trees. To be political today, one must laud horizontality. Anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism are the order of the day. Call it “vulgar '68-ism.” The principles of social upheaval, so associated with the new social movements in and around 1968, have succeed in becoming the very bedrock of society at the new millennium.

But there's a flaw in this narrative, or at least a part of the story that strategically remains untold. The “reticular fallacy” can be broken down into two key assumptions. The first is an assumption about the nature of sovereignty and power. The second is an assumption about history and historical change. Consider them both in turn. Continue reading →

Now that blogging is dead, seems like a good time to start a blog! I've given myself a few ground rules..

Mini-essays -- Longer-form writing will be the focus here. Aside from the occasional acts of shameless self-promotion, this space will be primarily devoted to mini essays and other kinds of ideas and prose sketches.

No comments -- Short-form discussion is great. But this blog will be for slightly longer pieces. If you want to respond in your own venue, please do!

No flame wars -- I'm not one to shy away from spirited debate, but flame wars are stupid. I'll try to keep the arguments substantive, while ignoring trolls and flamebaiters.

Sunset clause -- Don't you hate it when things go on too long? This blog will be summarily deleted after a certain amount of time. Six months, a year, who knows.