John Ó Maoilearca (aka John Mullarkey) has just published a review of my book at the Los Angeles Review of Books. The review is quite thoughtful and generous. He uses the review to speak about Laruelle's significance today, and does so in clear and plain language, no easy task to be sure.
He also stresses the performative/active aspect of Laruelle's method, something that I've neglected to mention overtly. But it strikes me as absolutely crucial. Not a kind of praxis or process theory, non-philosophy nevertheless is a question of use.
His mention of art and sound reminds me of one of the most memorable quotations in Laruelle. It has to do with color and the way in which each individual mode of thought carries a unique color:
“We obtain such color via the superposition of philosophical styles. . . . The signature claims of a given philosophy have a certain wave-length with a determined propagation frequency or period, and this distinguishes them from the same claims made by other authors while still allowing one to be superpositioned on top of another. This is how we acquire a certain color of thought from out of the pile of individual concepts -- but not merely a new thought system or rigid doctrine, never just a Marxist color, a zen color, or a phenomenology color. Thought is a prism first, a spectrum of radiation. Only ‘later’ is it a system” (Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, 478).
It's a passing remark, apparently unconnected to the rest of his project. But I think it captures the non-standard method quite nicely. Laruelle is fascinated by waves, and the way in which waves superimpose on each other. The prism metaphor nicely describes his approach, particularly as it has changed in the most recent writings. Like a kind of synesthesia of pure reason, philosophy radiates its own particular color. Every philosophy contains a signature hue, a special “color of thought,” that differentiates it from others around it. The “use” of such color resides in the superposition of each color within the generic “spectrum of radiation.”