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 Katerina Kolozova

Examining the “principle of

philosophical sufficiency”
Of ontology and its philosophical limitations


1. Introduction
According to François Laruelle’s non-­standard philosophy or non-­philosophy,
what constitutes the principle of philosophical sufficiency is its autoreferentiality
which does not consist only in philosophy dealing with itself but also, at a more
fundamental level, thought dealing with itself in a particular way, one specific of
philosophy. The particularity of thought’s autoreferentiality in question is what
determines in the last instance all philosophy; and by “all philosophy” I mean a
radicalized concept of philosophy, one “impoverished of philosophical sufficiency”
(Laruelle) or reduced to its identity in the last instance, rather than a generaliza-
tion. The determination and the identity of the last instance of philosophy consist
in the practice and the concept of amphibology of thought and the real amount-
ing—“to truth.” Truth in the philosophical sense is not merely exactness, a notion
and value of critical relevance for the sciences, but rather a gesture of intervention
into the domain of the real whereby thought and the real constitute an amphi-
bology of a particular kind. The real imbued with truth is more real than the “mere
real,” it is the real perfected with sense, purpose, it is the real endowed with raison
d’être. The senseless or purposeless real is hardly any real to philosophy. The real
and truth constitute a unity whereby the latter supersedes the former and in that
very gesture they form a dual entity that is the cornerstone of all philosophy—the
being, or tò ón in Greek. Only by way of being an ontology, philosophy remains en-
trapped in its circularity saturated with “the principle of philosophical sufficiency”
(Laruelle, Philosophy and Non-­Philosophy).1
Laruelle and Marx propose two different ways of braking away from philosophy’s
self-­circumscription and, in spite of the differences, both proposals are founded
upon the same epistemic principle—treating philosophy scientifically or, rather,
creating a science of it and with the help of its conceptual material. They both argue
that this can be done only by way of adopting a perspective that is both less anthro-
pomorphic and less anthropocentric, albeit by using different vocabularies. By way
of adopting a “third party’s” (Marx) perspective,2 one can establish an objective yet

182
neither perfect nor sub specie aeternitatis situated glance on human reality. This
would be a science of humanity that would not be humanist, and perhaps not even
posthumanist as it will be radically divorced from philosophy which is, in its turn,
yet another variant of humanism. “Species being of humanity” (Marx) will thereby
become a mere object among other objects of study. In order to accomplish such
positioning of thought, one ought to abandon subjectivity centered philosophy as
yet another form of anthropocentrism and a purely structural one.

2. The “ case ” against ontology:

Marx, Laruelle and Marxist feminist philosophy
Before I lay out the argument of this section of the article, let me clarify some of
the terminology used here, beginning with the end of the title: by feminist Marxist
philosophy, I do not mean only commentators of Marx but feminist philosophers
that are inspired by Marx’s texts and employ tenets of his theory in novel ways that
resonate with other theoretical legacies or simply create something as eclectic and
as original as Irigaray’s fusion of Freud and Marx. Regarding “ontology,” following
Laruelle, I must state it is a concept that is possible inside philosophy only—the
concept of tò ón would be meaningless to a science or to a different tradition ap-
proximate to that of philosophy.
“The Being” a mixture or an amphibology of an effect of cognition (“truth”) and
the real, i.e., the indifferent out-­there the act of cognition aspires to mime, relay,
“code,” in other words—understand and control. According to Laruelle, a scientific
posture of thought aligns with the syntactic model the radical dyad of the instances
of thought and the real constitutes: it affirms to the impossibility to grasp “the real
in itself,” it renounces to any pretension to grasp the essence of an entity out-­there,
it permits the possibility there is more than one essence or more than one defi-
nition of a thing. I am summarizing an argument that stretches from Laruelle’s
Philosophy and Non-­Philosophy to his Theory of Identities and Introduction to Non-­
Marxism, to mention few among many of his works that tackle this problem. The
following quote encapsulates the said (and also what will follow in the forthcoming
pages of this paper):

We are abandoning the traditional ambitions of philosophy—they are but hal-

lucinations to us—and vindicating finitude, precisely the “radicality” or “fini-
tude” of scientific posture. (Laruelle, Philosophie 27; my translation)

In short, the scientific posture of thought simultaneously admits the real’s radical
foreclosure but also seeks to relate it, or relate to it, or relay it—produce knowledge
of it, providing certain understanding of it as well as enabling control and manipu-
lation too. François Laruelle, quite similarly to Quentin Meillassoux, argues that the

Examining 183
real is radically foreclosed but that thought ought to submit to it as the sole source
of its legitimation. This relation (or rather correlation) to the real is called unilateral
in Laruelle, whereas in Meillassoux correlation is used in the opposite sense and it
is what he subjects to his critique. Thus, Laruelle’e critique of amphibology is com-
parable to Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism. In order to surpass this self-­
imposed entrapment of philosophy, Laruelle proposes abandonment of the first and
grounding premise of philosophy which is also the foundation of ontology. In short,
he proposes abandoning ontology as it has no meaning outside of philosophy.

The most noteworthy of these foundations is what we call “thought of the

One” (in order to distinguish it from the “thought of Being”). More rigorously:
vision-­in-­One. The structures of vision-­in-­One will be systematically exposited
and distinguished from that which constitutes ontology, i.e. philosophical de-
cision itself. Thought of the One, of the nothing-­but-­One, has never been a
philosophy, even if it can evoke certain appearances of it, and non-­philosophy
is the de facto demonstration that an essential thought can and must exist out-
side the Greco-­philosophical and even before it. This thought of the real as One
rather than as Being is also the essence-­the essence alone, not the whole-­of sci-
ence. (Laruelle, Philosophy 1)

“The vision-­in-­One” here refers to the unilaterality explained above. Some of

Laruelle’s terminology has changed with the passing of time, and even the notion
of non-­philosophy itself has been almost replaced by the term “non-­standard phi-
losophy.” In spite, of the terminological refinements, the premises presented here
remain foundational of this entire project: superposition borrowed from quantum
theory used in the phase of non-­standard philosophy is simply a further elaboration
or enrichment of the argument about the unilateral relation or the method of dua-
lysis, whereas non-­standard philosophy is in fact the method of scientific “way of
doing” philosophy. Finishing with this brief terminological digression, I will point
to a couple of important elements of the quote above. It equates “the philosophical
decision itself ” with ontology, whereas ontology itself is predicated on “the thought
of the Being.” The stance of unilaterality is the “essence of science.” In Laruelle’s
most recent publication, Tétralogos (2018) the problem of ontologization of phi-
losophy is once again tackled through the critique of the attempts toward fusion of
philosophy and mathematics due to the fact that both disciplines suffer from the
“principle of sufficiency” amounting to a system of amphibology (Laruelle, Tétra-
logos 50–51). It is a tendency betrayed by the gesture of “ensemblisme” (51), a pre-
tension to account for the entire universe and in fact constitute it, unilaterally in-
sisting that it is the reflection of the real itself, or, in the context of the philosophy
and critique inspired by “the linguistic turn,” that universe of language or sign is
the real itself (Laruelle, Philosophy 184–91). The equation real=fiction (of the old

184 the comparatist 44 : 2020

metaphysics) is now simply reversed but remains the same fiction=real (231). Here
again we see an analogy between Laruelle’s critique of the amphibology and Meil-
lassoux’s critique of the post-­Kantian “correlationism” (Meillassoux 5).

3. Democracy of thought:
Philosophy one among the disciplines
The “principle of philosophical sufficiency” emerges from the invention of “the
Being” or tò ón (τὸ ὄν) in Greek philosophy, later on, in the form of Christian the-
ology, it becomes fused with the Judaic philosophy received through the two testa-
ments (Laruelle, Philosophy 1–5).3 It is a distinct and historically embedded event.
Its historical accidence renders it susceptible to obsoleteness, to declaring it sur-
passed. The test to its possible obsoleteness lies in the identification of philosophy’s
self-­sufficient conceptual universe as detached from reality or the real—its inability
to affect any tangible change or effectively account for it, or as Marx would put it
its inability to “change the world.” That is why both Marx and Laruelle advocate an
exit from philosophy, albeit by never really abandoning it all together. They retain
and safeguard it as a conceptual resource to draw from for the purposes of their
“scientific projects” based on deflating philosophy’s speculative self-­sufficiency. By
resorting to philosophy’s categorical repertoire (“alienation,” “abstraction,” “value,”
“matter”4 as “the real” or “the physical”), Marx creates his science of “species being
of humanity” and his political-­economy. Laruelle proposes a science of humanity
based on suspending philosophy’s sufficiency (expressed in the prefix of “non” in
non-­philosophy), which later on becomes a science of philosophy as elaborated in
his quantum theory inspired books and, in a most detailed fashion, in his Tétra-
logos published last year (2018).
It is also applicable to other objects of enquiry, such as “labor force” as demon-
strated in Introduction to Non-­Marxism (2014), making it apparent that a scientific
posture of thought in the treatment of “philosophical material” is possible and that
non-­philosophy provides the epistemic starting point for doing so (Laruelle, Phi-
losophie 64–69, 133 ff.). In my own work, I have applied the method in a critique
of poststructuralist conceptualizations of subjectivity and gender, on the analysis
of capital and patriarchy and theorizations of the political and metaphysical as-
pects of the notion of technology as based on its modernist precepts.5 Philosophy
that is predicated on the principle of its own sufficiency—on its “decisionism,”6
self-­mirroring, “hallucinations,” to use Laruellian parlance7—constitutes “Worlds”
human subjects are supposed to inhabit or are conditioned by, in dramatic rift
from the real that has escaped words, that is out-­there and also within the human
self, as some exteriority inside of which we nest.
Philosophy in this sense, based on the grounding notion of “the being,” is a

Examining 185
Greek-­Judaic invention, argues Laruelle and the classical philology corroborates
this claim,8 and we ought to situate our discussions in this particular historical con-
text. I would add that the Islamic philosophical tradition, building on the Greek
philosophical legacy, belongs to the same system, the one that tends to institute
World(s) more real than the real itself. It is composed of self-­sufficient “halluci-
nations,” to paraphrase Laruelle, detached from praxis and the physical and often
violating their sovereignty, to use a political term for such are the consequences of
the epistemic problem at hand. It molds the practical and the physical (or: matter)
into materials of value production, reducing bodies, land and other forms of the
real that escape language to mere resource for philosophy’s value production, be
it moral or economic values. That is why Western or European—or rather the
Greek-­Judaic-­Islamic—history of philosophy needs to stop including “other civili-
zations” into the history of philosophy. It is neither universal nor eternal. Univer-
sality is, however, possible, but as a method of generic thought that may have end-
less number of variations, and (European) philosophy could see itself participating
in it, with its principle of sufficiency suspended. But “Western philosophy” (or the
Greek-­Judaic philosophical tradition) would be one among the many “philoso-
phies,” or forms of metaphysical, scientific and techno-­artistic thought.
Such positioning of philosophy in the generic production of thought could be
accomplished through a radically democratic situating of the discipline with re-
gard to the other sciences. For example, to paraphrase Laruelle, one should be able
to couple “Marx with Plank, Kant with Einstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger with
Cohen” in a fashion that does not permit for philosophy to establish a fold or re-
doubling of itself by way of subsuming science within the universe it institutes as
teleological perfection of the real (Laruelle, Opéra 51). A democracy among disci-
plines is presupposed, the posture of thought is scientific even though the material
is philosophy. Even though philosophy is “forced” into a field of enquiry that oper-
ates with science and where the methods inspired by quantum theory dominate,
its status of being forced in as principle—rather than fundamental (Laruelle, Té-
tralogos 28–33), a distinction Laruelle borrows from Marx (58, 61)—is the effect of
observing the method of “determination in the last instance” understood in both
Marxian and Laruellian sense. The object of study is philosophy, thus its immanent
structure determines the conceptual clone (Laruelle, Introduction 109), or as Witt-
genstein would put it—the Maßstab, and it, therefore, forces the entire structure
that is essentially scientific to exact a mimesis of the object of study in order to ex-
tract the abstract principles that govern it and that may be universally applicable
(Kolozova, Holocaust 61–63). Mimesis is used here in the Aristotelian sense, as
the notion of poesis is applicable on all forms of cognition or knowledge creation.
Thus a procedure that goes from the concrete to the abstract can be enacted, fol-
lowing the method of Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure 53), in perfect coherence

186 the comparatist 44 : 2020

with Marx’s practice of the analysis of capital, as well as examples of structuralist
analysis and psychoanalysis, as I have elaborated in my most recent monograph
(Kolozova, Holocaust 55–88). In this way, thought submits to the real and its vicissi-
tudes, while operating in the only possible field, that of transcendence in unilateral
relation to the foreclosed immanence.
In line with the realization about philosophy’s radical historicity and, thus, con-
tingent and transient nature, I will be referring to it not as to a universal trans-­
historical category, but rather as to a culturally and historically conditioned one.
Let us reiterate, Laruelle argues that philosophy proper, the one that is called
Western (even though it covers the Orthodox East of Europe as well and periods of
Islamic philosophy) is the product of the Greek-­Judaic tradition. The notion of tò
ón or the Being makes sense only within the framework of that particular tradition,
argues Laruelle, and we will bear in mind its utterly accidental past but also future.
Philosophy can infect and has infected the history of scientific thought, but
being determined in the last instance by a single defining principle—that of suffi-
ciency amounting to the problem of amphibology—it remains radically different
from science and the latter remains radically immune to the possibility of total
contamination by philosophical preoccupations. The fact that it escapes the prin-
ciple of philosophical sufficiency (PPS) preserves science from succumbing to the
authority of philosophy. Principle of philosophical sufficiency is the determination
in the last instance of all philosophy according to Laruelle: rather than general-
ization about philosophy, the “principle of philosophical sufficiency” is a radical
identity or an identity of the last instance of all philosophy which consists in phi-
losophy’s circularity, in its submission to the authority of its postulate or to a con-
cept—to its “decision” about reality, writes Laruelle—rather than to the real. As al-
ready explained, the real is defined in Laruelle by its radical foreclosure to thought,
and in that sense it is not much different from Lacan’s concept of the real. There is
one important difference, however, pertaining to the syntax of thought’s posture:
the real is something that can be “cloned”, coded into a structure or image, some-
thing to which thought succumbs. It does not appear only as mere intervention of
the irrational, paralingual, or the symptom as tuché into the automaton of signi-
fication. It is what the process of signifying always already mimes and produces
traces of. The automaton of the signifying chain is not self-­sufficient and inde-
pendent from the real, but rather submits to the real as its authority and as that to
which it always already relates or correlates (in Laruellian not Meillassoux’s sense).
Such are the ways of the scientific posture of thought.
For the scientific posture of thought, as argued by Laruelle, there is a certain out
there without a preassigned meaning, without a “meaning” tout court—it is an ex-
terior occurrence whose composition, laws and also possibility of control and ma-
nipulation are (sought to be) explained. Thought relates to it unilaterally, does not

Examining 187
seek to unite with the object of study, to embody it or express it, to penetrate and
reveal its “true being,” scientific posture of thought presupposes the indifference of
its object of study. Philosophy, on the other hand, seeks to reflect “the truth” of its
object of study, to be the perfect reflection of what it attempts to explain, to grasp
its “essence,” to penetrate its “substance.” The “truth” of something, an essence of
a thing or its substance (in the philosophical sense) are all useless concepts to a
scientific enquiry which operates with definitions, axioms and other concepts less
ambitious to grasp and overlap a totality of the subject of study.
Philosophy collapses cognition with its object of study, whereby it attempts to
elevate its own realization into a union with the object of study. This union is the
philosophical truth or simply truth—not an accurate explanation of an object of
study but its “truth.” The cornerstone of the principle of philosophical sufficiency
is precisely the notion of truth, because it is the substance of being—the senseless
real infused with sense is both truth and being, the two notions are interchangeable.
Such is the case in philosophy, as well as in the other forms of “ensemblism,” let us
borrow this term from Laruelle’s Tétralogos (Laruelle, Tétralogos 43, 51), that usually
include mathematics, logic and philosophy, or a fusion of the two or the three predi-
cated on a philosophical decision pretending to ground and stand for the real itself.
Thus, “truth” is an instance where a fusion between the real and the cognition
of that real occurs in a form that constitutes a perfection of the mere real, the mere
out-­there devoid of meaning. Truth is the real perfected through meaning, en-
dowed with sense and purpose. It contains not only what something is, not only
how it is, but also why it is. The “why” in question does not refer to cause but rather
to purpose, which leads us to the philosophical question par excellence: what is the
reason of a particular thing or, for that matter, anything to exist, immediately radi-
calized to the question of the reason to exist. Why is there an “is” (or to be, or einai
in Greek) rather than a “is not” (mê einai in Greek), why is there Being rather than
Nothingness—this question is the very origin of Greek philosophy and the sub-
sequent Greco-­Judaic philosophical tradition. Since Parmenides, the tautological
proposition “being is, but nothing is not” has been at the core of philosophical “de-
cisionism”—the founding act of philosophical reality, or reality as always already
philosophically produced. The Being or tò ón becomes an entity and the central
object of study of philosophy constituting its most superior discipline, the highest
form of philosophy—ontology.
Laruelle’s non-­philosophy is founded upon a departure from ontology and a re-
placement of the concept of tò ón with that of the one synonymous with the real, as
already noted. Let us reiterate, the one stands for the procedure of unilateralization
(or dualysis), cloning the structure of thought and the indifferent real. It is also a
mathematical one and the resistance of the real as zero to the one, or as that which
is not counted. The one is not an all-­encompassing category subsuming a multi-

188 the comparatist 44 : 2020

plicity within a Universe, as Alexander Galloway seems to think when arguing that
“. . . domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe.
What this produces, for Laruelle and non-­philosophy, is an “autistic; rationality,
in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirec-
tional identity with the One.”9 Rather, the one is synonymous with the real, and it is
a discrete and asemantic element of the signifying automaton, a posture of thought
vis-­à-­vis the real, a procedure of unilateralization (Kolozova, Holocaust 5–13). The
universe would presuppose a unity of duality or multiplicity which is an essentially
philosophical procedure, one the non-­philosophy or the non-­standard philosophy
not only does not apply but seeks to abolish as the founding gesture of the origi-
nary amphibology. And this is what non-­philosophy and its later form, the non-­
standard philosophy, seeks to overcome, step out of while retaining philosophy
as depository of transcendental material, treated as chôra—disorganized matter
(of conceptual substance), rather than cosmos or a universe. As Laruelle’s Tétra-
logos shows, “the Universe” is the philosophically non-­standard or generic category
analogous to the “World” as philosophical instantiation (Laruelle, Tétralogos 84).
The one is, therefore, neither universe of any sort, nor substance, nor essence,
nor the Being—it is the descriptor of thought’s posture of unilateralization vis-­à-­
vis the real of numberless identities in the last instance that are subject of cogni-
tion. The real does not have the Being as its analog nor does it establish any analogy
with substance or essence (ousia), it is rather the mode or tropos10 in which the
out-­there renders itself available to cognition or, in Laruelle’s parlance, to thought.
The notion of mode we encounter in the logic and metaphysics of the middle ages
refers back to the Greek term tropos which means “a way” rather than a “mood”
and is used to denote Aristotle’s syllogisms. Indeed, “the one” is about the possi-
bility of cognition and the most rudimentary posture of thought, one that precedes
language, the unilateral submission of the subject of cognition to its “object” in the
mode of the real rather than the transcendental or as concept. Summing up the
central epistemic argument of Laruelle’s Introduction to Non-­Marxism, we could
say that a non-­philosopher (or a non-­standard philosopher) could study any ma-
terial or abstract reality as the real to be first “cloned” into an identity in the last in-
stance, and only after “coding” a certain “syntax of the real” taken fully to the tran-
scendental level (Laruelle, Introduction 109).

4. Marxian “ third person ’ s view ” :

an epistemological and ideological
possibility aided by Laruelle and Irigaray
In Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General11 and in his writings on Feuerbach,12
Marx argues that in order to move beyond the confines of philosophy for the pur-

Examining 189
poses of founding the science (of human species of humanity) he purports will
issue from and overcome philosophy, one needs to move away from the centrality
of the notion of “subject” or “subjectivity.” The epistemic problem or fallacy in
Hegel, as Marx sees it, consists in the projection of the human centered perspec-
tive on the objective reality which operates as a structural rather than semantic law
of not only idealist but all philosophical reason. Such structural conditioning of
philosophical reason has political consequences too.

The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self—this is according
to Hegel the one-­sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of
only one side. Man is equated with self. The self, however, is only the abstractly
conceived man—man created by abstraction . . . The self-­abstracted entity, fixed
for itself, is man as abstract egoist—egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the
level of thought. For Hegel the human being—man—equals self-­consciousness.
All estrangement of the human being is therefore nothing but estrangement of
self-­consciousness . . . All reappropriation of the estranged objective essence
appears therefore, as incorporation into self-­consciousness: The man who takes
hold of his essential being is merely the self-­consciousness which takes hold of
objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropria-
tion of the object. (Marx, Manuscripts: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General)

Marx’s proposal of a new science is predicated on a hitherto novel grounding

gesture of thought derived from the premise that thought should submit to the
real, described as “sensuous and lived,” not to the “object.” The latter is an ab-
straction, product of the conceptual division of the material act of cognition into
the dualism of subject/object. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray has
demonstrated how the dialectics of subject/object plays out: it is at the origin of
Western philosophy, the (literal and metaphorical) speculum devised by the sub-
ject to look at the object of study, i.e., Plato’s cave or female hysterae and for that
matter any form of somatic reality, projects a two dimensional image the subject
integrates in its narrative of the universe or “the Being” (Irigaray). That projected
image, product of subject’s mirror, is taken to be the reality itself. Such procedure
could be implemented on any subject matter, but the position of object is always
reserved for the entities bereft of reason: women, children, animals, nature. Iri-
garay, evidently, argues that the “rational,” rid of affect, detached from his mortal
body—and, according to the contemporary accelerationist and “neorationalist”
dream (Roden 510–27), soon to become a “fully automated” bodiless part of singu-
larity—Subject is male. She further radicalizes her argument by employing struc-
turalist psychoanalysis and demonstrating that the language in the generic sense
is patriarchal, the symbolic laws are pronounced by the father. Therefore, onto-
logically there is no possibility for a female subject of philosophy to emerge. She

190 the comparatist 44 : 2020

advocates speaking from the position of the (metaphorical) hystera itself, from the
cave beyond its transposition into an object or image, from the position of the real
that precedes the intervention of philosophical dualism (Irigaray). At this point,
Irigaray bifurcates from both Marx and Laruelle as she seems to attempt for “sub-
jectivize” the real, to give voice to the immanence, whereas unilateralization condi-
tioned by the originary foreclosure of the real remains the foundational premise of
what we tentatively call “post-­philosophy,” i.e., Laruelle’s non-­philosophical proj­
ect and Marx’s proposal of a science of the species being of humanity.
Marx proposes submission to the real and treating the realities subject to exami-
nation as objects (in the sense of third party), without any privileging of the sub-
ject position, but without substituting the “abstraction” of object (the concept) for
the real itself or attempting to “give it voice” (thus, committing the fallacy of pro-
ducing subject centered knowledge). The discussion is thus not “object-­oriented,”
but moves beyond the space and dynamics created by the couple of subject/object.
It is the human subject that seeks to interpret the surrounding reality, according to
Marx, but a subject that does not project itself onto it, nor does it attempt to “be-
come one with it” in order to not only produce truth of the real but to recreate it
and move it up the ladder of transcendence—to the level of a higher form of reality,
one where meaning and the being-­there or the out-­there are one, exemplified in the
form of the Being. The subject is a function, just as is the object, as well as the real
itself. It’s not an ontological category, at least not in Marx’s critique of Hegel and
Feuerbach. I argue that Marx remains faithful to this stance and that there is no
epistemological break causing a supposed veering away from the critique at hand.
Quite to the contrary, I think that the execution of Capital is a demonstration of
the productiveness of the methodological procedure and the epistemic posture he
proposes.
Marx’s “humanism” is not human-­centered, and not subject centered either.
The human is one among the objects of study of the post-­philosophical science
he pleads for. Therefore, the “humanist themes” in Marx’s work are not either in
contradiction or in trenchant discontinuity with the science of political-­economy
and of the human societies developed in Capital I–­III. Marx’s humanism is not
a philosophical project and it is not humanist in the enlightenment sense of the
word: it is a science of the species being of humanity rooted in a radical attempt
to do away with anthropocentrism in the worldview it creates. In this sense, and,
therefore, to a limited extent, it is a post-­humanist project, that we will term non-­
humanist in line with its essentially non-­philosophical commitment, for which we
borrow Laruelle’s term in lack of a more adequate one and avoiding the ad hoc des-
ignation of “post-­philosophy” I use above. Consequently, Marx’s humanism can be
called non-­humanist and the prefix serves the same function as in Laruelle’s non-­
philosophy. It is a science of the human “impoverished” of philosophy, or a sci-

Examining 191
ence operating with philosophical material on the basis of a suspended principle of
(philosophical) sufficiency. Therefore, Marx’s “humanism”—called by Marx him-
self “naturalism” (Marx, Manuscripts)—postulates “the human” as transcendental
albeit affirming that the “real abstraction” (Sohn-­Rethel 20–28) of humanity is de-
termined by the “real, sensuous and physical” conditions of both social relations
as well as of human embodiment. Materially determined reality of the species of
objects of cognition called human, i.e., representations and philosophical figura-
tions of the reality in question, is the subject of study of Marxist sciences. The sub-
ject theorizing or scientifically examining the object of study enacts superposition
and renders itself conditioned by the object as much as it influences the object’s
emergence on the transcendental stage. Here, we make recourse to Laruelle’s use
of quantum theory in order to further elaborate the procedure of unilateraliza-
tion (as explained above). Marx’s third person’s perspective can be best explained
by way of extension through Laruelle’s non-­standard philosophy and the method
of cloning and dualysis, elaborated in Introduction to non-­Marxism, as well as the
procedure of superposition central to the latest stage of Laruelle’s oeuvre. This de-­
subjectivized position Marx argues for does not seek to become the “objective sub-
ject,” such amphibological move would be essentially philosophical. The positivist
“objective-­subject” is, therefore, irrecoverably philosophical. Marx rejected it for
the same reasons he rejected Feuerabach’s attempted materialism.
The subject of scientific enquiry is “de-­potentialised,” as François Laruelle
would put it. He refers to the method of “de-­potentialisation” in order to argue
for a political self that is a victim which is always already a subject in revolt.13 The
type of revolt produced by subject’s superposition vis-­à-­vis the world it opposes is
called messianism, and this thesis is closely examined in Laruelle’s opening lecture
of the 2014 Cerisy symposium dedicated to his philosophy as well as in his other
works of the latest stage of his non-­standard philosophy, including the Tétralogos
published in 2018.
The non-­standard philosopher, including the Marxian non-­standard philoso-
pher, assumes the task of “cloning the real” by virtue of superposition (as con-
ceived in quantum theory, adjusted to philosophical investigation): it submits itself
to the effects of the reality by miming and subsequently “coding” the elements of
mimesis. Thus the “cloned” structure of the occurrence of out-­there is transposed
on the transcendental plane or on the plane of signification. The “object,” deter-
mined in the last instance by the foreclosed real, is recreated in the universe of the
signifying automata, i.e., natural or formal languages.
Just as any user of language, be it digital or natural, the creator of a materialist
and non-­philosophical account, aspiring to ground the interrogation in scientific
rigor, describes or inscribes the object of study, e.g., the species being of humanity,
into signs or engages into a process of its signification. This transposition of en-

192 the comparatist 44 : 2020

countered exteriority into a signifying chain is a material process. The signifier be-
comes a trace either vocal or graphic, subject to intrinsic material rules, such as cer-
tain phonemes cannot be adjacent whereas other are there to establish difference,
or certain symbols are required to produce a specific meaning. We have learned
from structuralist linguistics and psychoanalysis, that language, psyche as language
and politics as discourse (and episteme) constitute an automaton (of signification).
This automaton can be interrupted, traumatized, disrupted and forced to restitute
itself by the intervention of the real insofar as tuché (Greek for chance, accident,
contingency), as we could learn from Lacan and Aristotle. The automaton is indif-
ferent, operates on the principle of disinterested autoproduction of signification.
When subjectivized it can be and more often than not is employed for enacting
critique through it, which means that it is always already subjected to disruption
and reinvention by the self that is its agency. The self, therefore, intervenes in the
automaton within an instance which is similar to that of the real; or is precisely the
real, that thing in the human or the metaphorical cyborg or the signifying animal
that forces the process of signification, the operations of the automaton to reinvent
themselves. That is why, along with John Ó Maoilearca, and inspired by Laruelle, I
have called this form of selfhood “the non-­human” (Kolozova, Holocaust).
Finally, the less there is ontology in the application of philosophy, the more
the principle of sufficiency is suspended, the more the real can be approximated
through “cloning,” transposed into language and relatively successfully mediated.
The mimetic clone does not aspire to be something more than idempotence. The
production of the “syntax of the real” (Laruelle, Introduction 51) is therefore, predi-
cated on tautology, A=A. The automaton of signification is calm, monotonous tau-
tological reality of material transposition of cognitive experience onto the plane of
“écriture” (Derrida). The old Hegelian dramaturgy of all that exists is replaced by
the monotonous circular movement of bio-­cybernetic automata of signs.

 The Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities-­Skopje

Notes
1 The concept is expounded and references to pages are included further on, as the ar-
gument is deployed.
2 “To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and
sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one
and the same thing,” from the Chapter titled “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in Gen-
eral” in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
3 It is a recurrent theme throughout the book.
4 I have explained in my previous publication, Toward Radical Metaphysics of So-
cialism (2015) published by Punctum Books (then in Brooklyn NY), how the notion
of “matter” and materiality is hardly ever termed as such in Marx’s original writings

Examining 193
 and that the notion of the real or the physical appear far more frequently as their syn-
onyms.
5 Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (2014);
Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-­Marxist Critique of
Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (2019).
6 It refers to the principle of philosophical sufficiency: with a single gesture, philosophy
establishes not only its rendering of the real but the real itself. This problem is tackled
throughout the opus of Laruelle. Most instructive are the first five chapters of this Phi-
losophy and Non-­Philosophy.
7 “We abandon philosophy’s traditional ambitions—for us, these are hallucinations—
and assert a “finitude”—precisely the “radicality” or the “finitude” of the scientific
posture—which is in any case more modest than philosophy’s unacknowledged folly”
(Laruelle, Philosophy 22).
8 Multiple papers of classical philology applied on the translation of Greek philosophical
vocabulary demonstrate the difficulties of translating the “the being” and or essence
(ousia) and the other substantivized variation of the verb to be in non-­Indo-­European
languages; cf. Nakahata Masashi, “From Ousia to Jittai: A Problematic Translation” is
the English translation of an article “Transplanting, Grafting, and Crossbreeding—
a Journey into the Labyrinth of Jittai”, which is based on a presentation given at the
International Research Center for Philosophy, at Toyo University held on 28 February
2015.
9 From Galloway’s abstract: “Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in
Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-­
philosophy, is an “autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are
marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One,” published in Alex-
ander R. Galloway, “The Autism of Reason,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Hu­
manities 19, 2 (2014): 73–83.
10 In Prior Analytics I.4–6, Aristotle develops the underpinning lows of the modes or the
tropoi (in Greek) of logical inference. This terminology dates since the middle ages,
whereas Aristotle, however, does not use the term tropos (Latin: modus) referring in-
stead to “the arguments in the figures.”
11 The critique is published as part of Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manu-
scripts of 1844.
12 Karl Marx, A Critique of the German Ideology and Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.
13 François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims. Trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet.
Hoboken: Wiley, 2015. I have used the French original in my work on the concept as
developed by Laruelle: Théorie générale des victims. Paris: Fayard, 2012. Also, consider
my paper in the Cerisy Volume on Laruelle: Katerina Kolozova, “Sur la possibilité
d’une révolte immanente comme théorie et comme pratique Lire Laruelle avec Marx.”
La Philosophie non-­standard de François Laruelle. Eds. Maryse Dennes, John Ó Maio-
learca, Anne-­Françoise Schmid. (Paris: Classiques Garnier 2019). 127–35.

194 the comparatist 44 : 2020

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