LARUELLE

AND NON-
PHOTOGRAPHY

Jonathan Fardy
Laruelle and Non-Photography
 Jonathan Fardy

Laruelle and
Non-Photography
Jonathan Fardy
Idaho State University
Pocatello, ID, USA

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 Preface

This book had multiple beginnings. I first encountered François Laruelle

in name only in 2013 when I heard his name mentioned by fellow stu-
dents. I was then nearing the conclusion of my doctorate in Theory and
Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. I was finishing up a dis-
sertation on nineteenth-century photography. I was comfortable with my
theoretical orientation at that time and Laruelle was not part of it. Still, I
thought it only right to look at his work on photography. I ordered a copy
of his text, The Concept of Non-Photography. I was surprised when it arrived.
It is small. There are no pictures and no mention of any particular photog-
raphers. That didn’t bother me. What did was Laruelle’s language. It is
strange. It is full of strange constructions and awkward syntax. I also found
it frustrating that Laruelle doesn’t always or consistently specify his terms.
Multiple terms are often used to refer to the same idea. I gave up for what
I thought were good reasons. I had reached what Laruelle would call a
“Philosophical Decision.” He always capitalizes this term for it is a proper
name that names a gesture endemic to every philosophical way of thinking.
Every philosophy makes a decision regarding the Real of its object of
inquiry. I had decided that Laruelle really was not worth the trouble.
Sometime later, Anthony Paul Smith, one of the best translators and schol-
ars of Laruelle, came to give a talk in my department. I must confess that
I was one of a handful of students who all but shut down that talk.
Despite my resistance, however, or perhaps because of it, I kept return-
ing to Laruelle. Friends would ask: why? Why did I keep returning to this
writer? I think it must have had something to do with the strangeness of
Laruelle’s work. I felt as if I just didn’t get what he was saying. Yet, that very

v
vi PREFACE

feeling was strangely compelling. It kept me coming back to see if I could

get it. What I have come to see is that there is something I can get out of it
(even if I don’t feel I ever will or should “get it”). And I have come to see
that the strangeness of Laruelle’s thought is productive for thinking in new
and “non-standard” ways.

Who is Laruelle?
François Laruelle was born in 1937. He is currently Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy at the University of Paris X. His career is something of an
irony. Despite his professional title, his name is now synonymous with his
unique project, which he alternately calls “non-philosophy” or “non-­
standard philosophy.” Laruelle hails from the same generation of postwar
intellectuals that include Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze,
Luce Irigaray, Jean Baudrillard, and many others. But he was not part of
that thoroughly American phenomenon known as “French theory” that
electrified humanities departments starting in the 1970s.
Part of the reason for Laruelle’s relative obscurity as compared to his
contemporaries has to do with the fact that his work is difficult to easily situ-
ate within readymade narratives of theory like the “deconstruction of the
subject,” “post-Marxism,” “poststructuralism” and so forth. What he
shares with many of the stalwarts of French theory is a commitment to set-
ting thought within a framework of radical immanence. Laruelle takes as
axiomatic that there is no place from on high or removed from the messy
embeddedness of reality from which we could grasp the whole. But the
question for Laruelle is: how to think immanence immanently without rei-
fying immanence into a form of crypto-transcendence? How do you think
immanence without constructing a quasi-transcendental perspective on
immanence? Photography offers Laruelle a model. Laruelle develops
an immanent mode of thought on the model of photography, but photog-
raphy severed from the standard philosophical standpoint of representation-
alist metaphysics—a non-standard philosophy he calls “non-photography.”

Aim
The aim of this book is twofold: to provide a critical commentary on
Laruelle’s idea of non-photography and through this to provide a general
introduction to his larger intellectual project of non-philosophy. There is,
however, no discussion of actual photographs or photographers. There are
also no pictures. I have tried to answer Laruelle’s abstract conception of
 PREFACE
   vii

photography with a correspondingly abstract, but clarified, explication of

that conception. The book is divided into chapters and sub-sections to make
it as easy as possible to clarify specific themes and terms important to
Laruelle’s work on photography. The book is part reader’s guide and part
commentary. The two books central to this text are The Concept of Non-­
Photography and Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. Although the lat-
ter text deals with much more than photography, I have chosen to focus my
reading and commentary on those passages and ideas that are most relevant
to Laruelle’s conception of non-photography. I hope you find this book use-
ful for reading and understanding Laruelle’s work on photography. Finally,
I hope it inspires you to try your hand at the practice of non-photography.

Pocatello, ID, USA Jonathan Fardy

 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my mentors and teachers, especially Andrew Hershberger

and Sharon Sliwinski. I want to also thank my dear friends, Christopher
Langlois and Andrew Weiss, for their conversations. I want to also acknowl-
edge and thank all those who have worked so tirelessly to translate and
comment upon the work of François Laruelle: Anthony Paul Smith,
Alexander Galloway, Katerina Kolozova, John O’Maoilearca, Taylor
Adkins, Drew S. Burk, Julius Greve, and so many others. I want to espe-
cially thank Rocco Gangle for his insightful criticism and suggestions.
Thanks to my editor Lina Aboujieb at Palgrave. I would also be remiss if I
did not here thank all my students who continue to sharpen my ideas.
Finally, I want to say a special thank you to my wife, Amy Wuest, PhD,
whose care and informed criticism have been vital to this book.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Cloning Concepts  9

3 Non-Photography 25

4 Explication to Performance 53

5 Conclusion 65

Bibliography 69

Index 71

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter covers key terms necessary for an introduction to

Laruelle’s work. It concludes with an outline of the chapters.

Keywords Real • Principle of Sufficient Philosophy • Philosophical

Decision • One • Non-photography • Photographic stance

Key Ideas
The aim of this introductory chapter is to outline the key ideas for under-
standing Laruelle’s non-philosophical project. The most important terms
for any introduction to Laruelle’s work are: the Real, the Principle of
Sufficient Philosophy, and the Philosophical Decision. We will explore
each before turning to the subject of non-photography and its core
terms.
Real, Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, and the Philosophical Decision
are consistently capitalized throughout Laruelle’s texts because they name
what Laruelle considers to be the structural invariants of “standard phi-
losophy.” Standard philosophy, argues Laruelle, is structured by the way it
decides on the nature of the Real understood as the totality of reality at its
most fundamental and essential. Standard philosophy presupposes that it
is epistemologically sufficient to grasp the Real. It is this presupposition
that Laruelle names the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. Non-philosophy
is founded on a different axiom: the Real cannot be grasped by ­philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Fardy, Laruelle and Non-Photography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93097-8_1
2 J. FARDY

The Real’s immanent totality exceeds any decision upon the Real that
philosophy could render. To be clear: it is not that Laruelle holds that no
knowledge of the Real is possible. We can, and do, have partial or local
knowledge of the Real through science. But absolute philosophical knowl-
edge of the essence of the Real is impossible according to Laruelle.
Philosophy is immanent to the Real and is conditioned by it. Philosophy
cannot decide the Real. The Real is instead decisive for philosophy. It is
the latter perspective that distinguishes non-philosophy (or non-standard
philosophy) from philosophy (or standard philosophy). We will now inves-
tigate each of these ideas in more detail before concluding with an intro-
duction to “non-photography.”

Real
The Real is the center and specter of Laruelle’s work. It is central as it is
cited throughout all of his work. Yet it is a specter because it is elusive. Put
simply: the Real is all that is. It is the immanent totality of which thought
itself forms a part. Laruelle argues that standard philosophy is marked by
its insistence that it is possible to grasp the Real. It accomplishes this (or
fails to) by making a decision concerning what the Real really is. Every
standard philosophy renders a decision on the Real. The Real for Plato, for
example, was the world of the “Forms”: the world of eternal perfection
beyond space and time. The Real for Heidegger was that of “Being”: the
brute, precognitive, experience of sheer existence. The Real for Foucault
was “discourse”: the genealogy of words and practices that shape and
determine the conditions of historical possibility. The Real for Derrida was
that of “differance”: the differential space that conditions the play of dif-
ferences within signifying practices. The Real for Laruelle is all that is and
which is immanent to our existence. But the Real for Laruelle cannot be
philosophically decided. Rather the Real is that which is decisive for
thought of any kind.

Principle of Sufficient Philosophy and Philosophical

Decision
Standard philosophies presuppose that they are sufficient to grasp and
decide the Real. It is this presupposition of standard philosophy that
Laruelle names: Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. Laruelle axiomatically
 INTRODUCTION 3

rejects this principle. No thought is sufficient to grasp the Real as a t­ otality.

Non-philosophy is thus founded on the axiomatic rejection of the Principle
of Sufficient Philosophy and the decisional structure of standard philoso-
phy that issues from it: the Philosophical Decision.

How Non-Philosophy Differs from Philosophy

Non-philosophy (or non-standard philosophy) differs from philosophy in
that the former refuses to take a decision on the Real on the grounds that
it is not sufficient to grasp and decide it. But this does not consign
Laruelle’s project to silence. Rather it enables him to draw on a wide array
of cultural and philosophical materials that are combined and reconfig-
ured in novel ways. Laruelle subtracts the content concerning the Real
from his chosen materials. It should be emphasized that the project of
non-philosophy is not epistemically hollow. Laruelle accepts that local
knowledge of the Real is possible through science. What he does not
accept is that any practice of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of
the Real.

Non-Photography
One of the “raw materials” that Laruelle draws on is photography. His
work seeks to de-philosophize photography in order to fashion a form of
thought he calls “non-photography.” Laruelle sees both standard phi-
losophy and standard conceptions of photography as structural parallels.
Both philosophy and photography have shared a similar fate in discourse.
Both have been linked to standard philosophical tropes: truth, light, rea-
son, illumination, and the Real. It is true that photography theorists for
years have countered this conception by calling attention to the manipu-
lation and mediation of the Real engendered by photographic practice.
But neither the naïve view of photography as an unmediated reflection
of reality nor the view of photography as a form of manipulation and
mediation escape the topos of the Real. Philosophy and photography
enable a certain forgetting of the frame they impose on the Real. Laruelle
sees photography and philosophy as different forms of media that frame
and force a certain imposition on the Real. But their respective decisions
always fail. The visual always exceeds the boundaries of the frame of
photography as the immanent totality of the Real escapes that of
philosophy.
4 J. FARDY

Non-philosophy and non-photography begin by acknowledging the

insufficiencies of photography, philosophy, and standard philosophies of
photography. Photographic and philosophical frames are partial and insuf-
ficient to decide the Real. What appears in their respective frames is imma-
nent to the apparatuses of philosophical and photographic vision. As
Laruelle writes in The Concept of Non-Photography:

Photography is in no way a double, a specular image of the World, obtained

by division or decision of the latter; a copy, and a bad one, of an original.
[…] The photo is not a degradation of the World, but a process which is
“parallel” to it and is played out elsewhere […hence photography is]
“unlimited” by right rather than merely “open”. (24–25)

Laruelle’s effort to free thought from the sovereignty of the Philosophical

Decision parallels his effort to free photography from its theoretical attach-
ment to the Real. Laruelle’s aim is to open photography and philosophy
within an “expanded field” that is neither quite photography nor philoso-
phy in the traditional sense of those terms (see Krauss 1986). Photography
(like philosophy) is rendered “unlimited” once its suture to the Real is
severed.

Problem
There is a central problem that animates Laruelle’s project of non-­
photography. How can photography be thought without “philosophizing”
it? Is non-philosophy hopelessly trapped in a vicious circle that tries to
escape philosophy by theory? Is such a thought not already destined to
reproduce the Philosophical Decision in the very decision not to decide?
This book will try to answer these questions. But before we condemn the
apparent circularity of a non-philosophical approach to photography, we
need to understand the circle we are in. This immanent circle is marked at
two points by the concepts “art” and “science.” At its historical advent in
the mid-nineteenth century, photography was torn between those who saw
it as a scientific tool for seeing the world objectively and those who saw it as
a medium for creative, subjective expression. The art/science split has been
insistently reiterated ever since in the continuous and contentious debate as
to whether photography is principally subjective or objective in nature.
Scholars since the 1970s have insisted that a serious consideration of
the heterogeneity of photography’s techno-discursive practices ought to
 INTRODUCTION 5

temper any attempt to define photography in essentialist terms. It was, for

example, to lead John Tagg (1993) to coin the memorable term “photog-
raphies” in order to mark his theory as non-essentialist. Poststructural
strains of photographic criticism assert that photography is definitively un-­
defined and inhomogenous. This new perspective was part of a larger shift
towards “philosophies of difference” that were primarily based in terms
appropriated from the study of language. Photography like language was
said to be comprised only of differences.
Laruelle is highly critical of “philosophies of difference” from Foucault,
Deleuze, and Derrida in philosophy to Tagg in photography. Specifically,
he is critical of the all-too-easy way in which the prizing of difference,
multiplicity, and heterogeneity lapses into a set of transcendental values
that merely invert the terms of contestation while leaving the essential
hierarchic structure intact. It is not enough, argues Laruelle, to simply
exchange identity for difference in the philosophical or critical field. Nor
is it sufficient to claim that the matter is ontologically “undecidable” as is
the fashion in deconstruction. Photography, according to Laruelle, is nei-
ther to be defined as a singular identity nor as a matrix of differences.
Photography instead is to be understood as a radicalization of the duality
of identity and difference in which both are retained and neither are tran-
scended. Laruelle names this state a state of “superposition.” He takes the
term from the science of quantum physics. There it names an atomic state
in which one particle may be said to be in more than one place simultane-
ously. It is not that one place excludes or transcends the other. Neither has
priority. A state of superposition is not simply mixed or inhomogenous. It
is a state of being in two states at the same time.
The non-photographic perspective takes aim at photography’s self-­
imposed philosophical dualism of identity and difference. But it does so
not through a deconstructive lens. The problem with deconstruction for
Laruelle is that it retains the standard philosophical view that philosophy
is sufficient to dismantle philosophy. Laruelle notes in Philosophy and
Non-Philosophy:

[Non-philosophy] does not suppose philosophy valid or given so as to

deconstruct it afterwards in its most massive and most apparent unitary
forms. Deconstruction believes to be able to distinguish between philoso-
phy’s supposed real essence, its postulated validity, and some of its “inferior”
forms, or its most logocentric or gregarious modes, etc. From the outset
non-philosophy prohibits this facility and this decision which is made to
forevermore save the essence of philosophy and in order to protect it. (179)
6 J. FARDY

Non-philosophy does not ally itself with deconstruction because the

latter still retains philosophy’s prejudice that it is sufficient to critique
itself. The deconstructive gesture predictably ends with philosophy saving
itself and further aggrandizing its stature by its claim to be “self-critical.”
Laruelle calls for a “post-deconstructive” frame that negates the tradi-
tional “amphibologies”—the admixtures of subjective/objective, truth/
illusion, etc.—imposed upon photography by philosophy. Such amphibo-
logies are symptomatic of thinking photography according to the
Philosophical Decision.

Syntax of the One

Non-philosophy holds that the Real is One. The latter term is capitalized
for it names the state of the Real as a radically immanent unity. The
amphibologies imposed on the Real by philosophy deform this oneness of
the One. Non-philosophy axiomatically asserts that the Real is One, but
this oneness cannot be philosophically grasped without violating its unity.
The Real as One thus names that which transcends philosophical intelligi-
bility. Non-philosophy’s strange syntax constructs transcendent (not tran-
scendental) terms. As Anthony Paul Smith (2016) explains, One names a
structure that is “foreclosed to thinking and being altogether in its pure
abstraction, and so it is real in this way as beyond or, more accurately,
preceding the philosophic doublet of thinking and being altogether” (74).
Because we cannot think the Real of the One as One, the name remains
stubbornly abstract. But in its very abstractness, the name of One is faith-
ful to the utterly abstract and foreclosed condition of the Real as radical
immanence. The One is a realist discourse written in the syntax of
transcendence.

The Stance of Non-Photography

Laruelle roots his theory of photography in the immanent practice of pho-
tography. The essence of photographic practice for Laruelle is that of the
“photographic stance.” The “photographic stance” does not designate a
term within a phenomenology of the photographic act. It is rather an
entirely abstract term for a form of photographic vision that precedes the
act of composing or selecting a subject. “Before the eye, the hand, the
torso are implicated,” in the photographic act, writes Laruelle in The
Concept of Non-Photography “it is from the most obscure and the most
 INTRODUCTION 7

irreflexive depth of the body that the photographic act departs” (12). The
photographic stance of vision is prior to any act of photography or a phi-
losophy that would categorize that act. Having rooted his theory in this
abstraction of the photographic stance, Laruelle proceeds to construct an
imageless, abstract theory of “non-photography.” But what finally is “non-­
photography”? Laruelle (2011) writes:

Here is the first meaning of “non-photography”: this word does not desig-
nate some new technique, but a new description and conception of the
essence of photography and of the practice that arises within it […] of the
necessity no longer to think it through philosophy and its diverse “posi-
tions,” but to seek an absolutely non-onto-photo-logical essence, so as to
think […] what photography is and what it can do. (4)

It’s a tall order. But let us see where Laruelle’s pursuit of non-­photography
takes him, and what we can do with it.

Bibliography
Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Laruelle, François. The Concept of Non-Photography. Translated by Robin Mackay.
New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011.
Smith, Anthony Paul. François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical
Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
 CHAPTER 2

Cloning Concepts

Abstract This chapter examines non-philosophy’s “cloning,” procedure,

which is the non-standard parallel to the conceptual procedure of standard
philosophy.

Keywords Clones • Onto-vectorial insurrection • Onto-photo-logical •

Force (of) thought • Photo-fiction • Philo-fiction • Quantic writing •
Dualysis

Clone
What the concept is to standard philosophy, the clone is to non-­philosophy.
Whereas the philosophical concept decides on its object, the non-­
philosophical clone parallels it. Just as the clones of biotechnology parallel
their progenitors, so the clones of non-philosophy parallel the Real. The
clones of non-philosophy, some of which we will explore in this chapter,
are immanent to the field of non-philosophy. Many of them are in fact
neologisms and as such their meaning is truly immanent to the terms of
non-philosophy. Precisely because they are immanent or closed-in upon
themselves, these clones clone the Real’s non-relationality. As the Real for
Laruelle is closed to philosophical access, so too are the clones of non-­
philosophy closed upon themselves.
The clones of non-philosophy (as those of biotechnology) also take the
form of mutations. Non-philosophical cloning is an activity that takes the

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10 J. FARDY

raw material of standard philosophy and mutates it by cancelling its ability

to decide upon the Real. As Anthony Paul Smith explains in his excellent
reader’s guide to Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy:

While Laruelle has elsewhere differentiated his sense of cloning from the
“biotechnological” act of cloning, we may begin to understand what attracts
him to this [conceptual] persona by noticing […] that the clone is not a
mere copy of an original. Neither is it a reflection upon something other
than it. The clone retains its own identity, thereby not being a reflection or
copy, but carries the same genetic structure as the material it is cloned from.
In this way, the clone carries forth the essence of the One [of the Real] in its
action, without this action being able to be claimed in any meaningful sense
of the One [of the Real]. (83)

Smith rightly points out that the non-philosophical clone has neither the
status of a copy nor a reflection, but nonetheless carries within itself some-
thing of the essence of the Real. That essence is precisely the clone’s non-­
relation to that which has no relation to anything for it is immanent to
everything—the Real. The clones of non-philosophy are structured by a
form of non-relationality that parallels the non-relationality of the Real. As
John O’Maoilearca explains in All Thoughts Are Equal, Laruelle’s cloning
procedures can be understood as a “quasi-mimetic approach to philoso-
phy” that “revoices philosophical material […] in an immanent mode”
(173).
One might ask: why then does Laruelle title his text on photography—
The Concept of Non-Photography? Why use the term “concept” when his
whole aim is to escape the enclosure of philosophical concepts and con-
ceptualization? One way to understand this apparent inconsistency is to
take seriously the fact that the title is a surface description intended to
attract the interest of philosophically or theoretically-minded readers with
an interest in photography. This is not to suggest that it is simply a market-
ing ploy. Rather, the title is a kind of lure that leads the reader into a text
that ultimately abandons the standards of conceptual practice dictated by
philosophy in favor of a creative, non-philosophical approach. Put differ-
ently: the title is a mutation of non-philosophical language (“concept”
rather than “clone”) intended to capture a philosophical perspective that
the text polemically negates. The “concept of non-photography” is a phil-
osophical term external to the immanent program of non-photography.
From the immanent perspective of non-photography, there is no singular
“concept of non-photography.”
 CLONING CONCEPTS 11

The question of the clone versus the concept in non-philosophy has

everything to do with the standpoint of non-philosophy with respect to the
Real. Standard philosophy, argues Laruelle, operates from a standpoint of
dominion over the Real. It decides what it is. It decides its relation to it. The
propositions of standard philosophy are therefore of a prepositional nature
that insures the stability of its relation to and over the Real. Laruelle’s proj-
ect is an effort to escape this domination of the Real instituted by the prepo-
sitional language of standard philosophy. Indeed, “Laruelle’s entire project,”
writes Alexander Galloway in Laruelle: Against the Digital, “might be use-
fully described as little more than an extended treatise on the preposition”
(26). The insistent bracketing and hyphenating of propositions by Laruelle
can make for vexing reading, but it follows from his first axiom: the Real is
foreclosed to thought. The foreclosure of the Real axiomatically cancels the
possibility of anything like a conceptual relation “to,” a philosophical reflec-
tion “of,” a concept “of”, or a discourse “on” the Real.
The prepositional language of philosophical propositions is a question
of standpoint. Where philosophy stands became a central question con-
cerning what philosophy is in the modern period. But no sooner had the
modern demand for heightened self-reflexivity asserted itself than it was
subsumed into standard philosophy. The question of philosophy’s relation
to the Real collapsed back into a question for philosophy. Standard phi-
losophy preserved its institutional power even as it questioned its very
foundations. The post-Heideggerian tradition has been committed to
anti-foundationalism. But it still remains in the orbit and under the author-
ity of philosophy.
Laruelle argues, however, that philosophy cannot be the source of its
own critique. Non-philosophy breaks with the positing of philosophical
foundations as well as the foundations of philosophy itself. Even meta-­
philosophy—philosophy about philosophy—is rejected by Laruelle for it is
ultimately committed to the preservation of philosophy’s autonomy and
authority. Meta-philosophers can educate us in the ways and means of
philosophical reflection, but in so doing they restore the disciplinary
power that philosophy always already claimed to have. Philosophy and
meta-philosophy form a closed circuit of power and authority. In Principles
of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle writes:

We know the question: who will educate the educator? It is an infinite

regress: who philosophizes philosophy? But philosophy cannot really and
rigorously think itself; it can reflect upon itself, meta-philosophize itself, but
12 J. FARDY

it cannot invent a totally other thought which would not be to some extent
a double or a reflection of itself. It goes as far as dialectic or deconstruction,
which is to say as far as these absurdities: post-philosophy, post-metaphysics,
but it never renounces its ultimate authority over the Real, even when it
accepts a limiting and sometimes deconstructing of this authority. (14)

Non-philosophy is not simply a philosophical alternative to standard

philosophy. It’s also not a doctrine. It is a drive to attain the necessary
velocity to escape the gravity of philosophy. It is a force and a trajectory
more than a properly bounded domain, territory, or field.

Onto-Vectorial Insurrection
The escape velocity of non-philosophy is fueled by an irreverent, even
insurrectionary, use of language and rhetorical models. In Photo-Fiction,
for example, Laruelle draws on the discursive materials of quantum phys-
ics. He is not the first to do this.
Jean Baudrillard famously, some might say notoriously, drew on physics
(particularly astrophysics) in fashioning what he called his “theory-­
fictions.” Baudrillard’s non-scientific use of scientific terms enraged many
scientists and philosophers. Baudrillard, and other stalwarts of French
theory, figure prominently in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book,
Fashionable Nonsense. Indicting what they see as an irresponsible, merely
rhetorical, use of scientific language in contemporary theory, they write:

The lackadaisical attitude toward scientific rigor that one finds in Lacan,
Kristeva, Baudrillard, and Deleuze had an undeniable success in France. […]
This way of thinking spread outside France notably in the English-speaking
world, during the 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, cognitive relativism devel-
oped during the 1970s mostly in the English-speaking world […] and
spread later to France. These two attitudes are, of course, conceptually dis-
tinct. […] However, they are indirectly linked: if anything, or almost any-
thing, can be read into the content of scientific discourse, then why should
anyone take science seriously as an objective account of the world? (207)

First, the supposedly “undeniable success” of what the Anglophone

readership calls “French theory” in France is overstated. The very fact that
Fashionable Nonsense attracted so much attention in the English-speaking
academy underscores what François Cusset and other careful historians of
the movement have amply demonstrated, namely, that French theory was
 CLONING CONCEPTS 13

more successful and culturally impactful outside than inside France (see
Cusset 2008). Second, whatever threat is posed by the creative use of sci-
entific language for non-scientific ends pales in comparison to the threat
posed by a generalized anti-intellectualism, at least in American culture,
that has seriously undermined the value of all intellectual endeavor. Sokal
and Bricmont do not help matters in this regard by publishing a simplistic
screed against a vast and complex array of thinkers and texts—which they
barely skimmed as evidenced by the shallowness of their interpretations—
ironically in the name of defending evidenced-based research.
Putting that aside, we can take their question at the end of the passage
just cited seriously. Why “should anyone take science seriously as an objec-
tive account of the world?” They seem not to know or care to mention
that the matter of scientific objectivity has been (and continues to be) the
subject of debate in scientific and philosophical communities. And many
in both lines of work regard it as at least a sign of intellectual laziness, if
not ignorance, to casually throw around terms like “objective account of
the world” without first clarifying more precisely the nature of the rela-
tionship between scientific theory and the world as such.
That said, there are, of course, good reasons to take science seriously,
namely, because science provides reasons in the form of evidence that lend
credence to its claims. And it is fair to say the same of a theoretical text by
Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze, or, for that matter, Laruelle. There are rea-
sons they use scientific language. Each has their own reasons. But faulting
a theorist for using scientific language in a non-scientific way is like fault-
ing a poet for using the word “rain” in a non-meteorological context. This
is not merely to point out the inanities of Sokal and Bricmont’s work, but
to prepare some groundwork for a turn to Laruelle’s use of the language
of quantum physics.
The most pronounced use of what Laruelle calls “quantic” language
appears in Photo-Fiction, where he calls for a performative elaboration of
non-photography by combining the raw materials of photography with
the language of quantum physics. It is in this quantic context that Laruelle
fashions a clone he calls “onto-vectorial insurrection.” Laruelle’s non-­
scientific, quantic prose carves out an onto-insurrectionary vector—an
insurrection concerning the being (onto) of standard philosophical
thought—and a velocity that aims to escape the gravity of standard
­philosophies of photography. Laruelle seeks to free photography from the
philosophical reduction imposed by philosophies of the Real and the phil-
osophical rhetoric of optics and reflection. Laruelle (2011) writes that his
14 J. FARDY

“non-scientific use of science” is “science” understood “outside the reduc-

tion that founds the scientific relation to the World” (143). Quantic prose,
Laruelle notes in Photo-Fiction, operates as a “re-branding” or a mutation
of standard philosophical discourse (49). Standard philosophies begin
with the “light” of truth, reason, and certainty. Non-philosophy quantizes
this metaphor so as to articulate a way of thinking open to contingency
and to disempower the certitudes of standard philosophy. Non-philosophy
is thus a critique of the entire tropology of light within standard philoso-
phy. It is a critique of philosophy as a photo-graphy, a writing of the light
of Reason, Truth, the World, or simply the Real.

Against Photo-Philosophy
From Plato’s cave, to rationalism’s “light of Reason,” to the Enlightenment,
up to the rhetoric of reflectivity in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, or
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the visible—light, as we
know, has had a long life in philosophical and theoretical thought. Indeed,
the etymological roots of “theory” leads back to an entire ancient Greek
rhetoric of seeing, speculating, and knowing. This “onto-photo-logical”
essence of philosophy is jettisoned in non-photographic thought. Laruelle
(2011) writes:

All, the All itself, would have begun with a flash, the lightning-bolt of the
One not so much illuminating a World that was already there, as making it
surge forth as the figure of those things that its fulguration would have for-
ever outlined for the West. Such is the philosophical legend of the originary
flash, of the birth of the World, a legend of the birth of philosophy in the
spirit of photography. (1)

The “philosophical legend” clings to a myth of the “originary” flash of

reason that lights up the world in its “truth.” This photo legend of phi-
losophy has been reiterated countless times, but each time it appears as the
illumination and capture of the Real signified most often by the philo-
sophical concept of the World. The philosopher “in the end,” writes
Laruelle (2011), “would have been nothing but a photographer” (1).
Philosophers, at least since Kant, have only deepened the myth of the
“originary flash” in seeking to capture the originary and essential flash of
reason itself. Such philosophers try to recover the origin of the flash of
logos. As Laruelle (2011) puts it:
 CLONING CONCEPTS 15

[Philosophy is] destined ceaselessly to take new shots of that first flash—
consigned to extinction—constrained thus to comment interminably on
that first shot by taking yet more, to engage himself in an unlimited-­
becoming-­photographic—so as to verify that the flash, the World, the flash
of the World—that is to say, philosophy—really has taken place, and was not
just a trick. (1–2)

Philosophy’s effort to capture the “originary flash” is illusory for it was

always already a “trick” set up in advance to authorize philosophy as the
power to illuminate the truth and to fashion the world in its image of
thought. It was a trick that philosophy did not see as a trick for it was
blinded by the very power it assumed it had to see and decide the Real.
Laruelle does not, however, pursue a deconstruction of the legend of the
flash for he wants to set his thinking on an insurrectionary vector that can
escape the gravitational pull of the photo-myth of philosophy. In The
Concept of Non-Photography, Laruelle writes:

No point in trying to separate philosophy from this photographic legend

that encircles it: philosophy is nothing other than that legend of the fulgu-
rant illumination of things and of its imperceptible withdrawal, of that no-­
longer-­photographed that founds the photographic destiny of West. Well
before the invention of the corresponding technology, a veritable automa-
tism of photographic repetition traverses western thought. Philosophy will
have been that metaphor of a writing or a speech running after an already-­
failed light. (2)

The light of philosophy blinded philosophy itself. This is why the light of
philosophy, for Laruelle, is an “already-failed light.” There is no way,
Laruelle claims, for philosophy to escape its self-blinding light. Laruelle
(2011) writes that if light “is the constitutive metaphor of the Philosophical
Decision, how could it then be thought by philosophy without a vicious
circle resulting? This problem is invariably intensified in what are called
‘philosophies of photography’ or ‘theories of photography’” (3). Laruelle’s
“re-branding” of standard theories or philosophies of photography is set
by a quantized vector. In Photo-Fiction, he writes:

One must treat philosophy in a complex manner as a photographic variable

[…] via the quantum and no longer merely photography via philosophy.
The quantum is the re-branding that weighs on the conjugation of variables.
We go from photography to non-philosophy in changing levels in passing
16 J. FARDY

from the photo-logo-centric context to its variables. The reduction of the

Principle of Sufficient Photography is firstly created by mathematical phys-
ics, but it is a fiction, not a materialist reduction of philosophy. (49)

The quantum re-brands, clones, or mutates not only standard philoso-

phies of photography, but also non-philosophy’s clones as evident in the
change in terms from Principle of Sufficient Philosophy to Principle of
Sufficient Photography. An organon of non-philosophy—one at least as
important as the Philosophical Decision—is re-branded “via the quantum”
in order to facilitate the “changing of levels” or a “passing” from philo-
sophic to photographic thought. This doubling of the clones pluralizes the
variables of photography and philosophy in a way that is itself variable.
Laruelle’s play with the language of vectors, trajectories, and (quantum)
fields draws on the raw material of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari jettison the tradition of positing
philosophical foundationalism (or philosophical “grounds”) for a highly cre-
ative elaboration of thought according to “territories,” “strata,” “plateaus,”
and “planes of consistency”—a multiplicity of “smooth” and “striated”
spaces—across which they let fly “lines of flight” in the form of continua, vec-
tors, manifolds, frequencies, and intensities. Laruelle shares Deleuze and
Guattari’s attraction to the rhetoric of science for it provides rich resources for
prose experiments aimed at escaping the trappings of standard philosophy.
To think of non-philosophy as a vector is to rightly think of it as a tra-
jectory and not a destination. Put somewhat differently, non-philosophy
may be understood as a “strange attractor” of vectors of mutational
thought. Non-philosophical vectors never arrive at non-philosophy. They
exist in a state of movement and mutational metamorphosis in the corpus
of non-philosophy and its diverse practices. These trajectories and prac-
tices are never direct. They are always slightly askew or mutated. Direct
discourse is the stuff of philosophy proper. Indirect discourse and repur-
posed materials and practices are that of non-philosophy. Vectors of non-­
philosophical thought, we might say “always approach their attractor
asymptotically, that is they approach it […] but never reach it. This means
that unlike trajectories, which represent the actual states of objects in the
world, attractors are never actualized since no point of a trajectory ever
reaches the attractor itself” (DeLanda 2002, 31–32).
In Photo-Fiction, Laruelle seeks an escape vector beyond the “flash of
Logos,” the philosophical “event or axiomatic decision” that attempts to
capture the world as a rationalized object (37). The flash of the
Philosophical Decision only discovers, Laruelle claims, that which it has
 CLONING CONCEPTS 17

already decided upon. The flash of discovery disguises the moment of

decision. Laruelle (2012) writes:

The flash of Logos, of the event or axiomatic decision is the Greek model of
thought, its circularity, merely differed, effectively its two strips crossed in
the interior form a figure eight and even if the topology arrives in order to
form the whole of the subject of the circle of philosophy; at best the flash is
the philosophical equivalent of macroscopic physics. (37)

For Laruelle, the flash of Logos is but one side of a figure eight struc-
ture—a Mobius strip—each side being continuous with the other. The
philosophy of light, of reason, of discovery turns out to be simply the
macroscopically visible instance of a decisional structure withdrawn from
visibility. Non-photographic thought abandons philosophy’s macroscopic
metaphysics of light—its fascination with the rhetoric of visuality—in favor
of inquiring into the microscopic, unseen, or quantic decisional structures
of standard philosophy.

Dualysis and Fiction

Laruelle’s intertwining of two discursive terrains—light and structure—is
an example of a form of non-philosophical thinking that Laruelle names
by way of a neologism—”dualysis.” The generic structure of dualysis
appears in non-philosophy whenever Laruelle attempts to think beyond
the “amphibologies” or admixtures of standard philosophy. Dualysis radi-
calizes the antimonies and dualities of standard philosophy and rewrites
them in the syntax of the One. The crucial duality at the very root of non-­
philosophy is the dualism of thought and the Real. No thought is held to
be sufficient to encompass the Real. Thought is conditioned by the Real
but never adequate to it. Non-philosophy radicalizes the dual structure of
thought/Real in order to explore and exploit the “relative autonomy” of
thought, which hinges precisley on thought’s failure to grasp the totality
of the Real. Non-philosophy affirms the relative autonomy of thought
from the Real by means of a set of rhetorical strategies, incluidng quantic
writing. The style of non-philosophy is thus of primary importance to
non-philosophy’s radical reconception of the thought/Real duality. As
Ian James notes in The New French Philosophy:

Throughout the different phases of his [Laruelle’s] thought […] radical

duality is maintained as the first and last affirmation and necessity of non-­
philosophical practice. Indeed, if the axiom of [the] indivisibility […of the
18 J. FARDY

One is] to have any coherence or discursive rigor at all, the performative
effectivity of this duality between thought and the real must be maintained.
[…] It is therefore only in the context of a performative dualyzing of philo-
sophical dyads that they can be effectively shorn of transcendence and its
pretensions to unity or totalization (the splitting, mixing, synthesis of tran-
scendence and immanence). Yet such a performative maintaining of non-­
philosophical duality proves to be the most difficult, complex and challenging
aspect of non-philosophy itself. (175–176)

James correctly underscores the “performative” aspect of non-philosophy

(as does Laruelle himself). It is often only through polemical performance
that Laruelle maintains the fragile duality of thought and the Real. The
non-philosophical “process of extraction and the performative use of phil-
osophical material it engenders,” James concludes, “follow directly from
the axioms and deductions of the vision-in-One. Indeed, the performative
nature of non-philosophy […is] decisive because it is ultimately the sole
guarantor of the ‘non’ of non-philosophy” (174–175).
It is, again, quantum physics that has been Laruelle’s go-to rhetorical
matrix to radially dualyze the thought/Real duality. The clone of “super-
position” is performatively elaborated in non-philosophy as a means
to correct the splits instated by standard philosophy. Superposition names
a state wherein a particle is understood to be in a duality of states. Cloning
the quantum principle of superposition, dualysis radicalizes philosophy’s
dualities via performative strategies that parallel without claiming to be
the Real. The aim of dualysis is to repel the amphibologies of standard
philosophical admixtures in the name of the immanence of the One. Non-­
philosophy seeks to hold onto the duality of thought and the Real by
guarding the autonomy of each. In Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle
calls for non-philosophy to be a “guardian of autonomies” via a transcen-
dent syntax that parallels the order of the Real without deciding it (166).
Dualysis goes beyond the aporias of the “undecidable” of deconstruction.
Undecidability is not a “regional” problem of philosophical interpretation
as it is for deconstruction. Undecidability is cloned into a principle of the
Real as “the Undecided.” Undecidability is not a philosophical result for
Laruelle but a principled point of departure. In Philosophy and Non-­
Philosophy, Laruelle writes:

“Dualysis” simultaneously frees the [R]eal, which is no longer encumbered

and hindered by philosophy, and the Philosophical Decision or at least its
essence, which is no longer prevented or inhibited by itself and by the faith
 CLONING CONCEPTS 19

bound to its spontaneous practice. In the last instance, dualysis roots deci-
sion as such in an Undecided and, reducing it to the state of material, it
aligns decision with a non-positional possible, fating it in a certain way to
fiction, giving it space and respiration that it has never had. (92)

Dualysis aims at occupying a “non-positional possible”—a literally uto-

pian, or no-place. It is a form of writing and creative thinking—a “certain
fiction”—that approaches the strange attractor of the “non-positional”
without ever arriving. It is a utopian and a creative effort that draws on
available material to leave the Real Undecided and not “undecidable” as in
deconstruction. The materials comprising this fiction, as noted, are fre-
quently taken from the regimes or “regional” knowledges of mathematics
and quantum physics and redeployed in non-mathematical and non-­
physical terms. Laruelle writes in Photo-Fiction:

More generally, photo-fiction is what we call a “generic” extension of the

apparatus of quantum physics, an experimental apparatus […] based on the
quantum model in all its dimensions. It is the technological extension of
photographic optics that exists within the quantic […], the formal extension
of its algebraic ingredient […], the extension of its material aspect […] and
the extension of the finality of the subject. (17)

Quantic writing performs a dualysis on the standard amphibologies

imposed on photography by philosophy: techno-science versus art, image
versus reality, truth versus fiction, among others. These standard dualities
are transcoded by a creative mutating—a “fictionalizing”—of photogra-
phy’s philosophical concepts. Like a particle in superposition, non-­
photography places the traditional oppositions imposed by philosophy on
photography into an Undecided state. Non-photography is thus like a
particle collider that smashes open the philosophical carapace of photog-
raphy. Laruelle (2012) writes:

Photo-fiction in fact designates the effect of a very special apparatus that one
must imagine because it is not available in any store, being more theoretical
than technological. […] Normally a photo is supposed to resemble its pho-
tographed object or subject due to optical and chemical processes. But our
new apparatus of photo-fiction is not material in the technological sense of
the term and nevertheless it must assure a certain resemblance between the
photo or its subject and the photo-fiction sought. It must be capable of
“photographing” (if we can still use this term with a number of quotation
marks since it is a discursive photography rather than visual). (15)
20 J. FARDY

The creative prose of non-photography rhetorically grants the Real of pho-

tography its independence. The rhetorical aspect here needs to be empha-
sized since for Laruelle the Real is always already autonomous in the last
instance. Non-philosophy’s creative syntax is a rhetorical measure faithful
to the axiom of the Real as autonomous, foreclosed, and decisive for
thought. The differences and distances that mark the relation between the
clones of non-photography and the Real parallels the “decoherence” of
photography and any “final” determination of its onto-photo-logical
essence imposed by philosophy acting in the name of the Real.

Force (of) Thought

Non-philosophy is a philosophy of difference, but not of the kind enshrined
in “philosophies of difference” familiar to readers of poststructuralism.
Philosophies of difference—Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Irigaray, and many
others of Laruelle’s generation—remain bound by the imperative of the
Philosophical Decision insofar as they marshal difference as a concept for
deciding the Real whether it be the Real of metaphysics, philosophy, social
theory, politics, or ethics. Non-philosophy, by contrast, is not a philoso-
phy of difference in this sense, but a difference of thought. Laruelle sees the
struggle against philosophies of identity by those of difference as bearing
the unmistakable mark of the Philosophical Decision: a scission or splitting
of the problematic into the duality of Identity and Difference. This split-
ting of the problematic reproduces the field of debate even as it inverses its
conceptual hierarchy. Laruelle, by contrast, radicalizes the duality. In
Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle calls for an affirmation of a truly

radical duality: rather than a still-philosophical dualism reabsorbable in an

ultimate synthesis, it remains a duality even when it takes root in the Identity
of the One. The One no longer shuts Duality or multiplicity into the circle
of synthesis. […] This matrix has never been philosophical even if it has
worked inside philosophy. (6–7)

The scissions or schisms of philosophical thought are radicalized in the

non-philosophical matrix as the duality of, and as, the One of the Real.
Prepositions are once again on the agenda. Consider it by analogy. Physics
tells us that while the phenomena of lightning and magnetic attraction look
very different, they are, in fact, manifestations of a single, unified field of
force—the electromagnetic force. Similarly, dualysis can accept both that
 CLONING CONCEPTS 21

there are phenomenal differences and that these differences are immanent
to the Real that is One. Non-philosophy affirms duality as an instance of the
One without holding that the One is knowable as a standard philosophical
concept. Holding onto duality without positing a dualism of the Real is an
instance of what Laruelle designates by the clone “force (of) thought.”
Force-of-thought, writes Laruelle in Principles of Non-Philosophy, is at
“the heart of non-philosophy and its work” (7). Force-of-thought syntac-
tically marks the force of the Real on thought. It is also a forcing of non-­
philosophical thought to remain fast to the radical dualism of thought/Real.
It is a means by which the twin temptations of deconstruction and amphib-
ological synthesis is resisted and philosophy’s power to decide the Real is
defetishized. Laruelle writes in Dictionary of Non-Philosophy:

Force (of) thought is the first possible experience of [non-philosophical]

thought […] and is a defetishizing experience. Whereas “thought” is a
fetishized […] generality susceptible to circulating amongst all philosophies
and their objects and dimensions—in the manner of an abstract exchange or
common sense—force (of) thought is the reality of thought insofar as the
former is not alienated in the latter. (64)

The raw material of Marxism is evident in the passage just cited. It was
Marx whose labor-power (or labor-force) perspective defetishized the
allure of the commodity. The commodity for sale seen from Marx’s per-
spective no longer appears as an object of fetishistic allure created ex-nihilo.
It appears as the product of labor and labor-power. Laruelle clones Marxist
thought and mutates it according to the syntax of the One. The Real of
philosophy is defetishized and stands exposed as no longer a discovered
essence, but a production of philosophy. The Real of philosophy is seen to
be fabricated by philosophy itself.
Force (of) thought also names an experience of thought that defe-
tishizes philosophy’s presupposed power to access and know the Real. The
Real in its immanent totality cannot be fully conceptualized and governed
by philosophy, but we can know that. Force-of-thought is thus also the
experience of the force of the Real’s unthinkability. This experience is
retained without transforming the phenomenal experience of this force
into a propositional (and prepositional discourse) “on” the Real.
Sometimes, Laruelle will clone “force (of) thought” as “vision-in-One” or
“force (of) vision.” The bracketing of the term “of ” and the use of the
term “in” alludes to the idea that the force at issue is immanent to the
Real. As Alexander Galloway notes:
22 J. FARDY

Laruelle will speak of things like […] vision-in-One, or thinking according

to the real even as he hedges with parenthetical expressions like force (of)
vision. Similar to Hermes, the chaperone god who runs alongside travelers
as they venture into foreign lands, Laruelle seeks a parallelism or accompani-
ment. But such parallelism is a nonrelation in which no mutual exchange or
correspondence transpires between the parties in question. In this sense
Laruelle seeks relation without exchange. (27)

One does not experience an unthinkability as a force “of” thought since

this implies a relation to thought that would locate thought in a place
external to the immanence of the Real. There is no “thought of” anything
in non-philosophy. There is only thought cloned and mutated as “force”
operative within the immanence of the Real. Thus, we cannot speak of
concepts of non-philosophy in the usual sense that philosophy uses the term.
Force (of) thought is an epiphany more than a hard-won concept that
opens a realist perspective on how things stand with respect to philosophy.
“If there is a realism,” writes Laruelle in Principles of Non-Philosophy, “it is
[…] a Real-without-decision-of-realism, realism being nothing but one
philosophical position among others. The force-(of)-thought accords the
radical primacy of the Real over thought with the relative autonomy of
thought” (22). Everything in the above quote turns on what precisely
“relative autonomy” means. We know that it cannot be that thought is
wholly independent of the Real. This is the ruse of philosophy proper
from Plato’s Forms to the inanities of natural language philosophy and on
down the line. But is it permissible in non-philosophical terms to speak of
the “relative autonomy” of thought with respect to the Real? Yes.
Thought is relatively autonomous insofar as it is “free” of the decision
on the Real Thought is conditioned by the Real, for it is immanent to it,
but its only conceptual relation to deciding the Real is negative; it has only
a relation of non-relation. It is free from the Real because it cannot decide
upon it. This “relative autonomy” of thought affords non-philosophy a
degree of creative freedom not afforded to philosophy proper. Philosophy
is sutured to the Real (if only in an illusory manner) by the Philosophical
Decision. It is thus conceptually captive to what it claims to capture
whereas non-philosophy remains axiomatically and relatively autonomous.
The thought of non-philosophy in being “relatively autonomous” with
respect to the Real occupies a place parallel to (and conditioned by) the
Real, but does not enter into any decisive exchange “with” it. There can
be no thought on the Real, but only a force of the Real on thought.
Laruelle writes in Principles of Non-Philosophy that force (of) thought is:
 CLONING CONCEPTS 23

at once an ultimate being-given and a non-belonging to the Real. […] Non-­

relation but non-confusion, precisely a ‘relation’ of cloning, which will be
decisive in order to understand the status of the organon of the force-(of)-
thought. (32)

Force-(of)-thought is an “organon” or an organizing term of non-­

philosophy for it captures in its very syntax the relation of the non-relation
of thought to the force of the Real. And it is precisely this relation of non-­
relation that makes “force-(of)-thought” and other non-philosophical
neologisms clones of the Real.
Non-photography, for its part, is a clone of photography conceptually
shorn of the philosophical status of “the concept photography.” Non-­
photography does not entertain the thematic of photography as mirror of
the Real. Non-photography is a thinking of photography without the Real.
Standard philosophies of photography that concern themselves with the
“truth-content” of photography consign themselves to tautologies for
either it is the case that photography is to be distrusted since photographs
can lie or that it can be trusted since photographs can speak the truth. But
this amounts to little more than saying that the truth can be reflected truth-
fully or that falsity can be reflected falsely as truth. In any event, the Real,
the World, the Truth remains what it was always already—an immanent
totality. The question for Laruelle is thus: how to break the circle endemic
to philosophies of photography that trap photography in a vicious circle of
image, reference, World or the Real. To break the cycle requires jettisoning
the prioritization of the Real as World in the name of thinking photography
anew. In the next chapter, we press to the heart of the matter to see what in
fact non-photography is and what ethical value it might possess.

Bibliography
Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co.
Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Translated by Jeff Fort.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum,
2002.
Laruelle, François. Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. Translated by Drew
S. Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
———. The Concept of Non-Photography. Translated by Robin Mackay. New York:
Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011.
 CHAPTER 3

Non-Photography

Abstract This chapter explicates the core “clones” of non-photography.

It examines non-photography’s critique of the photographic myth of pho-
tography; the status of photographic images in relation to the Real; the
“stance” of non-photography; Laruelle’s “science” of photography, and
finally Laruelle’s non-photographic ethics of human universality.

Keywords Non-photography • Science • Photographic stance • Vision-­

force • Quantum • Fractal • Humanity • Victims

Review
Let us briefly review the main arguments of the last two chapters. In Chap.
1, we surveyed the two major tenants of non-philosophy: the Philosophical
Decision and the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. The first is Laruelle’s
name for the gesture he sees as fundamental to philosophy: to decide on
the Real. Laruelle holds that this is not possible for the Real is foreclosed
by virtue of its radical immanence. Second, Laruelle rejects the Principle
of Sufficient Philosophy—the Philosophical Decision’s necessary presup-
position—on the grounds that philosophy does not have sufficient capaci-
ties to capture the Real. Non-philosophy is founded upon the axiomatic
rejection of the Philosophical Decision and the Principle of Sufficient
Philosophy. In Chap. 2, we examined Laruelle’s reformulation of concep-
tual work on the basis of his elaboration of “clones” of the Real. Recall

© The Author(s) 2018 25

J. Fardy, Laruelle and Non-Photography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93097-8_3
26 J. FARDY

that the clone is to non-philosophy what the concept is to standard phi-

losophy. The concept claims to grasp the Real whereas the clone is a struc-
tural parallel to the Real. We also examined Laruelle’s remodeling of
standard philosophic prose via quantic writing—a form of “fiction”—
inspired by the language of quantum physics. In this chapter, we will
examine how a non-philosophical view reframes standard philosophies of
photography, and we will further examine the quantized rhetoric of
Laruelle’s photo-fiction. We will now press to the heart of the matter and
try to parse and pin down more precisely the clone of non-photography.

What is Non-Photography?
The Concept of Non-Photography reached English-speaking audiences in
2011 through the remarkable translation by Robin Mackay at Urbanomic/
Sequence Press. What I had not realized when I first read it was that the
book is not quite a book, but a collection of essays. Part of my initial con-
fusion and frustration stemmed from trying to comprehend the text as a
monograph. The text makes far more sense when read as a series of tries,
takes, or even (non-photographic) “shots.” Read as a series of “theoretical
snapshots,” to borrow the title of an important set of photo-theory essays,
one is less likely to be frustrated by the seeming incompleteness of each
framing, or by the fact that the terms often change from one frame to the
next (see Long et al. 2009). Laruelle’s introduction to the volume gives us
some guidelines for reading.

“Non-photography,” above all, does not signify some absurd negation of

photography, any more than non-euclidean geometry means that we have to
do away with Euclid. On the contrary, it is a matter of limiting the claims of
“theories of photography” that interpret the latter in terms of the world and
of bringing to the fore its human universality. These essays aim to disencum-
ber the theory of photography of a whole set of ontological distinctions and
aesthetic notions imposed on it by the Humanities with the help of philoso-
phy, and which celebrate photography as a double of the world, forming
thus a “Principle of Sufficient Photography.” (vii–viii)

Laruelle here takes his own project of non-philosophy as raw material and
clones a mutation to pursue a photographic thought without reference to
the World. His essays aim to “disencumber” photography from the
Principle of Sufficient Photography. Just as his non-philosophical project
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 27

aims to cleave thought from philosophies of the Real, so here he now seeks
to cleave photographic thought from “theories of photography” that priv-
ilege the World and prioritize the Real. Just as Laruelle holds that philoso-
phy is not sufficient to frame the Real, so too he jettisons the normative
presupposition of photography as sufficient to frame the Real: the Principle
of Sufficient Photography.
Laruelle’s repudiation of the Principle of Sufficient Photography is set
against standard realist and constructivist views of photography. Laruelle
sees both positions as simply different ways of affirming the Principle of
Sufficient Photography. The constructivist sees photography as sufficient
to re-construct reality; the realist sees it as sufficient to empirically double
the world. For Laruelle, however, both schools of thought are encum-
bered by the Real and its related signifiers: reality, mirror, reference, or
simply World. If non-philosophy challenges the standard of thinking
according to the Real, then non-photography challenges thinking photog-
raphy according to the World. Standard philosophies of photography,
Laruelle argues, begin with an implicit or explicit decision on the Real as
either reflected or reconstructed in the photographic image. By this they
decide the nature of photography via its presupposed relation to the Real.
The aim of non-photography is to escape this doubly reinforcing self-­
confidence (or confidence trick) of philosophy and the philosophy of pho-
tography in one shot. Laruelle (2011) writes:

Here is the first meaning of “non-photography”: this word does not desig-
nate some new technique, but a new description and conception of the
essence of photography and of the practice [actual and theoretical] that
arises within it; of its relation to philosophy; of the necessity no longer to
think it through philosophy and its diverse “positions,” but to seek an abso-
lutely non-onto-photo-logical thinking of essence. (4)

It is important to note that Laruelle (2011) defines photography not solely

as “the technical act,” but also in terms of “the philosophy-style spontane-
ous, more or less invisible, self-interpretations that accompany it” (5).
Non-photography attempts to think photography without reducing it to
the photo-myth of philosophy—a photographism—that would appropri-
ate photography for the reductive ruse of a philosophy of pseudo-­
illumination, which would restore both photography and philosophy to
the order of an “onto-photo-logical essence.” Non-photography brackets
the question of the Real in relation to photography. It also brackets art
28 J. FARDY

historical and critical criteria as it relates to stylistic taxonomies and aesthet-

ics. The sole focus for non-photographic thought is the immanent force of
vision or “vision-force” that the photographic frame makes visible. What
photography makes visible, according to Laruelle, is not the Real, but pho-
tographic vision itself. There is an essential “being” immanent to the inte-
rior of the photographic frame. This being of vision—this registration of
vision-force—is the principal object of inquiry for non-photography.

Being in Photo
Laruelle (2011) contends that standard philosophies of photography err
whenever they explicitly or implicitly “postulate […] that the object ‘in’ a
photo and its photographic apparition share the common structure or
form of objectivation” (19). Laruelle acknowledges the work of Edmund
Husserl as decisive for his work on the question of the “being-in-photo.”
Laruelle (2011) writes:

To reprise—and radicalize—a distinction made by Husserl, we shall say that

the object that is photographed or that appears ‘in’ photo, an object drawn
from the transcendence of the World, is wholly distinct from the photo-
graphic apparition; it is, if you like, the photographic phenomenon, that
which photography can manifest, or more exactly, the manner, the “how” of
its manifesting the World. This manner or this phenomenon—here is what
radicalizes Husserl’s distinction—distinguishes itself absolutely from the
photographed object because it belongs to a wholly other sphere of reality
than that of the World. (18–19)

Laruelle radicalizes Husserl’s phenomenological method of “bracketing”

the question of reality in order to focus on the phenomena of experience.
Husserl argued that the phenomenologist should concern herself with
what appears without consideration for whether or not what appears is
“real.” This allows the phenomenologist to say without contradiction, for
example, that a bad dream was truly terrifying without countenancing the
fact that the events in the bad dream were not “real.” Appearance is
granted its truth-content and is freed from the limits imposed by reality
testing. Likewise, Laruelle argues that we should bracket out the question
of the Real in looking at photographs. What is “in” the photo constitutes
is its own being as photo. The “photographic apparition” has its own
being and truth quite apart from its bearing on the Real. The “being-in-­
photo” contains its own immanent reality and truth as an image.
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 29

The essence of “being-in-photo” is a “non-onto-photo-logical essence”

for its essence is not of the order of the photographic understood under
the sign of light, truth, or reference. This non-photographic essence is
transcendent for it its free of the Real photographically understood as
the double of the visible world in the standard sense. This non-­photographic
being in the abstract is “solely immanent” to itself shorn as it is from the
trappings of the World or the Real. The “being-in-photo,” that “photo-
graphic apparition,” that “quasi-field of presence” is, Laruelle (2012)
notes, “empty not only of present objects, but of all syntax, structure or
articulation, of […the] ‘Philosophical Decision’” (22). The “being-in-­
photo” constitutes a model for non-philosophical thought. The non-­
photographic image de-hierarchizes the conceptual schemas of standard
philosophy and reduces them to a unitary “flat thought” voided of the
decisional structure of philosophy proper.
Laruelle’s insistence on the distinction between “being-in-photo” and
the Real is affine with the work of Vilém Flusser. In Towards a Philosophy
of Photography, Flusser argues that the photographic image—be it a black
and white or color image—is a theoretical image. The Real of the visible
world is neither black-and-white nor is it specifically the colors allowed by
analog film or digital coding as the case may be. These color schemes are
photographic concepts that produce (and do not reflect) the image of the
visibly Real. Regarding black-and-white photography, Flusser writes:

[There] cannot be black-and-white states of things in the world because

black-and-white cases are […] “ideal cases:” black is the total absence of all
oscillations contained in light, white the total presence of all the elements of
oscillations. “Black” and “white” are concepts, e.g., theoretical concepts of
optics. As black-and-white states of things are theoretical, they can never
actually exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do actually
exist because they are images of concepts belonging to the theory of optics,
i.e., they arise out of this theory. (41–42)

Both monochromatic and color photography, which Flusser notes repre-

sents a “higher level of abstraction,” are concepts encoded into the chemi-
cal or digital structures that cameras use to picture the world (44). A
photograph is understood by Flusser as an assemblage of technologies by
which the World of the visibly Real is conceptually “transcoded” (44).
Images are not reflections of the visible world, but transformations, muta-
tions, or, in Laruelle’s terms, “clones.” Flusser points towards a philoso-
phy of photography (without perhaps realizing it) that would be faithful
30 J. FARDY

to this insight: photography is already theoretical inasmuch as it conceptu-

ally transcodes what it captures. For what is true of the photographic con-
cepts of “black,” “white,” and “color,” notes Flusser, is also “true of all of
the other elements of photographs. They all represent transcoded con-
cepts that claim to have been reflected automatically from the world onto
the surface” (44).
Laruelle (2011) shares Flusser’s desire to jettison the metaphysics of
photographic “reflection” for the conceptuality of the “continent of flat
thoughts” in Laruelle’s words (29). But he takes his distance from Flusser,
because the latter ultimately seeks an ontological, which is to say, a philo-
sophical, definition of photography rooted in the techno-conceptual nature
of photographic “programs.” Flusser writes:

Every photograph […] corresponds to a specific combination of elements in

programs. Thanks to this bi-univocal relationship between universe and pro-
gram, in which a photograph corresponds to every point in the program and
a point in the program to every photograph, cameras are omniscient and
omnipotent in the photographic universe. But they also have to pay a high
price for their omniscience and omnipotence, this price being the reversal of
the vectors of significance. That is: Concepts no longer signify the world out
there (as in the Cartesian model); instead, the universe signifies the program
within cameras. (68)

Flusser recognizes a decoherence between photographic concepts and the

Real. Flusser’s perspective in this regard is quite similar to that of Laruelle’s.
But from a non-photographic perspective, Flusser’s approach to photog-
raphy is still too philosophical. It thinks photography according to a pro-
gram of ontology, concepts, and technological essences. Laruelle, by
contrast, seeks to de-philosophize photography by refusing either to
decide its nature or its relation to the Real. Photography, in Laruelle’s
view, does not need ontological grounds. This need is philosophy’s not
photography’s. Laruelle’s aim is to set photography on a non-­philosophical
vector to see what it may become in the absence of standard philosophy.
Laruelle resets photography theory according to a multiplicity of non-­
stabilized and de-hierarchized essences that are anti-reductionist in nature.
“Photography can be reduced neither to its technological conditions of
existence,” writes Laruelle (2011), “nor to the experiential complex […]
linked to the medium, perception or aesthetic norms. It is an immanent
process that traverses […] photography” (39). Photography seen non-­
photographically is no longer a stable ontological category. It is a “pro-
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 31

cess” of thought and imaging that enables a radically immanent,

non-decisional mode of thought. This process is rooted in a stance that
Laruelle calls the “photographic stance.”

Photographic Stance
The clone of the “photographic stance” is difficult to grasp. The term does
not designate the embodied act of photographing. It is a form of thought—
a perspective and position—that leaves undecided its own position and
perspective with respect to the Real. Laruelle (2011) writes: “We cannot
be certain that photography is a position or the taking up of a position
before the World, a decision of position towards the object or the motif”
(11–12). The statement deserves to be read literally: the photographic
stance “cannot be certain” that it takes a “decision of position” towards
the World. Were we to be certain that photography did take a decision on
this point, then the project of non-photography would collapse into a
philosophy of photography by rooting itself in a decision on the Real.
Clearly there are thinkers and photographers who see photography as a
way of taking a stance (or even a stand) towards the World. But Laruelle
is concerned to construct a normative or ideal non-philosophical figure by
way of “the photographic stance” that “cannot be certain” about the
World. This normative figure posed in the photographic stance stands for
the ideal non-philosopher who does not take a decision on, or a position
with respect to, the Real. This stance voided of decisional or positional
posturing is the point of departure for a thinking of photography and
photographic acts in a non-philosophical register.
It is important to bear in mind that the “photographic stance” has,
however, nothing to do with the body of the photographer. This must be
pointed out if only because Laruelle’s own words seem at times to confuse
matters. “Before the eye, the hand, the torso are implicated in it,” writes
Laruelle (2011), “it is from the most obscure and irreflexive depth of the
body that the photographic act departs” (12). The photographic stance is
an abstraction that immanently voids and “renounces all corporeal or psy-
chic intentionality” and is stripped of “decision or expression” (12). As
“being-in-photo” is voided of any decisive connection to the Real, so is
the “photographic stance” voided of any decisive connection with actual
photographic acts. Both clones are purely immanent to the structure of
non-philosophical thought. They are figures of thought that animate the
immanent surface or “flat thoughts” that comprise non-photography.
32 J. FARDY

Vision-Force
The photographic stance parallels “vision-force.” Recall that vision-force
is vision undivided. It names a state of vision prior to vision’s di-vision
between the seeing and seen. Vision-force is the “body” of the photo-
graphic stance. The photographic stance, Laruelle (2011) notes, is rooted
in the “body” of vision. This body is an abstract body and is not to be
confused with “the substance-body, [… it is] a body absolutely without
organs” (12). Readers of Deleuze and Guattari will no doubt spot the
reference to their concept of the “body without organs.” A brief digres-
sion though Deleuze and Guattari’s concept will help clarify Laruelle’s
clone of their concept.
The concept of the “body without organs” is elaborated in Deleuze
and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. At one level, the Body without
Organs (or BwO) is the body become dis-organ-ized: stripped of organi-
zational and functional hierarchies and divisions of labor. The body in
question here is not a physical body, but a body of thought or way of
thinking—a philosophical corpus. Deleuze and Guattari’s model rejects
the inherited dualisms and splits of western metaphysics such as Descartes’s
scission of thinking and feeling (mind and body). “The BwO is the field of
immanence,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “the plane of consistency specific
to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference
to any exterior agency)” (154). The “body without organs” is abstract
desire ever desiring without reaching an end. It is a limit concept. “You
never reach the Body without Organs,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “you
are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (150).
Laruelle clones the raw material of Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO. The
“body absolutely without organs”—vision-force registered in the photo-
graphic stance—is an immanent rendering of vision prior to the decision
or scission of photographer and World. It is prior to decision, but not to
desire. The “photographic stance,” Laruelle (2011) writes is a desire to
“be rooted in oneself, to be held within one’s own immanence, to be at
one’s station rather than in a photographic position” (12). The
­photographic stance is an ideal stance that registers vision as a unitary
force prior to its organizational distribution into the vision proper to the
photographer, the camera, and the World. The photographic stance,
Laruelle continues, is “to naïve to be anything other than an indivisible
flux of vision, of which it is not even certain whether it will be divided by
the camera” (13). The “photographic stance” is Laruelle’s idealized non-
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 33

philosophical vantage. It is a stance that will not (and cannot) decide or

take a position on the Real. This ideal stance of vision-force cannot be
realized. Like the body without organs, this stance is an ideal and a desire.
That is why Laruelle calls this stance a “transcendental” body for it tran-
scends any individual photographer and indeed any possibility of actually
being realized. It is from this imagined and impossible perspective that
Laruelle (2011) seeks an immanent “photographic thought” that is not
“primarily relational, differential, or positional” with respect to the Real
(12–13). In the next section, we will see how this imagined naivete of the
non-­photographic stance mutates into a “science” of photography.

Science of Photography
Roland Barthes is a constant reference in photography theory. There is
scarcely a class in contemporary photo-theory that will not have some por-
tion of his last book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, on the
syllabus. But this canonization was late in coming. Geoff Dyer notes that
it was not until the late 1990s that Barthes’s later work began to be read
with appreciation by the theoretical and critical establishment. Assessing
Barthes’s importance ten years after his death, the New Statesmen, Dyer
notes, still “dwelled almost exclusively on his semiotics […] while dismiss-
ing the later, more personal works as ‘marginal, lacking the satisfying
stamp of authority’” (xii). The New Statesmen’s shortsighted criticism of
Barthes’s late work speaks volumes when heard with a Laruellean ear. The
strident subjectivism and literary creativity that mark Barthes’s late texts
like Camera Lucida seemed to academic professionals in theory and criti-
cism as lacking in rigor and the “authority” it signifies.
Starting from a “few personal impulses,” in Camera Lucida, Barthes
sought to “formulate the fundamental feature” of his experience of pho-
tography (8–9). Taking himself as the model for all photographic specta-
tors, Barthes tried to theorize the passionate and affective experience of
the subjectivity of photographic spectatorship. He attempted to find in his
singular experience a universal theory. In this effort, Barthes found himself
torn between the “conventional debate between science and subjectivity”
(8). Could there by a science, a theory, that could bridge the singular and
the universal?
Barthes’s impassioned search for a science of photography transmutes
over the course of the text into a quest to find the essence of his mother in
photographs. Camera Lucida was written in the wake of the death of
34 J. FARDY

Barthes’s mother to whom he had been devoted. Barthes’s initial theoreti-

cal commitment to discover a science of photography—an essence of the
photographic—gradually transmutes into an effort to establish a “science
of the unique being” (71). Barthes’s grief-stricken search to find the
essence of his mother in photographs led him finally to the discovery of
what he calls the “Winter Garden Photograph,” which he chooses not to
reproduce in the text. The photograph shows his mother as a little girl
standing in a covered botanical garden in the year 1898. This photograph
“was indeed essential,” writes Barthes, “it achieved for me, utopically, the
impossible science of the unique being” (71).
Laruelle picks up on Barthes’s concept of a photographic “science of
the unique being” so as to clone and develop it. In The Concept of Non-­
Photography, he writes:

Let us remark on Barthes’s statement and give it a literal sense: a photo real-
izes this “impossible science of the unique being.” The science of photogra-
phy is indeed a science of identity in so far as it is unique, but it is a science
that is entirely possible if one subtracts the unicity from its psychological and
metaphysical interpretations. (43)

The photograph of Barthes’s mother at age five in 1898 is, for Laruelle,
literally an “impossible science” of Barthes’s mother’s “unique being.”
The photographic image of Barthes’s mother is a photographic image, and
as such cannot constitute a “science” of her unique being.
Indeed, Laruelle (2011) argues that the essence of Barthes’s mother is
unique precisely because “in principle” she “has no copy” (43). Laruelle
literalizes Barthes’s rhetorical observation: a photographic science of the
unique being is impossible. But a science of the unique “being-in-photo”
is possible. Barthes’s philosophical perspective led him into a series of
amphibologies: impossible/possible, unique/copy, and living/dead.
Photography for Barthes, Laruelle (2011) writes:

is of the order of the semi-real, semi-ideal hybrid, of the living-dead or the

double. Science, however—this is what we postulate—science, at least
brought back to its ultimate conditions, is science only of the identity […]
which, in order to be real, can never be given in the mode of presence and
of specularity. (43–44)

Identity is visible in the being-in-photo. The science of photography seizes

on this. The science of the unique being of Barthes’s mother seen in the
Winter Garden Photograph is unique. The “being-in-photo” afforded
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 35

Barthes a new “idea” of his mother. This is what Laruelle suggests when
he writes in The Concept of Non-Photography that the “photo is an Idea—
an Idea-in-image” (37). What Barthes experienced that day in looking at
the Winter Garden Photograph was a unique identity of his mother as a
photograph: the uniqueness of her being-in-photo. It is this “science of
identity” that is possible via photography.
But why call this way of thinking “science”? What work does this term
do in Laruelle’s lexicon? Science in Laruelle’s thought refers to a “generic”
practice of scientific thought. Laruelle’s sense of science shares with the
hard and soft sciences a generic commitment to being open-minded and
open to experiment. Its primary aim is to approach philosophy as raw
material experimentally. Laruelle’s “scientific” thought is a clone of non-­
philosophy insofar as science names a stance that will not decide on any-
thing prior to experiment. It is a way of thinking that resists the flash of
philosophical illumination in favor of keeping things dark and undecided
rather than decide on them prematurely and with a false sense of security
granted by philosophical privilege. It will also not reify the philosophical
narrative of passing from darkness to light. For this narrative is “the fuel of
philosophy” in Alexander Galloway’s words (134). Philosophers, Galloway
continues, “are forever transiting between shadow and illumination,” and
philosophy auto-validates itself via a retrospective narrative of its supposed
transit from darkness to light. (134). For Laruelle, Galloway concludes,
“the problem is not that philosophy is dark. The problem is that philoso-
phy is not dark enough” (134). The problem is that philosophy refuses to
recognize the darkness of the unknown as darkness. Philosophy abhors the
dark. It decides against it to dispel it. In the case of photography, philoso-
phy seeks to illuminate photography by way of a discourse on the Real.
What it cannot countenance are the opacities of photography and the pos-
sibility of distinguishing it from bifurcated concerns over its capacity or
inability to frame or decide the Real.
We can think of the science of non-philosophy as analogous to “experi-
mental art.” Through experimentation artists discover (or create) new
forms of art. Likewise, the non-philosopher experiments with the raw
materials of philosophy to discover (or create) new forms of thought.
“Whereas philosophy’s spontaneous practices relate it to itself and turn it
into an auto-exercise or an automatism of repetition,” writes Laruelle in
Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, “a science relates philosophy to itself and
represents a change of base in our relation to it” (126). A generic scientific
view changes one’s “relation” to philosophy by freeing up capacities for
experimentation and exploration without concern for institutionalized
36 J. FARDY

readings or canonical interpretations. A “scientific” approach to philosophy

is open-minded or naïve in the best sense of the term. As Laruelle notes in
The Concept of Non-Photography: “Science does not serve us here as a para-
digm in its results or in the knowledge it produces, but in its stance” (33).
The non-philosophical or scientific “stance” and the “photographic
stance” are clones of one another. Each is a mode of approach to the
World or the Real that grants each its transcendence by virtue of its fore-
closure to full epistemic access. And each frees philosophy and photogra-
phy respectively from the paradigmatic support given by the concept of
the Real or the World endemic to philosophy proper and philosophies of
photography. Philosophy and photography grow dark in the light of non-­
philosophy. To see the darkness of philosophy and photography is the aim
of the “science” of non-philosophy and non-photography. If some readers
are frustrated by the theoretical “failure” of Barthes’s Camera Lucida,
then they will be rendered utterly apoplectic by the philosophical defeat of
The Concept of Non-Photography. Yet this defeat, this fall into darkness and
obscurity, illuminates the strangeness of photography and photographic
thought in ways that enable a certain experimental freedom to emerge
from the ruined edifices of standard philosophy of photography.

Quantization
The strangeness of Laruelle’s science of non-photography becomes only
stranger when he quantizes it. This aspect of his science of photography is
given its most forceful treatment in Photo-Fiction in which he develops his
quantic prose. We explored Laruelle’s quantic fiction in the last chapter.
But here we will deepen that understanding by examining the intersection
of physics and post-Heideggerian philosophy.
The quantum world is a world of uncertainty. Indeed, one of its core
principles is the “Uncertainty Principle” formulated by Werner Heisenberg
in 1927. Simply put, the Uncertainty Principle states that it is impossible
to know precisely an atomic particle’s momentum and its position simul-
taneously. The more you know about one, the less you know about the
other. The Uncertainty Principle rules out the possibility of knowing
everything about a quantum system. There is an epistemic loss at the start.
Full knowledge of a quantum system in the classical sense is impossible.
Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s mentor, believed that the study of quantum phe-
nomena required an entirely new philosophical framework. The classical
framework of concepts is useful for studying the behavior macroscopic
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 37

objects like billiard balls and planets. These objects conform to our every-
day intuitions concerning cause, effect, location, momentum and so forth.
But quantum behavior does not. Quantum objects can be said to be in
more than one place at a time. Causation does not operate in a classical
sense at the quantum scale either and the phenomenological character of
quantum objects appear quite odd from a classical perspective. Electrons,
for example, exhibit particle-like and wave-like behavior. Bohr developed
his “Complementarity Principle” to account for this non-intuitive result.
Put simply, the Complementarity Principle states that wave-like and
particle-­like descriptions of quantum phenomena are equally valid.
None of this makes a good deal of sense when seen from the macro-
scopic or classical world-view. Here we can know the speed and position
of a body. Waves and particles are distinct. And we can have epistemic
certainty and clarity about the behavior of systems. Not so in the quantum
world. That is why Bohr concluded in 1927 that “quantum theory is char-
acterized by the acknowledgement of a fundamental limitation in the clas-
sical physical ideas when applied to atomic phenomena” (Plotnitsky 1994,
66). Bohr’s “quantum postulate” attributes to “any atomic process an
essential discontinuity […] completely foreign to the classical theories”
(Plotnitsky 1994, 66). This “discontinuity” had profound epistemological
implications for conventional notions of causality. The quantum world
does not operate according to commonsense notions of before and after,
which problematizes causal explanations. The problem of causality only
intensified with the discovery that it was not possible to fully disentangle
the knowledge gleaned from the study of atomic phenomena from the
means used to study them. Observer and observed are both quantum sys-
tems and as such they are co-implicating and co-determining systems. The
“quantum postulate implies that any observation of atomic phenomena,”
wrote Bohr, “will involve an interaction with the agency of observation
not to be neglected. Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary
sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of
observation” (Plotnitsky 1994, 66). Thus, Bohr concludes, “an unam-
biguous definition of the state of the [quantum] system is naturally no
longer possible, and there can be no question of causality in the ordinary
sense of the word” (Plotnitsky 1994, 67).
In Complementarity, Arkady Plotnitsky argues that Bohr’s quantum
postulate parallels the poststructural critique of classical epistemology. The
classical world picture assumes that phenomena can be studied without
influencing or changing the object of study in the process. This secures
38 J. FARDY

epistemological foundationalism: phenomena can be known as they really

are in and of themselves. Classical epistemology promises knowledge of
reality as it really is—knowledge of the Real—we might say. Plotnitsky
argues that the epistemological break with the classical world-view insti-
tuted by the “quantum postulate” is paralleled in the work of Georges
Bataille.
Bataille was a contemporary of Bohr’s. He contributed to the study of
anthropology, philosophy, and art history. He was also a highly original
writer who was influential in Surrealist circles. Plotnitsky is especially con-
cerned with two concepts developed by Bataille: “restricted economy”
and “general economy.” The terms have nothing to do with economics in
the standard sense of the term. Rather his terms refer to economies of
energy and knowledge. A “restricted economy” of knowledge is one in
which the energy spent in acquiring knowledge is returned by an equiva-
lent gain in knowledge. Nothing is lost in a restricted economy of knowl-
edge. But in a “general economy,” energies are spent that do not result in
a return of knowledge. General economies are marked by a loss in knowl-
edge in some measure. A “general economy,” writes Bataille, is one in
which “excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be
utilized” (Plotnitsky 1994, 20).
The “quantum postulate” marked a break with classical epistemology
and instituted a general economic framework for the study of physics. A
parallel break was instituted by Bataille’s general economy postulate. The
latter has transformed many disciplines such as anthropology. Today, it is
standard epistemological practice for anthropologists to take account of
how the process of studying a given culture influences and marks the cul-
ture. It is today assumed that full knowledge of the independent reality of
the culture under observation is impossible. Plotnitsky argues that the
general economic framework—manifested independently and in very dif-
ferent ways by Bohr and Bataille—historically helped to establish the
“anti-epistemological” foundations of contemporary theory in the sci-
ences and human sciences.
Derrida, for example, recognized the implications of the general eco-
nomic framework for philosophy. Philosophical knowledge could now be
seen as a general economy operating in the guise of a restricted economy.
This he saw as clearly apparent in the persistent disavowal of writing, rheto-
ric, and signification within the philosophical tradition. Standard philosophy
tends to operate on the assumption that ideas are constant whereas the words
can be substituted, translated, or transcoded without any loss of knowledge.
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 39

Derrida rejects this assumption. The words philosophy employs—the instru-

ments it uses—play a non-trivial role in shaping the production of philo-
sophical knowledge. The language used to philosophically study phenomena
has an effect on philosophical knowledge. Systems of language and systems
of knowledge are intimately connected and co-­determining processes. On
the basis of this insight, Derrida set about reconstructing the norms of phil-
osophical prose. Writing, he argued, was no longer to be treated as a neutral
medium for philosophical ideas, but as decisive in their production. Derrida
called for a philosophy of “grammatology”—a “science” of writing—under-
stood in general economic terms.
Grammatology is a “science” that marks its point of departure at the
nexus of writing and concepts. Derrida’s science of writing—his gramma-
tology—is “generic” in Laruelle’s sense insofar as its aim is not to establish
laws and results, but rather to hold open what philosophy might be (or
become) once writing is avowed as a general economy in philosophical
knowledge production. Grammatology is a “strategic,” non-systematic,
and non-totalizing form of thought. “Strategic,” writes Derrida, “because
no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theo-
logically the totality of the field” (Plotnitsky 1994, 38). Grammatology
takes as axiomatic that whatever truth is possible in philosophy is pro-
duced within the immanent field of the “text” of philosophical exposition.
The truth is not outside or external to the conditions of writing, but is
rather always already conditioned immanently by words, figures, images,
and other “textual” constructions. The grammatologist is strategic in her
textual deployments for these are the conditions of immanent knowledge
production. There is no truth above or beyond—no final telos “or theme
of domination”—that would nullify the “play” of words, signs, and the
multiplicity of literal and metaphorical meanings they generate. It is this
truth immanent to the play of language that orients Derrida’s grammato-
logical project.
Laruelle shares Derrida’s desire to break the binaries that structure meta-
physics and they share a commitment to experimenting with the norms of
philosophical prose. But Laruelle is quick to distance himself from Derrida
and deconstruction. In Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle writes:

In many ways […] non-philosophy could recall the dominant currents of con-
temporary continental philosophy. It is sometimes interpreted by its adversar-
ies as a new species of “deconstruction” and by deconstruction itself as a form
thereof but an ungrateful one, devoid of the spirit of appreciation. (168)
40 J. FARDY

Laruelle ultimately rejects deconstruction on the grounds that it is still too

attached to the philosophical tradition. Deconstruction, along with other
varieties of poststructuralism have, according to Laruelle, merely substi-
tuted the dominant binaries of classical metaphysics with a new vocabulary
that nonetheless leaves intact the same “structural” invariants of philoso-
phy. The apparent general economy of poststructural theory turns out, on
Laruelle’s reading, to be a restricted economy.
Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Irigaray, and many other poststructuralists
turned away from the vocabularies of subject, unity, singularity, structure,
certainty, reason, and other textual markers of classical metaphysics. They
sought to reorient the whole of philosophical thought in terms of differ-
ence or “radical alterity” in order to awaken philosophy to what had been
repressed, marginalized, or effaced: minoritarian subjects, rhetoric, multi-
plicity, undecidability and others. They sought to resituate the whole of
philosophical thought in an immanent conceptualization that repudiated
the legacies of transcendental thought. For all this, Laruelle is grateful. In
Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle notes that the movement has “fortu-
nately delivered us from certain a certain latent mythology of metaphys-
ics” (173). Yet the poststructural project, in Laruelle’s view, has remained
fixed by the “invariant” conditions immanent to the Philosophical
Decision. Again, in Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle notes that post-
structuralism has

modified the image of thought, invented a new relation of thought to its

“object.” For the most part, this invention is as follows: thought is no lon-
ger what describes an already given object or one that is present before it
[…] but what discovers or manifests it in the aftermath of its exercise, “proj-
ect” or “decision.” (172)

The judgment here is damning, albeit in a subtle way. Taking undecid-

ability and difference as its starting points rather than certitude and same-
ness, poststructuralism constituted a new “object” if not a new “telos” for
philosophy. This new object or “image of thought” was understood self-­
critically to have been produced by the immanent organization of lan-
guage. The poststructural reorientation of language reset the norms of
philosophical prose by demanding heightened self-reflexivity and critical-
ity of its writers. Laruelle, however, detects in poststructuralism the trace
of the Philosophical Decision. For to decide that the Real is immanent to
language is still to decide on the Real. The “new” thought of poststructur-
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 41

alism, according to Laruelle, remains trapped within the restricted econ-

omy of standard philosophy. What must be deconstructed in deconstructive
thought is the authority of philosophy itself. Laruelle seeks a way beyond
the self-legitimating (and somewhat self-aggrandizing) gesture of decid-
ing on the fate of metaphysics in favor of resetting thought axiomatically.

Axiomatic Polemics
The axiom of the foreclosure of the Real as One cannot be argued and is
thus axiomatically stated and polemically advanced by non-philosophy.
This is evident in what Ian James (2012) identifies as Laruelle’s “polemi-
cal” attack on the linguistic idealism of deconstruction (11). Laruelle
“articulates the theoretical and philosophical aspiration of his work around
a demand for materialism,” which goes hand-in-hand with what “could be
characterized as a full-frontal attack on the category of ‘text’ and the struc-
turalist paradigm which privileges such a category” (11). Deconstruction’s
transcoding of the Real into the terms of linguistics is polemically repudi-
ated by Laruelle in the name of a materialist avowal of the Real as that
which cannot be subsumed under any sign for the Real. It is this polemical
thrust of Laruelle’s work that distinguishes it from critical poststuc-
tural projects like that of deconstruction.
Critique is always in some measure committed to that which it cri-
tiques. Critique remains immanently tied to the field of debate and the
terms set by that which it critiques. This is what distinguishes non-­
philosophy from poststructuralism. Poststructuralism, whatever else it
might be, is a critical project. It has by various theoretical and method-
ological strategies sought to bring about an immanent critique of the
philosophical tradition. Deconstruction, for example, is not so much a set
of doctrines or a counter-conceptual framework as much as it is a method
of careful or close reading that is critically attentive to the ways in which
statements can undermine their claims. This is not all deconstruction
amounts to. But it is a fair description of much of it. And despite the
ongoing tension between followers of Derridean deconstruction and those
who take their cues from the historical archaeology of Michel Foucault’s
work, the latter shares with the former a commitment to critique through
the dismantling of received historical wisdom. Discourse analysis is princi-
pally a form of critique that mines the historical archive to uncover the
ways in which power has structured disciplinary knowledge. Polemic is
different. It seeks to go beyond critique by axiomatically resetting the
42 J. FARDY

terms of the debate. One of Laruelle’s para-figures in this respect is Jean

Baudrillard. A turn to his work will help clarify the polemical thrust of
Laruelle’s project.
In 1976, Baudrillard sent in a long essay to Critique, which at the time
was under the editorship of Foucault. The title was brash: Forget Foucault.
Baudrillard accused Foucault (but especially Foucault’s followers and imi-
tators) of reifying the very thing Foucault set out to diagnose and critique:
power. Baudrillard wrote:

Do you think that power, economy, sex—all the real’s big numbers—would
have stood up one single instant without a fascination to support them
which originates precisely in the inversed mirror [of critique] where they are
reflected and where their imaginary catastrophe generates a tangible and
immanent gratification? (46)

Baudrillard argues that if Foucault is right in thinking that discourse gen-

erates reality-effects, then this must also be true of the discursive effects of
Foucault’s own theoretical critique. Foucault’s critical “fascination” with
the “real’s big numbers”—power, economy, and sex—produces and mag-
nifies, Baudrillard argues, the same power effects, albeit in the “inverse
mirror” of criticism. Thus, Foucault’s work and the journal for which he
for a time served as an editor, Critique, only increases the reality-effects of
the subjects it critiques. Baudrillard asserted that in the media-saturated
present, reality was dead and with it critique. Thus, critique had to be
transcended by what Baudrillard called “theory-fictions.”
It would not be fair or accurate to conflate Baudrillard’s concept of the
Real with that of Laruelle’s, but they do share a marked desire to escape
the englobing and constraining logic of thinking according to the Real.
Laruelle and Baudrillard are committed (for different reasons) to jettison-
ing the concept of the Real and with it models of critique immanently tied
to that conception. And both are concerned with a central question: how
does one resist the model of critique without perpetuating it? How does
one avoid the vicious circle of criticizing critique? Baudrillard’s title is tell-
ing. Forget Foucault is not only a critique of the man or his ideas. It is a
polemic against what Foucault’s name came to stand for by 1976. And one
of things it came to signify was “critique”. Thus, to “forget” Foucault was
a call to forget critique. This should not be confused with the ordinary
concept of forgetting. Rather it should be taken in the sense accorded to
the phrase “forget it!” Thus, Baudrillard’s title can be read: stop doing
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 43

critique! The essay is a polemic more than a critique. It has a destructive

(not merely deconstructive) edge to it. Polemic, as its ancient Greek ety-
mology tells us, is linked to war. Polemic does not work in the field of its
adversary. It takes the field.
The polemical approach is marked by an axiomatic impulse. Baudrillard’s
famed axiom—reality is dead—structured his work. Likewise, Laruelle’s
axiom that the Real is foreclosed to epistemic access, and his repudiation
of the Philosophical Decision, structures the field of non-philosophy. The
axiom is the chief weapon in the polemicist’s arsenal. The only possible
response to axioms is necessarily axiomatic. One cannot argue with axioms
for they are assertions and not arguments. Laruelle’s axiomatic insistence
on the foreclosure of the Real and his equally axiomatic reduction of all
philosophy to the gesture of the Philosophical Decision are weapons in
what Deleuze and Guattari might call Laruelle’s “war machine.” A brief
detour through the concept of the “war machine” will help to clarify this
point.
The “war machine” in Deleuze and Guattari is a figure of resistance. It
is drawn from the conceptual strata of war and armies. It is a model of
thought as resistance. But its model is not that of a conventional army
operating under orders from above. The war machine is modeled on a
raiding party rather than a professionally, organized and hierarchized
deployment of force. On the field of thought, the war machine is a desire
and a tactic for outplaying and frustrating the aims of order demanded by
organized thought. Indeed, the text in which they articulate the war
machine, A Thousand Plateaus, is itself a war machine. The very dis-­
organization of the text into a set of relatively autonomous “plateaus” is
designed to frustrate the sovereign force of standard philosophical thought
and structured explication. The text makes war not to “win” in the man-
ner of a teleological project. Rather it raids and ruins the edifices of phi-
losophy so as to transform it.
Non-philosophy in this respect is close to the spirit of Deleuze and
Guattari. Whereas critique remains trapped in the restricted knowledge
economy of that which critiques, polemics is a war machine “set against
the apparatuses” of standard philosophy. But it does not seek to “win” out
over philosophy. Such a teleological project would merely reproduce and
reify the epistemic violence of standard philosophy. The war machine of
non-philosophy instead seeks to establish its autonomy and to radically
disrupt the smooth operations of philosophy by seizing and repurposing
its raw materials.
44 J. FARDY

The polemical edge of Laruelle’s work leaves its mark in non-­

photography. Laruelle’s work rejects the taxonomical categorization typical
of standard photography theory. He does not seek to define or deconstruct
photography’s component concepts: technology, image, aesthetics, prac-
tice, et cetera. Neither does he disambiguate the camera from the photog-
rapher. Instead, Laruelle treats all of these as elements of a purely
non-photographic image—an image of thought—that opens an alternate
perspective on standard philosophy and standard philosophies of photogra-
phy. This non-photographic image of thought is polemically placed into a
state of “superposition.” The point is not to decide its nature, its aesthetic
character, its relation to the Real, nor does it decide that it is simply “unde-
cidable” in the spirit of deconstruction. The point is to decline to decide. It
is thus not for Laruelle, as for Barthes (2010), that photography is simply
“unclassifiable” because it contains a vast “disorder” of objects, images,
references, and aesthetic practices (4). Laruelle instead radicalizes Barthes’s
suggestion: it is philosophers who “impose” on photography the prob-
lematics of classification and ontological confusion. The “disorder” of pho-
tography, for Laruelle, is the projected disorder imposed upon it by
philosophy. This imposition of disorder then becomes the retrospective
justification for any standard philosophy of photography.
Laruelle axiomatically chooses a different starting point for his dis-
course on photography. He begins with the material fact that the
­photographic image is materially unified, but conceptually irreducible to a
single theory. To think photography, it is necessary to place unity and
multiplicity into a conceptual state of superposition. If photography the-
ory is to become adequate to the material and conceptual complexity of
the photographic surface, then, Laruelle argues (2011), it must fashion a
clone of the “continent of flat thoughts” immanent to the photographic
plane (29). Just as a given photographic image can have multiple subjects
and yet is materially unified, so too should thought on photography place
into superposition the dualities of photography. Truth/appearance, real-
ity/fiction, art/science, and so forth are no longer to be seen as a philo-
sophical “disorder,” but a superposition of states. The conceptual
“disorder” imposed by philosophy on photography is thus diffracted by
Laruelle’s insistence that the photographic image is also a form of thought
in which these dualities are made manifest and radicalized. A thought of
photography must in this sense be literally a thought of photography and
not a philosophy imposed upon it.
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 45

A Fractal Geometry of Photography

What would a theory of photography look like if the decisional imperatives
of standard philosophy were subtracted from it? Laruelle’s answer: a frac-
tal. My question and Laruelle’s answer should be understood in ultimately
non-visual terms. What Laruelle (2011) calls a “unified theory of photog-
raphy as fractality” is a theoretical structure that is internally unlimited as
are the algorithmic structures made visible in the geometrical patterns of
fractals (72). To make this clear, a brief detour though the wonderfully
weird world of fractality is necessary.
The term “fractal” was coined in 1977 by maverick mathematician
Benoit Mandelbrot. A fractal is a pattern that repeats at all scales to infin-
ity. It’s easy to make a fractal. One way is to draw a square and divide it
into nine equal smaller squares. Now erase the center square. Now divide
each of the remaining squares into nine smaller squares and erase the cen-
ter square from each of these. Imagine you did this to infinity. The total
length of the line segments of all the squares in the pattern approaches
infinity while the total surface area approaches zero.
Fractals can be made by hand and on computers. But Mandelbrot
found them in nature in snowflakes, arteries, trees, coastlines, clouds, and
many more. The jagged line of fractalized nature was entirely foreign to
the Euclidian world of idealized straight lines. As Mandelbrot notes in the
opening lines of Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension: “Many impor-
tant spatial patters of Nature are either irregular or fragmented to such an
extreme degree that Euclid […] is hardly of any help in describing their
form” (1). A fractal is infinite and infinitely complex. “Some fractal sets are
curves, others are surfaces, still others are clouds of disconnected points,”
writes Mandelbrot, “and yet others are so oddly shaped that there are no
good terms for them in either the sciences or arts” (1–2). Mandelbrot
drew on both science and art in order to establish a non-Euclidian approach
to space and dimension. His first publications were filled with pictures. He
drew on a diverse array of images from computer-generated shapes to art
such as Hokusai’s masterpiece, The Great Wave, to coastlines, meteorites
and moon craters. His books were part picture and part math books. Like
non-philosophy, Mandelbrot drew on art, philosophy, and science to for-
mulate a thought that transcends the standard limitations of each.
Laruelle’s call for a “unified theory of photography of fractality” is a call
to render a theory of photography that stretches the concept of photogra-
phy to infinity. Rather than side with the semiotic school, the art-historical
46 J. FARDY

school, the visual studies school, and so on, Laruelle takes these as facets of
a unified (but not homogenized) approach to photography: an infinite or
fractal science of photography. Laruelle’s fractal science of photography is
not a theory of images so much as a theory of how to look at photographs,
the medium of photography, and the practice of photography.
“Mandelbrotian fractality is geometrical,” but the photo, writes Laruelle
(2011), “imposes a more ‘intensive’ or ‘phenomenal’ conception of fractal-
ity. A photo ‘looks,’ must be ‘looked at’ and the wholly internal drama in
this operation harbors a new concept of fractality. […] We shall call it a ‘non-
Mandelbrotian’ or ‘generalized fractality’” (178). The repeating pattern of
gazes between the “look” of the photograph and looking at it theoretically
creates a fractal structure. This fractal structure is purely ideational and non-
visual. It is a fractal picture of looking; a fractal structure of gazes that iter-
ates itself through the recursive structural pairing of look and looking.

What’s the Point?

Let us for a moment review what we have explored in this chapter. We have
discussed Laruelle’s radically immanent theory of photographic images: the
“being-in-photo” of the image. We have unpacked Laruelle’s notion of the
“photographic stance” and “vision-force” as a non-­decisional body of vision.
It is a stance prior to any decision concerning the difference between seeing
and seen and their respective validity with respect to the Real. We have also
examined in more depth Laruelle’s “science of photography,” which calls for
a cultivated naivete and open-mindedness with respect to what photography
is (and might become). Moving from the quantic to the geometrical model
of “generalized fractality” enables Laruelle to explore the abyssal and para-
doxical depth of the “continent of flat thoughts.” All of this (and more)
constitutes the field, and activity, of non-photography. But if all non-pho-
tography amounted to was a playing around with “fictional” motifs drawn
from science and photographic practice, then it would amount to an inter-
esting read perhaps, but little more. However, non-photography, Laruelle
(2011) insists, is also an ethics that affirms “human universality” (viii).

Human Universality
Throughout his works, Laruelle makes direct or indirect allusions to
humanity. It is the north star of his ethics. Laruelle will refer to the human
of humanity by various names some of which are gender specific and oth-
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 47

ers more generic. These include: “Man,” “Man-in-Person,” and “Human-­

in-­Human.” These terms are clones and are largely interchangeable. The
hyphenations are Laruelle’s syntactical way of underscoring his immanent
conception of the human. The “human” in Laruelle’s ethics of humanity
should not be confused with the human of humanism or the humanist
tradition of the West nor with any philosophical concept of the human.
Rather, in a knowingly naïve way, Laruelle asks us to consider the human
in general or in “generic” terms. His “human” is not that of philosophical
thought but of “lived experience.” It is the human-in-person—actual and
real—that is Laruelle’s subject and not those figures that populate philo-
sophical elaborations on the human whether of the humanist, anti-­
humanist, or post-humanist variety.
Laruelle’s insistence on an ethics of the human flies in the face of the
position taken by most of his French contemporaries. Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and especially, Louis Althusser, all espoused
some version of anti-humanism or posthumanism in their effort to create
philosophies that would no longer uncritically place the human at its center.
Theirs was an admirable effort to “de-center” the privileging of the human
in philosophy in the name of the stranger, the oppressed, the forgotten,
other animals, and other stories and discourses buried beneath the citadel
of philosophical humanism. But Laruelle’s problem with these varieties of
philosophy after humanism is that they all take a position or make a decision
on the human. Each in their own ways decides on the human and in so
doing subjects the human to the violence or victimization of abstraction.
Rather than further victimize the human through standard philosophi-
cal abstraction and objectification, Laruelle opts to begin with the figure
of violation and victimization par excellence: the victim. As John
O’Maoilearca explains in All Thoughts are Equal:

The philosopher’s victim is an abstraction, a surrogate for a position, a “vic-

timological” distance. […] Laruelle is interested in … [those] victims […]
who exist below the philosophical radar, unheard of. […] These unrecorded
and sometimes unrecordable individuals […] are the victims who cannot be
victims, in man’s eyes, and yet without them, there could be no heroic
Victim, no suffering and resisting anthropos for the philosopher to cham-
pion. (58)

Laruelle’s figure of the victim, written sometimes as “victim-in-person” or

simply “the Victim” is something of a paradox. On the one hand, it appears
48 J. FARDY

to be precisely the kind of abstraction that he opposes in discussions of the

human. But, on the other, it is a syntactical attempt to close the “victimo-
logical distance” between the victim and the non-victim. For, as Laruelle
(2015) states in an interview concerning the victim in his work:

In a general way, within an ontological representation of the Victim, she is

only originally present with some distance, a distance I call victimological
distance. Even when she seems given in some very immediate way as in the
case of television images, the Victim is, in reality, given across a distance,
that of the image. This distance is the mark of philosophy. (74)

Victims are always “over there” or “on the screen” or “in the news”
until they’re not. Until that day when it is you or your loved ones, victim-
ization is a distant phenomenon. We can feel pity, compassion, sympathy,
but it is a distanced and generalized feeling. When it is you or your loved
ones, then it’s no longer distant. Then and there it becomes immanent
and personal.
Laruelle’s major text on the victim is his General Theory of Victims, but
elements of this idea can be found in many other works, including his texts
on photography. In Photo-Fiction, for example, Laruelle argues that too
often photography establishes victimological distance. Photographs of vic-
tims sometimes “astonishes” viewers, but this often does not compel
action (84). “It is not so astonishing,” writes Laruelle (2012), “that pho-
tographs are filled with the dead, the assassinated, complete and incom-
plete infants, the living universally condemned to death” (84).
Astonishment at the sight of photographs of victims betrays a false con-
ception of the Real. Should we really be surprised at the sight of victimiza-
tion? Outraged, yes, but astonished? To be astonished by the image is to
remain fastened to what we sadly already know: there are victims. The
point is not to be astonished. The point of such images, for Laruelle, is to
defend the human against violation.
Laruelle’s work in certain respects parallels the innovative and ethically
courageous work of the photographer and theorist, Ariella Azoulay, who
argues that photographs of victimization should be read as claims made by
a global citizenry bound by photography—a “citizenry of photography”
in her terms—that use photography not to astonish, but to compel action.
Photographs of victimization are to be understood according to a differ-
ent measure than that of victimological distance. Azoulay (2008) writes
that “photography is one of the distinct practices by means of which indi-
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 49

viduals can establish a distance between themselves and power in order to

observe [and] challenge its actions” (105). The photograph of the victim
is always potentially an instance of photographic resistance. It always has
the potential for us to take a critical distance or perspective on power by
drawing close to the victim and seeing him or her as one of our fellow
“citizens of photography.” We are bound together in a stance of vision: of
seeing and being seeing in photographs. And this photographic together-
ness is a tie that can bind and resist the otherwise distancing effects of
philosophy and the image. Azoulay and Laruelle, despite their profound
differences, both insist that photographs of victimization must entail an
ethics of interpretation that seeks to close the victimological distance
established by standard photographic and philosophical practice.
Photography on Laruelle’s score is the resistance of the “body of
vision.” Photographic vision opens a parallel perspective to that of the
Real. And in so doing frames a utopian space beyond the restricted econo-
mies of “image,” “reference,” “truth,” “reality,” and “World.” Non-­
photography sees these concepts as always arriving too late. They do not
capture the immanence of photographic acts. They do not capture the
complexity of the act at which point photographer, apparatus, and
­photographed exist in a “superposition,” and not in the linear and causal
form afforded by a retrospective philosophical reconstruction. It is this
precarious point immanent to the Real of the act that demands to be
thought, argues Laruelle, when scenes of violence find their way to us by
photographs. For, we do not need to decide on the Real to side with its
victims. To read images of victimization in light of the world risks falling
into the trap of what Adorno and Horkheimer, in a different context,
called the problem of “doubling the world” in thought (2). If thought
were to realize itself as an idealized photographic representation—a one-
to-one tracing of the world in thought—it would only double what we
already known and have: the world and its cruelty. To Laruelle’s thinking,
indeed, it is senseless and cruel to speak of victims seen in photographs as
victims of the Real world for the victim is without world. It is not enough
to say how is this possible in “our” world; for Laruelle it is necessary to
cancel the philosophical concept of the Real world in the name of the
deterritorialized victim. What the world rejects—the victim—is reason
enough to reject the “real” world. Photography theory’s response to
images of violence or victimization, Laruelle suggests, should take the risk
of refusing the rhetoric of the world and the Real in the name of those
without access to either: the Victim.
50 J. FARDY

Non-School
Laruelle seeks by way of non-photography to elide the moment of decid-
ing finally what photography is. He seeks a fractalized, non-photographic
essence that iterates theoretically to infinity what a standard philosophy of
photography would seek to close down and take a definitive position on.
We have seen how this strategy of not taking a definitive decision on pho-
tography does not stymie thinking about photography. Indeed, having
jettisoned the standard approach to decide the object of his inquiry,
Laruelle leads us to see how a non-philosophical perspective productively
undertermines photography.
No longer ensnared by philosophy’s demand to objectify photogra-
phy according to the logic of the Real, Laruelle’s non-photography
thinks photography according to the thought immanently inscribed in
photographic images and the stance from which they issue. This thought
immanent to photography is, however, not an “essence” in the standard
sense. Non-photography declines to seek a philosophical essence of pho-
tography. Rather it aims at a creative use of immanent photographic
thought to craft a philo-fiction or photo-fiction empowered to chal-
lenge philosophy and the decisional cut that divides knowledge into the
arts and sciences.
Finally, we have seen that non-photography is also an ethics of human
universality that aims to close “victimological distance.” Non-photography
is indeed a strange thought and even a thought of the stranger. It migrates,
moves, and morphs. Non-photography is an opening beyond the enclo-
sure and englobing sovereignty of thought grounded in the Real and epis-
temologically restricted economies. In the next chapter, I demonstrate
how this kind of thinking can be used.

Bibliography
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.
James, Ian. The New French Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
Laruelle, François. Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection of the Victim: François
Laruelle in Conversation with Philippe Petit. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith.
Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
———. Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. Translated by Drew S. Burk.
Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
 NON-PHOTOGRAPHY 51

———. The Concept of Non-Photography. Translated by Robin Mackay. New York:

Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011.
Long, J.J., Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch, eds. Photography: Theoretical
Snapshots. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
 CHAPTER 4

Explication to Performance

Abstract This chapter shows how non-photographic thought can be

practiced or performed. We will see, in fact, that non-philosophy is a kind
of performance art of philosophy. The chapter brings together many of
the themes that have been explored thus far and combines them in a prose
experiment.

Keywords Theoretical installation • Black box • Matrix • Photo-fiction

Theoretical Installation
Among Laruelle’s many synonyms or clones for non-philosophical prose,
including quantic writing, philo-fiction, and photo-fiction, is that of “the-
oretical installation.” As I write this, I am about halfway through teaching
a course on the history of installation art. I have come to see that any
discrete history or definition of this art practice is wrongheaded for it is a
history and an idea that has been largely motivated by an attempt to dis-
rupt the standard categories of art history. Installation is an art of organiz-
ing spaces in order to induce a questioning of standard art-historical
categories and critical distinctions.
The third chapter of Photo-Fiction is titled “Photo-Fiction: A Theoretical
Installation.” The term “installation” appeals to Laruelle for like “non-­
photography” (or “non-philosophy”), installation is a radically unortho-
dox approach to artmaking that draws in a theoretically infinite array of

© The Author(s) 2018 53

J. Fardy, Laruelle and Non-Photography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93097-8_4
54 J. FARDY

themes. The introduction of the clone of “installation” into Laruelle’s

lexicon also marks a shift from an explication via photo-fiction to a
­performance of installation. Laruelle rhetorically stages the act of installing
a set of themes and gestures that alert the reader to the performative, and
not solely explicative, dimension of non-philosophical thinking. Laruelle
(2012) asks: “neither photographer nor aesthetician, what am I doing
here?” Answer: “I’m not doing aesthetics but I’m trying to build a thought
that exceeds or replaces the general process of philosophical aesthetics”
(12). The performative dimension is already here apparent in the manner
by which Laruelle splits his authorial voice into a pseudo-Socratic dia-
logue. This performative splitting of the authorial voice is doubled in a
further thematic of splitting performed throughout the chapter.
The standardized splits that issue from the schism of the Philosophical
Decision, notes Laruelle (2012), “merely splits philosophy into two halves
or two parallel attributes, real and thought” (13). This duality is polemi-
cally radicalized. What photo-fiction “will produce [and perform],”
Laruelle (2012) continues, “is a kind of chaos that is even more intense
than the photo, perhaps as a mixture of Cubism and fractality exerted on
the same conceptual material, on the basis of a special logic of what we
could call an art-fiction” (13). And, reaffirming his call for a creative sci-
ence of photography, Laruelle (2012) writes, that this “theoretical instal-
lation conjugates concepts (or philosophemes) and algebra within an
indivisible and entangled whole” (20).
Theoretical installation is a performance of non-photographic thought
that grants photography and photo-fiction their respective autonomy even
as they remain “entangled” or even “indivisible.” One can better under-
stand this by looking at photographs. Every visual element in a photo-
graph can be seen and conceptualized independently of the others even
while every element is immanently and indivisibly entangled within the
materially unified field of the photographic surface. The photograph sus-
pends the opposition and exceeds the philo-decisional split. But one might
ask: does non-photographic performance still perform some kind of con-
ceptual act on photography? Does it not still make photography an object
of conceptual reflection? To an extent, yes. But it radically undermines the
authority and stability of standard philosophies of photography. This
undermining is a performative more than a conceptual activity. Non-­
photography’s thought on photography is precisely a performative strat-
egy that seeks to grant photographic practice its autonomy. It aims to
render photography as a parallel discourse and not to epistemologically
 EXPLICATION TO PERFORMANCE 55

constrain it by subjecting it to the authority of philosophy. In another

performative aside, in Photo-Fiction, Laruelle asks:

We could ask why should we thereby deprive ourselves of the benefits of

philosophy? In reality, we are in no way whatsoever deprived of its benefits.
Philosophy still serves to formulate photo-fiction and enters into it as an
essential part of its materiality. (18)

Laruelle sees philosophy as part of the “materiality” of photo-fiction, but

precisely in the sense that philosophemes and photographic practices are
raw materials that help to install a thought that will neither dominate pho-
tography nor reify the authority of standard philosophy. What would this
non-reified and non-dominating thought of photography look like or
rather how could it be performed? How could non-photography be
installed?

Black Box (Theatre)

The performance of non-photography or a theoretical installation is not of
the order of philosophical reflection. Non-photography is determined by
a desire not to reflect on photography. It is rather a practice or performance
parallel to photography and philosophy. Non-photography is also not a
meta-critical reflection on its own internal matrices. It is not simply a
reflection on the way it fuses the raw material of philosophy and photog-
raphy. Non-photography appears in Laruelle’s writing as a “black box”
into which runs the inputs of philosophy and photography and out of
which issues outputs of photo-fiction, philo-fiction, theoretical installa-
tions, and other clones of photography and philosophy. But non-­
photography itself remains consistently a dark subject or a black box. It is
the peculiar construction of this black box of non-photography that
Laruelle installs within the text of Photo-Fiction in the form of a performa-
tive exercise. With cunning irony, Laruelle writes that the “apparatus” of
non-photography “is probably not good for taking pictures to put into
albums […] it is made only for generating fictions that are like ‘theoretical
captions’ that eventually accompany the photos” (12). Photo-fictions
accompany photographs like captions do in that they retain a material and
conceptual autonomy parallel to the autonomy of the image. Photo-­
fictions parallel, but do not frame or philosophically capture photography.
This parallelism is secured performatively by rhetorical and syntactical
56 J. FARDY

strategies. These strategies maintain the gap or distance between the Real
of photography and its thought that standard philosophy effaces once it
takes photography as an object of intellection or reflection.

Derridean Digression
The experimental and creative impulse, or the “scientific” and “artistic,”
in Laruelle’s sense of theoretical installation, bears comparison with the
more daring and unconventional writing of Jacques Derrida. His texts,
such as The Post Card and Glas, have been difficult for the academy to
domesticate. The wildly experimental approach he takes in those texts is
not simply a stylistic oddity; it is fundamental to their conceptuality. The
“Envois” section of The Post Card, for example, is written in the form of
short love letters to an unknown addressee. The returning subject of
these letters or postcards is a curious postcard apparently found in a shop
at Oxford University. The image, which also serves as the cover of the
book, is a thirteenth-century illustration by Matthew Paris, which was
originally published in a book on fortune-telling. The image shows two
figures labelled as “plato” and “Socrates.” But, and this is Derrida’s
point of departure for his letters, the names appear to have been reversed
in the image. The figure denoted as “plato” stands behind that of
“Socrates” who, seated at a lectern, appears to be transcribing what
“plato” says. The whole scheme of the origins of Western philosophy is
reversed and Plato’s stature is, literally, demoted. Rather than Plato hav-
ing written down what Socrates said, Paris gives us the reverse scenario
in which the philosophical “figures” of speech and writing were con-
fused at the start.
Derrida sees in the postcard image an ironic foretelling or fortune-­
telling of his own account of “writing” as a generalized theory of spacing,
tracing, and signification. Writing, for Derrida, is not derivative of speech
as it is in the “phonologocentric” account. Speech rather is understood to
have features that carry the trace of writing already within its structure.
The iterative structure and the spacings or gaps between spoken words
parallels the spaces between words and marks that makes inscription intel-
ligible. Speech qua inscription is prior to the hierarchic distinction of
speech before (and over) writing.
In Glas, Derrida pursues a comparison of the philosophy of Hegel with
an autobiographical account by the novelist Jean Genet. The text takes
 EXPLICATION TO PERFORMANCE 57

these historical figures as figures of thought: philosophy (Hegel) and lit-

erature (Genet) and plays them off one another. The text is also typo-
graphically a-typical. It consists of two parallel lines of text: one by Genet
and the other by Hegel. Derrida’s commentary runs between the two.
Figuring his own thought as the offspring of philosophy and literature,
Derrida runs between Hegel and Genet, philosophy and literature, ­concept
and rhetoric, in an effort to appease or perhaps to keep score. (The cover
of the book is an illustration of a boxing bell.) Glas questions the tradi-
tional conflict between art and philosophy as well as philosophy’s hetero-
normative orientation—its “phallogocentricism.”
The Post Card and Glas, are as much about the mixing of genres as
anything else. The first mixes the personal and the public. A postcard,
after all, is a mixed genre. It consists of one “public” and one “private”
side. It is an admixture, an inhomogenous structuring of image and text,
visuality and textuality, personal and public. Derrida’s text likewise is an
amphibological admixture of amorous and philosophic language. The
text’s mixed messages are part of a “postal system,” in two senses: a sys-
tem gone “postal” or “crazy,” and a “network of relays and addresses”
shot through with “errors” and failures in meaning: “effects explaining
and preceding causes, the end before the beginning” (Powell 2006,
127). In Glas, the admixture of “raw materials,” in Laruelle’s sense,
produces an experience of reading that dizzies and confuses. Reading
Glas, wrote John Sturrock in his review of the text for The New York
Times, “is a scandalously random experience” intended to “impose a
certain vagrancy on the eyes and attention of whoever reads it.” The
form of these texts by Derrida is, of course, a good deal their message.
They are meant to confuse, parody, and deconstruct the conventions of
philosophical and academic thought and writing. These texts creatively
and strategically challenge long-held convictions concerning the distinc-
tions between genres of writing and calls into question precisely those
canonical convictions as perhaps nothing more (and nothing less) than
cultural conventions.
Derrida’s experimental work aroused the ire of many in academe as
was evident in the effort by some to deny him being awarded an honor-
ary doctorate by Cambridge University in 1992. The detractors publicly
accused him in an open-letter published in Mind. They declared that
Derrida’s work amounted to little more than literary Dadaism. Their
criticism spoke volumes about the philosophical importance they
58 J. FARDY

accorded art. Dadaism was a creative challenge to the authority of stan-

dard philosophical conceptions of art and beauty. The criticism of
Derrida’s creative and irreverent approach to writing was echoed in
Derrida’s obituary in the Economist. “It is not that Mr. Derrida’s views,
or his arguments for them, were unusually contentious. There were no
arguments, nor really any views either.” The glib comment denies the
dead thinker the title of “philosopher” on the grounds that he made “no
arguments” and held “no views.” What could not be countenanced it
seems was the idea that Derrida’s work (in part) was an argument with
philosophy itself. The furor sparked by the style of Derrida’s work was
the furor by philosophy to protect its standing and authority. Seen from
a Laruellean perspective, the rejection of Derrida’s work by the philo-
sophical establishment in the Anglophone world was an anxious-ridden
effort by philosophers to preserve their philosophical authority by decid-
ing what was and was not a philosophical achievement. Philosophical
authority (or, indeed philosophical authoritarianism) is established in a
tautological game: philosophy alone is sufficient to decide what is and is
not philosophy.

Re-Enter Laruelle
This detour though Derrida is significant for our purposes because one
can trace a parallel history of reception of Laruelle’s work in the
US. Laruelle is, of course, not read in analytic departments of philosophy
any more than is Derrida on the grounds that his work advances “no
arguments.” But Laruelle has also had a slow and somewhat difficult
reception in Continental philosophy circles. The fact that much of
Laruelle’s work has been published by small presses such as Univocal and
Urbanomic/Sequence testifies to the interest aroused by Laruelle’s work
outside mainstream academe. This is no small feat considering the diffi-
culty of his work.
Laruelle’s work has been a kind black box or black hole in theory
circles for it is difficult to assimilate it into a broader context of post-
modern theory. What it does share with that tradition—from
Heidegger through Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari—is the perfor-
mative dimension of thought. The creative and protean ways in which
Laruelle performs non-­ philosophical thought may be likened to a
black box in another sense from those already discussed: black box
 EXPLICATION TO PERFORMANCE 59

theatre. What Laruelle stages is a self-­conscious playing out of non-

philosophy as a theoretical installation or performance art in theory.
There is almost a Brechtian dimension to this thought inasmuch as
Laruelle self-consciously stages the staging of thought and thereby
heightens the self-reflexivity of his prose and the awareness of the
reader in relation to it.
The third chapter of Photo-Fiction is especially marked by Laruelle’s
move from explication to performance. The move comes as something of
a surprise to the reader. Like the collapse of the “fourth wall” in theatre,
the text performs, or plays out and up, its constructed artifice. Indeed, the
theme of “construction” is the central figure that animates the opening
performative sequence:

Like an artisan, engineer, or designer, I am going to attempt to construct in

front of you a so-called apparatus of photo-fiction (or at least make an
attempt at projecting the diagram rather than contemplating the Idea of
photo). It is an exercise in the construction of a theoretical object, and is
thus transparent, but which will function more like a black box. (11)

Here the concept of the black box as understood in science—as an

entity of which you know the inputs and outputs but not the thing
itself—is cloned and mutated into the black box of theatre. Laruelle
stages a performance of construction. He puts together an apparatus
before our eyes. This contraption is not for capturing photographic
images, but for performing non-photography. The performance takes
the form of a scene of constructing a non-visual—entirely non-visual—
utterly black and “scientific” photographic prose in the form of a photo-
fiction. The drama is that of an experimental venture. Laruelle (2012)
continues:

Photo-fiction in fact designates the effect of a very special apparatus that one
must imagine because it is not available in any store, being more theoretical
than technological. Photo-fiction is a generic extension of the photographic
apparatus which is to say neutralized in its philosophical or aesthetic preten-
sions. We could call it a “reduced small scale model” but not the kind sold
in stores. […] This apparatus produces a fusion as superposition (hence the
effect of a special resemblance which we will see is not a metaphor) of the
camera on the one hand and philosophical discourse on the other, or even
still of the photographer and the philosopher. (14–15)
60 J. FARDY

Laruelle’s ironic allusion here to actual camera models “found in stores”

belies a more serious point: one cannot find an apparatus of non-­
photography readymade in either the annals of photography nor those of
philosophy. His creative prose projects a kind of “mimesis” of photogra-
phy rather than a mere metaphor. What is made visible here is the cloning
procedure of non-philosophy. Non-photography and its performative
double mime the metaphoric materials of photography: camera and cam-
era obscura. Non-photography like photography itself is a set of construc-
tions and matrices of technologies, techniques, and ways of thinking.
Cameras matrix together optical, digital, and chemical technologies. The
reception of photographic images may also be described as a matrix in that
it combines aesthetics, documentation, journalism, history, and art. Non-­
photography is likewise a matrix of art and thought. It is a superposition
of art, science, and philosophy given in a state that is irreducible to any of
these.
Laruelle’s affiliation with performance art and fictive or fabulating pro-
cedures brought his work to the attention of artists early on who saw it as
creative theory rather than a decisive and authoritative theory of creativity.
As Anthony Paul Smith (2016) notes, Laruelle’s “fiction is a kind of
counter-­creation to that of the world. The act of creating fiction or ‘fabu-
lating’ is the goal of a non-philosophy and the world it creates” (49).
Smith here zeroes in on a fascinating point. The goal of non-philosophy is
not to speak of the world, but to create its own world parallel to it. This
sense of the word “world” here is close to what a novelist, filmmaker, or
dramatist means when they speak of creating a world in fiction. These
worlds aren’t real in the sense that the table on which I am writing is real.
Yet they have real effects. Non-photography is a world unto itself. But that
doesn’t mean that it is meaningless. Indeed, fictive performance or prac-
tice finds its meaning precisely in its self-liberation from the tyranny of
thought dictated by the Philosophical Decision.

A Non-Photographic Experiment
Allow me by way of conclusion to attempt to build my own little black box
or non-photographic apparatus. Where to begin? I could take a herme-
neutic approach to Laruelle’s texts. But I have already done that in the
previous chapters. What can I say about non-photography that would not
be another textual interpretation? What would a non-philosophical read-
ing of non-photography look like? Let us begin by taking Laruelle’s
 EXPLICATION TO PERFORMANCE 61

thought on photography as raw material and recombine that material in

the matrix or black box of non-photography. We install non-photography
as a black box precisely because we do not want to decide what non-­
photography is since doing so would commit us to the philosophical conse-
quences of that decision. We place into our black box of non-photography
a set of “philosophemes” and treat them, Laruelle notes (2012), “like
images or photos” (77). I will take my experience with Laruelle as raw
material for a photo-fiction in miniature.

Two Images
First image: me sitting in the seminar room at the Centre for Theory and
Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Students and faculty sit
around the long table on either side of the narrow room. At the head of
the table is Anthony Paul Smith. He is one of the best translators and com-
mentators on Laruelle. He is giving an introductory talk on non-­
philosophy. I am sitting on the left side of the room by the windows. I
have already decided. Non-philosophy is not worth the trouble. Second
image: a small apartment on the thirty-eighth floor of a high rise in Hong
Kong two years later. The view out the window is bright with the lights of
the city reflecting in the harbor below. On a grey couch sits an opened
package. Next to it sits a copy of Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-­
Photography—its pages marked up with marginal notes and tabs marking
passages of interest.
What happened between the first and second image? What developed?
Strangeness turned to allure? Perhaps. Did the vector of resistance give
way to an onto-vectorial insurrection? Perhaps. What is certain was that
what is now visible was not then, but was still already at work—already in
development—the book I am writing now and you are reading at some
point in the future from this point in time. Each image therefore also
embeds within it futurity and potentiality. Such a theory is already at work
in a non-standard sense in the very images and concepts that you as a
reader have already formed or are forming in having read this far.
Let us then take these two images and memories and our nascent the-
ory of non-photographic time that appears in each as the starting point for
a theoretical installation. What is the status of time in the thinking of non-­
photography that we can glean immanently from these thought-images?
Only in retrospect is it possible for me to see each of these images as now
the origins of the text you are reading. Two arrows of time: the past as
62 J. FARDY

closed and known; the future having already been decided in retrospect is
at issue here. How to think these two arrows of time? We may have
recourse to the vector of quantic thinking opened in non-photography.
The memory image and the present from which it is remembered as the
future that will be are in a state of quantic superposition. This superposi-
tion of times is virtual and material. The creases in my texts by Laruelle,
the tabs, markers, underlined passages, and marginal notes are material
tracings: the tracing of non-photography in memory materialized in
­archival form. My copy of Laruelle’s text materializes a palimpsest of tem-
poralities: times in superposition.
Let us develop and abstract from our initial theoretical impression. A
non-photographic theory of time obscures or darkens our understanding
of time. But in so doing, it renders time “scientific” in the non-standard
sense inasmuch as the mystery of time is recovered rather than analyzed
out of existence. Thus, we pass from a non-photographic theory of time
to a “science” of time that opens up time as a question rather than decid-
ing in advance its nature. Via this route, we pass from non-photography to
a photo-fiction of time. The image of time becomes fractalized by imma-
nent crossings of retrospection and reflection. We end at a strange image
of time. The strangeness of the image parallels the strangeness of Laruelle’s
thought.

Stranger
Laruelle’s strange syntax, odd neologisms, and awkward phrasing can
make for unpleasant reading. His work for this reason can be off-putting
as it was to me when I first encountered it. Yet I now see that this appar-
ently off-putting quality had to do with my expectations concerning phi-
losophy or theory. Laruelle’s kind of writing did not seem to “belong,” it
was “alien” or “foreign,” I thought, to theoretical work on photography.
Anthony Paul Smith righty argues that part of the strangeness of Laruelle’s
texts, especially for those with some familiarity with Continental philoso-
phy, is that he takes themes, idioms, and concepts that are familiar to
many, but combines and blends them in ways that are new and unfamiliar
or simply strange. Smith (2016) writes:

Undoubtedly, Laruelle’s work is difficult at first glance, and yet his writing
is littered with concepts and conventions familiar to readers of Continental
philosophy and the history of Western philosophy generally. This is part
of what makes his thought so strange. What makes someone a stranger is
 EXPLICATION TO PERFORMANCE 63

not a totally unrecognizable nature, but a commonality that yet does not
quite fit into one’s own framework for making sense of a certain field of
experience. (49)

Smith precisely captures the strangeness of what we call “strange”:

strangeness is a function of the known presented in a mode or framework
that we have not the experience to readily comprehend. Such a condition
is not unlike what happens when looking at art, particularly experimental
forms of art like installation. Theory for Laruelle is something more akin
to art than to philosophy inasmuch as it strives not to explicate things, but
to render thought strange and novel. And it is precisely when non-­
philosophy is at its most strange that it is most faithful to the opacity of the
Real. Laruelle’s theory of theory as a fictionalizing, fabulating, or a defamil-
iarization of the Real is close to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “theory-­
fiction.” Opposing a concept of theory as critical explanation and analysis,
Baudrillard (2008) called for theory that would answer the enigma of the
Real by “radicalizing its secret” (25). “We will not oppose the visible to
the hidden,” continues Baudrillard (2008), “but will look for the more
hidden than hidden: the secret” (25). The aim of theory-fictions like
photo-fictions is to parallel the radical unknowability of the Real by clon-
ing its opacity within its discourse. This is theory in a non-explanatory
form which functions more like art, literature, and drama than anything
like standard philosophy. Theory-fiction, photo-fiction, philo-fiction are
not the same. But they share a performative and polemical dimension that
radicalizes the asymmetrical relation between thought and the Real.

Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Translated by Phillippe Beitchman and
W.G.J. Niesluchowski. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
Laruelle, François. Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. Translated by Drew
S. Burk. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012.
Powell, Jason. Jacques Derrida: A Biography. London: Continuum, 2006.
Smith, Anthony Paul. Laruelle: A Stranger Thought. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
 CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Abstract This concluding chapter provides a brief summary of the major

concepts covered in the book.

Keywords Non-philosophy • Real • Philosophical Decision • Principle

of Sufficient Philosophy • Non-photography • Being-in-photo • Clone •
Photographic stance • Vision-force • Quantic writing • Photo-fiction •
Philo-fiction • Generalized fractality • Science • Onto-vectorial insurrec-
tion • Black box • Victim • Human universality

Don’t Give Up
Don’t do what I did when I first tried to read The Concept of Non-­Photography:
I gave up. I thought that I wasn’t “getting it.” And while I hope that you
will have gotten something out of my presentation of Laruelle, you shouldn’t
assume that my reading is authoritative. You might come away with other
insights and these would be yet more fractals or clones of non-photographic
thought. Laruelle’s texts are against the disciplining of thought by standard
philosophy. Non-philosophy is also against schools and thereby discipleship.
Indeed, it would be entirely against the spirit of non-philosophy to reify
Laruelle’s texts and transform his commentators into “authorities” on
Laruelle. To read Laruelle closely and to practice non-philosophy are differ-
ent practices. But let us in this conclusion review briefly the key terms of
non-philosophy and non-photography.

© The Author(s) 2018 65

J. Fardy, Laruelle and Non-Photography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93097-8_5
66 J. FARDY

Review
Non-philosophy proceeds on the basis of one central axiom: the Real is
foreclosed by virtue of its immanence. The Real cannot be grasped as a
totality for we cannot establish a perspective external to the Real from
which its totality could be fully seen or known. This axiom distinguishes
non-philosophy from philosophy. Standard philosophy decides on the
nature of the Real. It assumes that it is sufficient to establish a perspective
on the Real. Each standard instance of philosophy, according to Laruelle,
decides the nature of the Real. But for Laruelle it is nonsense to make a
decision on the Real for the Real is precisely what is decisive for thought
in the last instance. Non-philosophy is firstly an effort to think without
committing oneself to the imperatives of the Philosophical Decision. It
thus rejects the philosophical presupposition that Laruelle terms the
Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. What happens to thought once one
takes the rejection of the Philosophical Decision and the Principle of
Sufficient Philosophy as the starting point? Non-philosophy stays with this
question via an experimental and “scientific” process of discovery and
invention.
Non-photography is an extension of non-philosophy into the photo-
graphic sphere. Laruelle takes his work into the sphere of photography in
an effort to think photography in ways that have been foreclosed by stan-
dard philosophies. Laruelle criticizes standard philosophies of photogra-
phy that decide what photography is via a decision regarding its relation to
the Real. Laruelle rejects both realist and constructivist varieties of the
philosophy of photography. By rejecting the Real as a starting point for
thinking photography, Laruelle opens up a way to think photographic
images as immanent to their own content or what he designates as “being-­
in-­photo.” The photographic image has its own identity as a photo under-
stood in an abstract sense conceptually divorced from the image’s
connection to the Real.
Non-photography resists the Principle of Sufficient Photography—
itself a clone of non-philosophy—which Laruelle sees as central to every
standard philosophy of photography. The Principle of Sufficient
Photography holds that photography is sufficient to frame the Real in
some measure. Standard philosophies of photography, according to
Laruelle, consistently connect a concept of photography to a certain con-
cept of the Real understood as the visible World. Whether a philosopher
holds that photography reconstructs the Real or empirically documents it
 CONCLUSION 67

matters little in the final analysis. The problem for Laruelle is that this
standard approach constrains the definition of photography via a narrow
definition of the Real as the visible World. The radicality of Laruelle’s posi-
tion lies in his insistence that we can think photography beyond the limits
imposed by philosophy once we take as axiomatic that the Real as a totality
can never be grasped.
We have also explored and examined what Laruelle calls the “photo-
graphic stance.” The photographic stance is not a body, but a body of vision
that registers vision as “vision-force.” The stance of photography is devoid
of intentionality. It captures the force of vision as an undivided and lived
experience understood as prior to the division (the di-vision) between seen
and seeing. The photographic stance is itself a clone of the non-­
philosophical stance in the generic sense. The non-philosophical stance
does not decide on the Real on the grounds that the Real is immanent and
decisive. Venturing out from this point, Laruelle develops a whole range
of rhetorical and syntactical strategies to keep his thought open and free
from the restrictive closures of philosophy. One of Laruelle’s chief strate-
gies is to draw on the rhetorical resources of quantum physics. Laruelle’s
“quantic” writing enables him to open his thought beyond the easy
dichotomies of the Western tradition. This also leads him to a non-­
Euclidian geometry of thought—what he calls a “generalized fractality”—
which has the potential to expand non-philosophical thought to
theoretically infinite expanses without it losing its generic and internal
consistency. Laruelle’s non-mathematical and non-physical use of mathe-
matics and physics is part and parcel of non-philosophy’s affirmation of
“science” as a necessary corrective to standard philosophy.
The term “science” is the source of a great deal of confusion and con-
cern, but by “science” Laruelle means something quite generic. Science
for Laruelle is a viewpoint that is open-minded and experimental and
which does not attempt to define an object of inquiry prior to investiga-
tion and experimentation. Science for Laruelle means keeping things dark
and a bit mysterious in order to expand one’s thinking about the object of
inquiry beyond standard and readymade frameworks. This science as we
have seen leads to an experimental way of writing, which Laruelle calls
alternately “photo-fiction,” “philo-fiction,” or “theoretical installation.”
Keeping photography in the dark, in his scientific sense, allows Laruelle
to pursue his thinking along a non-philosophical vector or what he calls an
“onto-vectorial insurrection.” Laruelle seeks to bring about an overturn-
ing of what we have thought photography to be according to philosophy.
68 J. FARDY

The term “black box” is situated in Laruelle’s practice of generic science.

Recall that “black box” comes to us from the world of science in which it
is defined as something of which we can know its inputs and outputs, but
the thing itself remains unknown or epistemologically opaque. Laruelle
installs non-photography as a black box in his corpus. He writes about the
photographic image, photographic technology, and the photographic
stance, but both photography and non-photography are strategically
bracketed out and posited as a black box. To decide what either is in a final
sense would commit Laruelle to an ethos of the Philosophical Decision.
He declines to decide the Real of reality as well as that of photography and
non-photography. In so doing, he demonstrates what photography might
be or become once the philosophical prejudice of the Principle of Sufficient
Philosophy is given up.
Finally, we should conclude by noting Laruelle’s radical affirmation of
the “human-in-human”—the reality and the actuality—of the human con-
dition. He distinguishes his humanism from that of standard philosophy.
The human of humanism, anti-humanism, or post-humanism is the human
violated and victimized by philosophical abstraction. The human as lived
and real is found in its most concrete state in the victim. Photographs of
victims often distance us from their humanity. Laruelle calls for an ethics
of interpretation that will close the gap of “victimological distance”
imposed by photography and its philosophical double. The exit from the
“photo-myth” of philosophy ethically leads to the deterritorialized ter-
rains of the victim and a radical ethos of human universality. All this and
more is possible in the strange thought of non-philosophy and
non-photography.

Coda
I hope that this little book on Laruelle and non-photography has helped
to clarify in some measure Laruelle’s thought. And I hope that it has
inspired you to go out and read Laruelle for yourself. You need not take
my word as authoritative. Indeed, central to the ethics of Laruelle’s
thought is a fundamental suspicion of, and resistance to, philosophical
authorities of any kind. Finally, I hope you have come to see that
­non-­photography is not simply a set of ideas; it is, in the final analysis, a
stance and an activity for doing non-standard things with philosophical
thought. I encourage you therefore to read Laruelle and be willing to
experiment with his texts and create your own images of non-standard
thought.
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 Index

A Camera obscura, 60
Amphibology, 6, 17–19, 34
Axiomatic, vi, 3, 16, 17, 25, 39,
41–44, 67
Azoulay, Ariella, 48, 49
B
Barthes, Roland, 33–36, 44
Bataille, Georges, 38
Baudrillard, Jean, vi, 12, 13, 42, 43,
63
Being-in-photo, 28–31, 34, 35, 46,
66
Black box, 55–56, 58–61, 68
Bohr, Niels, 36–38
Bricmont, Jean, 12, 13
Clone, 9–13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25,
26, 29, 31, 32, 34–36, 44, 47,
53–55, 65–67
The Concept of Non-Photography, v, vii,
4, 6, 10, 15, 26, 34–36, 61, 65
Critique, 6, 11, 14, 37, 41–43
D
Deconstruction, vi, 5, 6, 12, 15, 18,
19, 21, 39–41, 44
Deleuze, Gilles, vi, 5, 12, 13, 16, 20,
32, 40, 43, 47, 58
Derrida, Jacques, vi, 2, 5, 20, 38–40,
47, 56–58
Dualysis, 17–20

C E
Camera, 29, 30, 32, 44, 59, 60 Experimental, 19, 35, 36, 56, 57, 59,
Camera Lucida, 33, 36 63, 66, 67

© The Author(s) 2018 71

J. Fardy, Laruelle and Non-Photography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93097-8
72 INDEX

F P
Flusser, Vilém, 29, 30 Philo-fiction, 50, 53, 55, 67
Force (of) thought, 20–23 Philosophical Decision, v, 1–4, 6, 15,
Fractal, 45–46 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 29, 40, 43,
54, 60, 66, 68
Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, 5, 18,
G 35
General economy, 38–40 Photo-Fiction, 12–16, 19, 36, 48, 53,
55, 59
Photo-fiction, 19, 26, 50, 53–55, 59,
H 61–63, 67
Heisenberg, Werner, 36 Photographic stance, 6, 7, 31, 32, 36,
Human-in-person, 47 46, 67, 68
Physics, 12, 16, 17, 20, 36, 38, 67
Polemics, 41–44
I Poststructuralism, vi, 20, 40–41
Immanence, vi, 6, 18, 22, 25, 32, 49, Principle of Sufficient Philosophy, 1–3,
66 16, 25, 66, 68
Installation, 53, 54, 63 Principle of Sufficient Photography,
16, 26, 27, 66
Principles of Non-Philosophy, 10, 11,
K 18, 20–22, 39, 40
Knowledge, 2, 3, 19, 36–39, 41, 43,
50
Q
Quantic, 13, 14, 17, 19, 26, 36, 46,
M 53, 62, 67
Mandelbrot, Benoit, 45 Quantum physics, 5, 12, 13, 18, 19,
Matrix, 5, 18, 20, 60, 61 26, 67

N R
Non-philosophy, vi, 1–6, 9–12, 14–18, Real, v, 1–6, 9–15, 17–23, 25–31,
20–23, 25–27, 35, 36, 39, 41, 33–36, 38, 40–44, 46–50, 54, 56,
43, 45, 53, 59–61, 63, 65–68 60, 63, 66–68
Non-photography, vi, vii, 1–7, 10, 13, Restricted economy, 38, 40, 41, 49,
14, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25–50, 50
53–55, 59–62, 65, 66, 68

S
O Science, 2–5, 12–14, 16, 33–36, 38,
Onto-photo-logical, 14, 20, 27 39, 44–46, 50, 54, 59, 60, 62,
Onto-vectorial insurrection, 12–14, 67, 68
61, 67 Strange, v, 6, 19, 50, 62, 63, 68
 INDEX
   73

Superposition, 5, 18, 19, 44, 49, 59, V

60, 62 Vector, 13, 15, 16, 30, 61, 62, 67
Syntax, v, 6, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 29, 62 Victim, 47–49, 68

T W
Theoretical installation, 53–56, 59, World, 2, 4, 12–16, 23, 26–32, 36,
61, 67 37, 45, 49, 58, 60, 66–68

U
Universality, 26, 46–50, 68