François Laruelle

François Laruelle (22 August 1937 – 28 October 2024) was a French philosopher, of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. He began publishing in the early 1970s and had around twenty book-length titles to his name. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle was notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. Until his death, he directed an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale. Laruelle divided his work into five periods: Philosophy I (1971–1981), Philosophy II (1981–1995), Philosophy III (1995–2002), Philosophy IV (2002–2008), and Philosophy V (2008–2024). The work comprising Philosophy I finds Laruelle attempting to subvert concepts found in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida. Even at this early stage one can identify Laruelle's interest in adopting a transcendental stance towards philosophy. With Philosophy II, Laruelle makes a determined effort to develop a transcendental approach to philosophy itself. However, it is not until Philosophy III that Laruelle claims to have started the work of non-philosophy. Laruelle claimed that all forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, but that all forms of philosophy remain constitutively blind to this decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle was concerned with here was the dialectical splitting of the world in order to grasp the world philosophically. Laruelle claimed that the decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically. In this sense, non-philosophy is a science of philosophy. Laruellean (non)ethics is 'radically de-anthropocentrized, fundamentally directed towards a universalized, auto-effective set of generic conditions.'