I came from Greece and i’m trying the last months to translate the most basic texts of Laruelle in Greek language. I support the blog symvanta.blogspot.com, a blog of non-philosophy and materialism in greek language. I have already translate the ” Transvaluation of…” , i finish the ”My Parmenides” and i’m ready to start the translation of Dictionary of Non-Philosophy.

I think that this is the first presentation of Laruelle’s work in Greek language and i hope to find soon more people with the same interest on this important thinker.

I read all the english translations of Laruelle’s texts by your blog and i want to email me if its possible any other translation , mainly from the period of PHILOSOPHY I and PHILOSOPHY II of Laruellian work.

Go on non-philosophically!

Maladjusted:

“Having just looked at his brilliant, frightening, PhD thesis I’m particularly thrown by the extent to which he seems to think that overcoming correlationism is the first step on the royal road to the overthrowing of capitalism. This seemed completely mystifying to me at the time, but seems even more so now, in the light of your claim that speculative realism does -not- confuse politics with ontology.

I mean, to me, Brassier’s formula for politics is something like:

1) Bernard Henry-Levy is a humanist.
2) Speculative Realism is incredibly anti-humanist (human beings=cosmic excrement under the sign of imminent extinction.”

I cannot possibly see how any perspective that sees human kind as ‘excrement’ under the future of extinction could possibly constitute any form of emancipatory anti-capitalist politics? It seems closer to fascism and the early 20th century surrealists and Nietzschean anti-communists.

Likewise, in the 21st century materialism conference when pressed on the political implications of OOP Graham Harman gave some weird suggestion that we shouldn’t ruin a nice landscape with a factory because that would be not respecting the objects! His tone of voice didn’t sound particularly ironic; but his position is classically petit bourgois — you get the same sort of thing from Nimby Rural Alliance groups.

This is why I would follow Nick in seeing SR as permitting (even demanding) the separation of metaphysics and politics. But at the same time, I think to engage in radical, emancipatory, even Marxist, politics one also has to be a radical humanist and assert the importance of the break from nature signalled by the human — and it own autonomy and unique importance.

http://mariborchan.com/2009/01/01/slavoj-zizek-materialism-and-empirio-criticism-for-21st-century/

Thank you for your generous reply to my question.

I haven’t (obvioulsy) read “Nihil Unound” yet, so it is extremely interesting that Brassier would have dropped all the odd “let’s take a shot at capitalism by disorienting with Laruelle” line that seems quite pronounced in his thesis.

Well, I’ll definitely await what he has to say about historical materialism.

Cheers and congratulations on an informative blog.

Mal

I’m gunna rush and post this (not that anyones listening, prolly)
“If our brains were somehow, impossibly, wired to process themselves from the inside (as the subject of introspection) with the same fidelity with which they process themselves from the outside (as the object of neuroscience), then one might expect the generation of ‘action’ to be experienced as one more thing within the great causal circuit of the environment.”
See the thing is, I think he misses the motive for the brain to be wired to process itself. As in, there is no motive given in his example. And sure enough, if there was no motive in such observation being initiated it would go along the lines of
“Rather than experiencing norms constraining those actions, our brains would experience the processing of behavioural outputs against ongoing environmental input. There would be no ‘right or wrong,’ no ‘corrections,’ only attenuations of behaviour in response to real-time environmental feedback.”

If the self observation isn’t set up with some set of goals, of course it just observes itself numbly. One has to actually set up a mission when observing oneself, not just do it like sitting down to TV!

And further I noticed something perhaps quite beutiful – if we were forced to reflect on our own behaviour, as much as we were just forced, with no moral compass installed in that reflection, we would not be moral. It’s actually our capacity to not reflect on our actions that grants us the capacity to be moral at all!

I’m not sure precisely what Brassier would say himself, but I’d just point to the fact that all the capitalism stuff gets dropped by the time he writes his first real book. There’s no politics in Nihil Unbound, and I have a hard time imagining where one could extract it from without undermining the thesis of being-nothing. I do know that he’s writing a book on historical materialism, so it’ll be interesting to see whether he thinks his work falls on the side of intrinsically radical politics. Maybe he agrees there’s a separation between ontological discourse and political action, maybe not.

Having said that, I have been thinking (to put it crassly) “what about Brassier?”

Having just looked at his brilliant, frightening, PhD thesis I’m particularly thrown by the extent to which he seems to think that overcoming correlationism is the first step on the royal road to the overthrowing of capitalism. This seemed completely mystifying to me at the time, but seems even more so now, in the light of your claim that speculative realism does -not- confuse politics with ontology.

I mean, to me, Brassier’s formula for politics is something like:

1) Bernard Henry-Levy is a humanist.
2) Speculative Realism is incredibly anti-humanist (human beings=cosmic excrement under the sign of imminent extinction.

Ergo, speculative realism, is on the side of revolutionary politics.

Am I being grossly unfair or just confused?

Best,

Mal

best,
michael