Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI)
Central concept, along with the One-in-One, of non-philosophy that distinguishes it from all philosophies. It is said of the causality proper to the One as such or vision-in-One, of the Real in virtue of its primacy over thought and its object (like Being). This causality exerts itself upon what is given as non(-One) and serves as experience or data for thought-according-to-the-One: philosophy itself as form-experience of the World; and upon the universal noematic structures or theoretical knowledge that is extracted by it from this material. It is therefore also the specific causality of non-philosophy in general. This concept has a Marxist origin and is here extracted from historical Materialism, transferred and radicalized in first Science or according to the One which gives it its radical sense and enables its full employment (it should rigorously be called: givenness-in-the-last-instance).
The DLI is not simply an immanent causality but radical immanence itself—which distinguishes it from every “Spinozistic” immanence or every immanence derived from Spinozism. Reciprocal determination and the DLI are distinguished in many ways. 1) In the first case, causality is divided between two terms (cause and effect) which belong to a set or an ontological or ontico-ontological couple; in the second case it is attributed to one of these alone: the effect then supposes an objective or passive, merely occasional “receptacle” of this causality. 2) This occasion is already reduced to the moment when it manifests itself, in return deprived of determining or real action. The DLI thus supposes a unilateral, non-reciprocal duality of causes. 3) In the first case, causality goes in two opposed yet circular or infinitely convergent directions (action/reaction; real opposition; dialectical contradiction; differential relations of two terms, etc.); and, in the second case, causality goes in a single direction (from the Real towards the effectivity of the thought-world; from immanence towards transcendence). 4) In the first case, it supposes an alienating continuity and an identification of the cause in a supposedly given other term; in the second, cause is not alienated in its effect but supposes, being nothing but a universal negative condition, a functional transcendental instance which is that through which the Real can be said to act.
This rigorously irreversible character excludes that it is a question of a “linear” causality, “mechanistic” causality always being de jure irreversible and dialectizable by philosophy, as if by showing it the constant philosophical reinterpretations of historical Materialism which are so many re-normalizations. The necessity of the DLI is understood through the essence of the One: how can a radical immanence, which does not escape from itself or alienate itself, act upon an exteriority or a non(-One)? There is no causality of the One to answer for a cause or an occasional exteriority. If therefore and for example a thought adequate to the One or according-to-the-Real must exist, then it will necessarily be rejected outside of the One itself or outside of its essence without the latter alienating itself in this representation. This rejection is the primitive form of deduction: if a non(-One) exists, then it comes, either it or its clones, radically after the One itself of which it can only constitute a premise. The support for this argument is the radical immanence of the One which is here not simply its essence, which one could survey and treat as an object, but the performed point of view where the argumentation and what argues (the One itself in-the-last-instance) are enclosed together. When the One is taken as a point of view for a thought which can only emanate or proceed from it, then this thought is posited after the One at the same time as its material and what has already supported the efficacy of the One. “Last-instance” signifies that the One is the real unique cause despite the distance of the effect or the mediations that separate it from the One: a cause that reasoning or description never abandons and does not objectify surreptitiously by setting it in a face-to-face (= dyad) with another given. The latter is always-already proved through the One or “in-One”—it is the radical performativity of immanence—or has always-already sustained its efficacy. Vision-in-One and DLI describe the same phenomenon. We shall thus say of the One and every given = X: the One and X are not the Same but only identical in-the-last-instance. Non-philosophy’s destruction of the universal pretentions of philosophy’s Parmenidian matrix guarantees the radical autonomy of the One and the relative autonomy of the thought-world. The DLI is the causality of philosophically unforeseeable (non-definable and non-demonstrable) theoretical and pragmatic emergence.
What should be understood now by this rejection or foreclosure outside the One and by the One of every given = X and thought in particular? The efficacy of the DLI is double: 1) it invalidates or suspends theoretical authority (claims to knowledge of the Real) of form-philosophy as circularity (variously open and distended according to the philosophy): it is unilateralization in the narrow sense of the word; 2) it inscribes the mark of the One or Identity upon the content or diversity of form-philosophy itself (its material): this is unidentification. This vision of form-philosophy “in” and “after” the One, which remains in itself without identifying with its object, is the “cloning” of non-philosophy on the basis of the latter. Cloning expresses itself through various operations or operatory rules that make it equivalent to radical Identity in the core of the philosophical Decision (its dyadic duality of terms and its unity, the tissue of relations, thetic and autopositional disjunctions and syntheses, etc. which internally structure it). This quasi-operatory side of the One can be called noetic, even though it does not exert itself through any intentionality of consciousness. It consists in relating every given to the One-of-the-last-instance and to describe its being-lived or its (transcendental, aprioritic) identities thus cloned from it. On the other hand, we shall call noematic the phenomenal state of affairs that is grasped when it is reduced to its sense (of) identity (philosophy (“la” philosophie), i.e. sense of occasion and foreclosure of the Real. This sense of form-philosophy as grasped in-identity takes on different forms according to the levels or moments considered in form-philosophy. The DLI is not, for example, exclusive of the noetico-noematic duality, but only of its origin in consciousness or Being and its aspect of infinitely reversible bi-lateral correlation.
(Non-philosophical) Chora
Sense (of) identity of supposedly Real philosophical faith when the vision-in-One transforms it into its correlate (unilate) or gives it its sense (of) identity. The chora is the site through unilateralization that philosophy has become (as identity) by wanting to be equal to the Real (still not as transcendental unity). It is the phenomenon or given-without-givenness (of) this real hallucination.
The vision-in-One is the Given, it gives-without-givenness. Its first correlate (it should be said: its first uni-late) is that which it extracts or manifests from the first object to which it is opposed and which is philosophy: not as doctrine or system, but as faith-in-the-real that finally supposes itself to be the Real. Philosophy is not the only site of its doctrines and all existents, a universal site, it is the total site, that which envelops itself and which can thus only believe itself to be the Real or the absolute Site, including its self-knowledge. The vision-in-One can only exclude this belief or more precisely raise its supposed validity. But it gives it also without givenness under the form it extracts, that of an identity or a sense (of) identity which is that (of) this Site. The theoretical illusion, the supposed validity is raised but not the materiality of this belief consubstantial with philosophy. We shall call chora not this Site spontaneously aware of itself, but that which the vision-in-One sees of this pretention, including the reduced identity (of the) philosophical Site. This chora is not an emplacement of the spatial order in the manner of the philosophical imagination. It is the instance which, in the order of the sense (of) identity (of the “noema”), determines-in-the-last-instance the other philosophical contents (more specific and constituting the structure of the philosophical Decision) as at least given-in-One and reduced to their sense (of) identity. The One thus determines through its acting a more originary or more transcendental site equally foreign to every topo-logy, where the World and its contents, the Authorities, and the philosophical Decisions themselves come to be emplaced.
As an expression of being-separated/given from the One, the chora is “unilateralized,” it is a non-self-positional position (of) the World, impossible to be dialectized or topologized, to be scanned by a transversal gaze. The One is in effect indifferent to what it determines due to the fact that it determines it in-the-last-instance and through its being-foreclosed. The chora is the absence of every reciprocal determination, every unitary correlation of contraries, every sufficient philosophy. It is more than an a priori: if the Real is nowhere, utopic, it finally gives a real Site (in-the-last-instance…) to philosophy which no longer magically springs from the head of the latter but where it finds its emplacement. Instead of constituting an (anti-)thetic a priori susceptible to being-coupled, which would only be at the price of some “infinite task” or “différance” with its philosophical contrary within some unitary dyad of the One and the Other, the chora is the extreme counterpart of the Vision-in-One, that which, without forming a relation or correlation but a unilation, “faces” it after philosophical faith. It defines the object of the world par excellence; it is even its first determination.
(Epistemic, non-philosophical) Break
First Science’s mode of constitution as “unified theory” or identity-in-the-last-instance of science and philosophy, distinct from the unitary theory that mixes it in-Unity. The non-philosophical break must be called “epistemic” rather than “epistemological,” for all relations of the logos or epistemological relations arise from a unitary synthesis and break.
After having elaborated an “epistemic break” separating first Science (of the One) from philosophy, non-philosophy has complicated and displaced this distinction. 1) Every phenomenon of breakage is second in relation to the Real, to the vision-in-One; and not first, as in the philosophical Decision. Or, if it is “first,” it is in the radical and not absolute sense of non-philosophy: first operation of thought but not an operation of the Real. The “epistemological break” instead remains under the ultimate authority of philosophy despite the “mobile” force of science’s rupture in relation to ideology, a force that still too simply proceeds from a reversal of hierarchy. 2) Every non-philosophical break discovers its element in the oldest duality of philosophy and the Real, a duality each time articulated by a certain type of foreclosure. 3) To the extent that a break exists in non-philosophy, it is in the same proportion less “first” than equivalent to the a priori, and not transcendental, instance that “terminates” the constitution of the force (of) thought. The latter is non-self-positional and non-self-decisional Distance or Exteriority and thus distinguishes itself from the self-decisional decision of philosophy. 4) The non-philosophical decision is determined-in-the-last-instance by the Undecided (of the) Real, whereas philosophy is intricate in the Undecidable (to various degrees of irreducibility). It is what distinguishes a decision, break, or axiomatic-transcendental abstraction from its philosophical forms. 5) The a priori break of the non-philosophical type is not that through which non-philosophy globally distinguishes itself from philosophy—this distinction is first of all real, then transcendental and inseparable from the uni-versality of the vision-in-One—but is the organon of this dual distinction.
(Non-philosophical) Definition
Identity-in-the-last-instance of a proper name and a first term.
The definition does not enjoy in non-philosophy the same role as in philosophy, where its functioning as conventional equivalence supposes the unitary closure of the system. Non-philosophy posits the identity-in-the-last-instance of the individual and the philosophical system, or better yet of the conventional and the effective, its problem not being of knowing if a definition is pertinent or not for the Real. It dualyzes the classical definitions by affirming the identity-in-the-last-instance of two heterogeneous functions, the name of the One and the first term. It thus assures the non-formalist character of the transcendental axiomatic, the first term being obtained by rules of transformation on the basis of relatively autonomous materials that are philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, technical, mystical, etc.
The non-philosophical definition functions on the transcendental level which does not affect the One but is said according to it for the occasion of an “Existent” which is related to it in-the-last-instance. It thus participates in the contingency of this Existent, but it is conventional to the extent that it is a name according to identity. It is as a name according to the One and its clones that it is implicit, only being explicit via the way in which the first term and its conceptual symbol are obtained. The non-philosophical definition thus receives something of the opacity and mystery of the One. It does not deny the philosophical definition but emplaces it in effectivity by giving it a new function: no longer simply giving a signification to the functioning of a quasi-closed system, but enabling a dictionary from one philosophy to another cut out from translations between various systems. This magnification of the philosophical definition by the implicit definition of non-philosophy is one of the elements that contributes to non-philosophical poetics and “artificial philosophy.” A dictionary of non-philosophy makes use of this generalization of classical definitions because it sets off from philosophical material; but it also entrusts them with an implicit function which no effectivity can account for.
Radical immanence
Under its really radical form, i.e. immanent (to) self or thoroughly under some hypothesis of thought that validates it, it is equivalent to the One-in-One and consequently implies that uni-versal vision-in-One, but foreclosed to thought and/or the World, the Real as given-without-givenness and separated-without-separation.
Non-philosophy re-assumes the notion of radical immanence investigated by M. Henry, but on condition of submitting it pragmatically and theoretically to the vision-in-One. It is not a thought of immanence—it is still a philosophical decision that would objectify it, that would posit supposedly radical immanence generally through means which are of transcendence. A thought is itself effectively immanent and not an auto-negation of philosophy when it operates according-to-immanence or proceeds by cloning philosophy and the World. Radical immanence itself stops being an excessive slogan in the philosophical tradition (the slogan as the other face of destiny, consignment, or calling) when it is no longer posited by philosophical or constitutive operations but by simply axiomatic operations; when it forms the object of an axiomatic (transcendental) decision rather than theses. It has been fundamental for the specificity of non-philosophy and its distinction from the philosophies of immanence to concurrently elaborate the axioms of radical immanence and the axiomatic style (here transcendental and determined-in-the-last-instance) of thought.
Speculative Heresy 