Laruelle and Non-Photography by Jonathan Fardy

Author:Jonathan Fardy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

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 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 anything 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 philosophy 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, philosophy seeks to illuminate photography by way of a discourse on the Real. What it cannot countenance are the opacities of photography and the possibility 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 “experimental 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 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

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