The Experimental Texts of Francois Laruelle

We know a lot of you are into pre-Socratic, non-philosophy, non-photography, what: Francois Laruelle. Entropy Mag has just the ticket. In the oft-column "The Haunted House," Writer M Kitchell approached some of Laruelle's more "experimental" texts, "more from a literary perspective than one directly in line with Laruelle’s thought," perhaps to have a sense of them that is "closer to poetry than philosophy."

In the introduction to From Decision to Heresy, Robin McKay quotes François Laruelle on his experimental texts:

I have always wanted to write experimental texts, I would love to write more of them. But I am held back by scruples, or by a self-critique–shame, even. Because I know they will be judged harshly by poets, by philosophers, by pretty much everyone! I feel that this in fact is what I want to do, but I dare not do, any longer. I am still obsessed by the idea that one day I may write such a book, with texts that are freer like this. However, in most of my longer books there are sections that are at the limit, that become ‘experimental’ texts. Above all in the ‘christo-fiction’, or in the book on mysticism, there are texts that are really at the limit of a type of poetry of thought, or an experimental writing. So it is not something I have entirely distanced myself from. But I have these scruples, I dare not free myself completely.

This piece could actually serve as a good primer. Kitchell responds to Laruelle on Heidegger, Deleuze, the dark nights of the universe (color as myth), and other key aspects that poets tend to find affinity with when reading this philosopher. More:

WHAT THE ONE SEES IN THE ONE

“What the One Sees in the One” presents a suite of three poems and concludes with a set of axioms & theorems called “A Short Treatise on the Soul.” This section, which I had entirely failed to notice upon a precursory flip through the book, ended up being one of the most exciting of the experimental texts, as there is a sincere similarity between the poetry herein and much of the post-L’Ephémère poetry of France in the early 70s (take, for example, Alain Delahaye), as Mary Ann Caws put it, “sparse on the page but aligned with the left-hand column … play[ing] about in … a Place of Silence reminiscent of Bonnefoy’s True Place.” As such, they are exemplary of both a poetic and (non-)philosophic state.

[...]

Jan Baetens, in an essay postured against the minimalist poetry of the French which I would insist Laruelle’s work–here–invokes, states the following:

… the secret weapon of minimalism, the weapon that makes it in some sense unbeatable, is the collusion between poetry and philosophy. Minimalist poetry always presented itself as the servant of philosophy. In a moment when philosophy was undergoing its “linguistic turn,” it was a matter of demonstrating that poetry, on the one hand, was capable of “thinking,” and that, on the other, philosophy was right to transform itself into philosophy of language. The result was a direct convergence of interests between poetry and philosophy. Philosophers declared that minimalist poetry was the only philosophically tenable poetry, closer to the truth in literature than other forms of writing, which are too easily seduced by something other than language alone. Moving beyond the solution of continuity between poetry and philosophy, poets for their part allowed certain philosophers of language to reject from the realm of the “truly” philosophical any philosophy that was not itself a practice of language.

Exciting! Read all at Entropy. Photo at top: François Laruelle at The Concept of Non-Photography Symposium; Wednesday, April 6, 2011. Courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery.