Laruelle: Against the Digital
Dave Monroe
against.the.dave at gmail.com
Sat Oct 25 14:23:33 CDT 2014
Laruelle is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended
critical survey the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François
Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was
born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R.
Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s
concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more
fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital.
In Laruelle, Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept
and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle
to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and
continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin
Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s
concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient
philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the
One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of
philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.”
Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital
thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and
world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining
Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a
profoundly nondigital thinker—perhaps the only nondigital thinker today—and
engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media,
philosophy, and technology.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/laruelle
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20141025/af800b3d/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list