GNOSIS AND ANAMNESIS: on the way to immanence

Very interesting inter-blog discussion (beginning here) around Laruelle’s concept of Gnosticism as a way out of the sufficiency of the West. I would just like to add Lyotard’s and Stiegler’s emphasis on anamnesis to the mix. I think that the opposite of gnosis is ignorance, sleep, and amnesia.  Gnosis would then be more a path than a state, a continuing process of anamnesis. Thus Laruelle’s description of his progression through Philosophy I to II to III etc. is a description of his on-going anamnesis of philosophy and of his own noetic individuation.

I think that Katerina Kolozova’s article « The Project of Non-Marxism » gives a useful theoretical base for degrees of approach to immanence. Kolozova argues that the failure of Marxism is due to its use of insufficiently radical concepts ie of concepts that correspond more to transcendental constructs and that are not sufficiently dictated by the source of immanence of Marxist theory and practice. She considers that the notions of « labor force », and even of « proletariat » are not « radical enough to be seen as a « clone » of the Real or of the source of immanence of the (post- or non-) Marxist critique » (16).

Kolozova comes to a similar conclusion to that of Virgilio Rivas, in arguing that the “poor” is a concept that more radically corresponds with the source of immanence. As does Jacques Fradin published LA SCIENCE DES PAUVRES in Laruelle’s collection “Nous, les sans-philosophie” in 2005, which ends with an appeal for an “intellectual determined by the Poor” (p394), and identifies the Poor with the Victim or Man-in-Person: “Man , the Victim, due to the fact that he is a stranger to history is of an extreme poverty: he has nothing for himself” (377). Fradin ends with the declaration that “The Poor is the determining cause of the intellectual” and that “The Poor is the future which is coming. He is the Christ (of the) Future” (394).

What I find interesting in Kolozova’s discussion is her use of a notion of degrees of correlating to the source of immanence (or inversely of imbrication in transcendental constructs). The non-philosophical conversion is not an all-or-none once-and-for-all event. It comes in degrees and flashes and may well be different for each individual. The non-philosopher is on the way to immanence, but under the condition of immanence itself. Further, what has been seen as the « derivaive » nature of much of Laruelle’s work, his need to situate it in terms of non-X, can be revisioned as an integrally dialogic aspect of his work. The convergence here with Feyerabend’s non-philosophical method is illuminating. There is no orthodoxy of gnosis, no transcendental doxa, and so no « movement », in the sense of an organised school of thought, of non-philosophy. There is however the movement towards immanence and under its dictation.

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