DELEUZE, LARUELLE: democracy vs terror

What is the relation between Deleuze and Laruelle? Is Deleuze still caught in the aporia of sufficient philosophy? Is Laruelle the only one to find his way out of the hallucinated worlds of philosophy into the Real? Who can give us the answer here? Where is the democracy in this unique escape from the prison of philosophy? Laruelle alone has left the cavern and seen the sun, now he comes back preaching a strange democracy, a democracy of one.

I do not believe the self-publicity of philosophers, nor am I impressed by someone who vaunts his critique of the ego as superior to every other. I love Deleuze but I do not admire his critique of Hegel. More generally, if I want a living approach to a philosopher that Deleuze loves, then I know that he will open up new and vast vistas, he will amplify. But for the rest (Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc.) he is too reductive and dogmatic and I must seek elsewhere, even if his writing and concepts when discussing such thinkers are rich and inspiring in themselves. Deleuze has already given us the means to understand that: he needs conceptual characters to play all the roles in his philosophical dramas, he needs friends and allies and villains.

So I will never believe Laruelle on Deleuze, for me he is talking about a conceptual character in his own drama, a pseudo-clone. Laruelle claims to be democratic yet he and his followers refuse to apply to others the fraternity he demands for himself. Laruelle indicates that anything can be given a reading that reduces and encloses it in philosophy, even his own texts. But he asserts that there is also a non-philosophical reading of these same texts:

« Do I practice terror? There are obviously two readings of my text. There is a philosophical reading, one in which I do practice terror. And there is a non-philosophical reading, which is obviously my reading » (here).

Insofar as Laruelle gives Deleuze only a philosophical reading he is practicing terror, as Deleuze is when he talks of Hegel. Democracy would mean not only giving a non-philosophical reading of Deleuze, but acknowledging that he Laruelle is not the first non-philosopher and that his philosophical readings do not capture all. Some may even have gone farther than he on certain points. This is what I think is the case with Deleuze and Guattari on psychoanalysis.

There is some reason to believe that Laruelle does not profer his readings as absolute (which would be a philosophical gesture) or exclusive. In a surprising footnote on page 172 of THÉORIE DES ÉTRANGERS, where he presents his non-psychoanalysis, for example he writes:

« a different version of non-psychoanalysis, starting from different material than the Lacanism that we are using here, is being elaborated by Tony Brachet, psychoanalyst and philosopher ».

Other versions are always possible, and they take time to elaborate. But this is something that Deleuze also said, and asked democratically for such readings.

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