LARUELLEANS AND THE DENIAL OF SCIENTISM

Laruelle constantly gives pre-eminence to science over philosophy as that thought in accordance with the Real. This pre-eminence Laruelleans cope by just denying that he is scientistic, but such glib denialism is not to be taken seriously. Even Laruelle admits to having fallen into scientistic sufficiency.

Scientism is not tied in any essential way to verificationism or more generally to positivism, but is characterised by the excessive valuation of, or the primacy given to, science. Laruelle acknowledges the problem, and continues to struggle against this primacy in his own work. Despite this admission, I think that Laruelle still fails to escape scientism. This is also  Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion.

In his passage from non-philosophy to non-standard philosophy Laruelle proposes what he hopes to be a non-scientistic quantum thought, as it is an appeal to quantum concepts relieved of the principle of mathematical sufficiency.

Laruelleans typically deny that Laruelle is guilty of scientism, despite it appearing on virtually every page he wrote. Given the glaring failure of this denialism they then fall back on the claim that scientism is not a valid conceptual term, but just an « accusation ». If the word means nothing, then Laruelle can’t be validly subsumed under its (absent) extension.

I have never seen any Laruellean respond to this objection of scientism, except by bluff and denial. This is because the Anglophone interpretations of Laruelle fall victim to the suture of (non-)philosophy to one of its conditions.

 

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