In the last sections we have seen that certain key terms and concepts used to describe the literary genre of science fiction can also be used to describe Laruelle’s non-philosophical project in TETRALOGOS: amplitude, inventiveness, mega-text, cognitive estrangement, futurality, neologism and transformed language, futurality, and cosmicity. In this next section we take the parallels further.
3) Dynamic Presentation: Movements and Drama
According to François Laruelle, « standard » philosophy postulates its own sufficiency to encompass the real, but it maintains the appearance of this so-called autonomous apprehension by its real dependence on other modes of apprehension. Sufficiency is defined by an imaginary autonomy and a real dependence. Thus, contrary to its self-image as a « pure » discipline, standard philosophy exists in a composite state, a mixture (Badiou says a « suture ») of philosophy with another mode of apprehension, typically (for Laruelle ) with the poem. Laruelle also considers other existing mixtures, such as that of philosophy and science, found in positivist and scientistic systems.
So, the complete formula for standard philosophy is philosophy sutured with science and this composite re-sutured with the poem.
The movement traced by the book unfolds in four stages. I associate them with four defining features of science fiction: the suspension of disbelief, cognitive estrangement, the cosmic, and the sense of wonder.
1) Prologue: Conceptual characters and structure of the action. The movement here is the passage from amnescience (or sutural forgetfulness) to de-suturation, and the emergence of the characters of the drama and of the existing structure of their actions. In terms of science fiction, this corresponds to the willing suspension of disbelief.
We live in the state of amnescience, in worlds governed by sufficient philosophy and by its unconsciously organized mixtures. François Laruelle proposes first to disarticulate and disorganize existing worldly mixtures (the suture of philosophy and the poem, and that of philosophy with science) by a procedure of forcing, i.e. by means of science. This would produce a more rigorous philosophy and at the same time provide an answer to the critics who accuse Laruelle of scientism.
Science would be used strategically in the current state of mixtures (philosophy / poem and philosophy / science) to suspend the sufficient attitude and to free philosophy from its unilateral limitation and its conceptual fusion with poetics on one side and with the scientific reductionism of the other. The mixtures must be interrupted, and Laruelle’s thesis is that « the strongest interruption is the scientific » (183).
2) Organon: the theory of Reminiscience. The movement is the reorganization of the conceptual and dramatic architectures, releasing the characters and their acts for new adventures. In science fiction terms, this stage corresponds to cognitive estrangement. Estrangement is forcing. Here begins forced philosophy and its consciously reorganized mixtures.
In this second stage, philosophy is neither eliminated nor abandoned, it remains an essential reference in a new reorganized architecture, where it finally has access to the real, but only through the sciences (generic logic and quantum physics).
« [Philosophy] will have to accept the sometimes embarrassing mentoring of these sciences (generic logic and quantum physics) which will deprive it of its pretension to a fundamental access to the real, and will leave it with only the possibility of a mediated access to this real as Universe, but in view of the governance of the empirico-formal human experience at the heart the World » (21).
Laruelle proposes to call this replacement discipline, reorganized consciously according to other principles, « Reminiscience », in which philosophy persists in a purified state as a transcendental « memory » of the past and the future, mingled with the « generic » and the « quantic ».
Philosophy would survive as theatricalised memory, somewhat like the Art of Memory described by Frances Yates, with its conceptual characters, landscapes, acts, and actions, but to which we should add a futural dimension.
3) Amplitude: the whole range of human experience and its cosmic epic. The movement is gaining in amplitude, it’s the journey from Earth to the Stars. Laruelle says from Birth to Messianity, but I suggest we correct this to say from Birth to the Birth of Messianity. In science fiction terms, this is the stage of the cosmic journey or the encounter with aliens or with their artefacts, and a new apprenticeship of the universe. Here the ascensional dialectic extends into the non-phi human epic.
In this third phase, the reorganization prepares us for a new stage of the ascent in the dialectic of the ascension we are following. We thus move from a sufficient philosophy through a non-standard philosophy, to a forced philosophy, to the non-phi epic of the human experience in all its extent: from the cave to the stars (its sites) and from birth to messianity (its stages).
I say this is the stage of the birth of Messianity, because the Messiahs that we are have two faces. One face, transcendent, is turned towards the Starry Sky and the other face is turned towards the Earth. How to go down to earth while remaining a Messiah? This is the problem of the end of the 2001 film The Space Odyssey. The hero frees himself from his mundane clone or his digital double, i.e. the rationalist or artificial intelligence HAL, experiences quantum teleportation and a lived experience by way of the Reminiscience of the cosmos and of all stages of life. He is reborn as a stellar fetus and returns to Earth as a Messiah/Anthropos, but the film stops there, just before the most difficult moment to schematise: the Ritorno.
4) Ritorno: the science-fictional and musical return from the Starry Sky to the Earth. The movement is a conscious descent, not a fall of the Icarus type (for example David Bowie’s character in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH), but rather a moment of subjectivation. In science fiction terms, it’s the sense of wonder.
Strictly speaking the sense of wonder is the subjectivation of the epic of humanity in all its cosmic amplitude. Laruelle also speaks of indignation, which is the subjectivation of the struggle against the evil world in favour of the just world. We are in the descending dialectic or the anthropic descent.
In this fourth and last phase, the anthropic descent is subtended by the same quadriparti as in the de-anthropologising rise of Reminiscience: dramatization, memory, generic and quantic.
This is the musical part proper, the movement to leave the coherence of transcendence, and voluntarily or at least consciously, to enter decoherence. After having freed standard philosophy of its suture with the poem (or with science), after having reorganized it with the help of the forcing of the generic and the quantum, after having become « aliens », we go up to the ultimate amplitude of the human experience, its sites and its stages. And it is from this amplitude of wild experience, the lived-without-life, that we can recombine otherwise, transcendentally, philosophy and music, and descend « philo-musically »:
« The last book describes Messianity as the ultimate and highest stage of human existence, the stage that returns to its origins and closes the cycle. It is ultimately given in a philosophical-musical pathos which is the explicit object of the last Book, thus retroactively closing this tetralogy » (26).
Commentary: The movement of the Larunellean space opera goes from amnescience, i.e. from the philosophically contaminated experience of naive empiricism (and scientism) to transcendental or radical empiricism (the pluralist universe), and finally to a radical polytheism (democratic Messianity).
AGENT SWARM 