PURITY AND INTENSITY OF THOUGHT
There is a great purity and intensity in Laruelle’s exigency of thought that account for its attraction. I am turning to his book THE LAST HUMANITY in the post-Covid context to see if he can help us to rethink the notion of « life » in a fruitful manner. Given this attraction it is well to keep in mind certain limitations of his thought in order to see how he himself thinks beyond these limitations or allows us to do so.
LARUELLE’S SHADOW AND CONCEPTUAL PATHOLOGIES
We have already noted that the title of Laruelle’s book literally translated is IN THE LAST HUMANITY The New Science of Ecology. A first impression of the title leaves us with the usual problems posed by Laruelle’s works:
1) Structuralism – Althusserism as background (in the last instance, primacy of « science »).
2) Scientism – a problem never fully faced up to by Laruelle, nor by his disciples.
3) Humanism – replacing the last instance by the last humanity.
4) Purism – the purity of his exigency leads him to exclude all « rival » approaches.
THERAPEUTIC DISPLACEMENTS
Laruelle from the beginning of the book amasses his conceptual resources to bring them to bear on the problem of practical life lived outside metaphysical transcendences. This he calls « lived-without-life ». This neo-immanentisation leads him to produce a number of conceptual displacements that provide possible antidotes to his shadow pathologies.
1) Post-structuralism – from philosophy to ecology
2) Post-scientism – from Newtonian science to quantum thinking
3) Post-humanism (and trans-humanism) – from specific determined Newtonian humans to generic indeterminate quantum humanity
4) Post-purism – from disciplinary demarcations (including that of non-philosophy from philosophy) to de-disciplinary « collisions »
AGENT SWARM 