By Jeremy R. Smith
Note: I wrote this essay in 2021, which was slightly revised in my 2023 dissertation, “The Cave and the Stars: On the People and Democracy of Non-Philosophy.”[1] Since this essay, attention to the early writings of François Laruelle has increased, following the publication of Lindsay Lerman’s translation of Phenomenon and Difference by Triple Ampersand (&&&) in 2023, as well as subsequent studies into machinic and political materialism by Yuchen Sun in their article “From ‘Dialectical to ‘Machinic’: Early Laruelle’s Critique of Deconstruction” in Derrida Today 18.3 (2025), Philippe Lynes in the first volume of Dearth: Deconstruction and Speculative Realism (Northwestern University Press, 2025), and, most recently, Katerina Kolozova in connection to her critique of techno-capitalism. I provide this piece with a short note for its republication with Hyperspekulation, with thanks to Jason Bonilla for allowing this.
The early period of Laruelle’s writings, periodized as Philosophy I (circa 1970-80), still requires a thorough investigation into the conjuncture that informs this writing: Althusser and structural Marxism, Derrida and deconstruction, Deleuze-Guattari’s machinics of desire, the angelism of Jambet and Lardreau, alongside many others. The central text of this period is hard to pin down, but the one that offers a comprehensive account is Le déclin de l’écriture from 1977, which, to retain the tongue twister, could be translated into English as The Twilight of Writing. While others may see in the Nietzsche book the broad strokes of the Deleuze-Derrida (or, in Machines Textuelles, Derreuze-Delida) blending to combat fascism, I find that situating Twilight alongside arguments found in Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka and Derrida on the pharmakon as found in Dissemination best assists in understanding Laruelle’s political materialism. Nietzsche makes himself fascist to invent a rebellious stance against it: how can one not see similarities to the invention of minor literature and the grandeur of Nietzsche’s own future physician of philosophy, the one who heals/poisons themselves while also poisoning/healing their patient? And what are we as readers, scholars, enthusiasts or just members of the public to name this period? Certainly not non-philosophy and its uni-lateralization, but perhaps non?philosophy, provided that one understands this ‘?’, as Jacob Vangeest points out, as the being of problems and questions, the active and affirmative affect of Différance (Laruelle’s bastardizing of Deleuze and Derrida) as the being of non-being (cf. Difference and Repetition, 64).
Yet if there was one thing to add that was missing in my original post, it had to do with machinics proper and to differentiate it from mechanism. There’s a great quote in Deleuze and Parnet’s Dialogues II (on pages 104-5) that differentiates the two, but I think Laruelle does well to highlight in Twilight the way in which, as I note in this essay, both the multiplicity of positions and one position in the multiplicity echoes Deleuze’s observation of Kleist’s marionette-operator-machine: man is inseparable from or, better yet, continuous with the machine, one part of it and very important for its functioning. From there, consequences in analyzing Laruelle’s writings on technology and what he, similar to Gilbert Hottois’ formulation of techno(-)science, calls techno-metaphysics — the primacy of technics over theoria, the auto-positing of philosophy as a techno(-)logy in Le nouvel esprit technologique and Le principe de minorité — and its bio-political implications (see “Homo ex machina”[2]) may follow in investigation, including later on with the fully developed version of “philosophy as the superior form of biotechnology” analyzed in Theory of Strangers.[3]
In my view, it is great to see the rising interest in this period of writing, that new research may be underway in drawing from this period, and there may be hope that further inventive work is done. By submitting this piece for a new audience, I’m not at all interested in providing corrections to readers and existing scholars, even though I am now more inclined these days to distinguish myself from the ones who I’ve called Larualiens in my dissertation and those who participate in “Laruelle Studies” or (akin to Marxology) “Laruellology.” That was the work of the dissertation; I am more interested in the practicality of non-philosophy and the future of its discipline. In addition, it is highly encouraged to consider the works in their original French and historical place in their theoretical conjuncture, and they are accessible through well-known channels for academics and para/non-academics; doing so would give better insight to interpretations and the building of trust in a research community. Please note, as well, that some slight errors in translation may appear; after all, since this essay is five years old by now, some choices I made then may not at all be appropriate in my eyes today. Thank you again to Jason, with hopes that these investigations continue.
October 2026
***
Philosophy I is the period of François Laruelle’s writing that has been rarely touched upon in the Anglophone scholarship present for the past ten years in the influx of studies on Laruelle and non-philosophy. There are few exceptions to this: my colleague Jacob Vangeest’s MA thesis[4] and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s essay on Nietzsche’s political materialism[5], though there is as well the early ‘90s essay by Arnaud Villani discussing the role of Machines textuelles.[6] While each in their own right display what is singular and unique of the stances that Laruelle attributes to this early period of his writing, it is worth noting that even in this rarity of scholarship, what is missing is the signature of the name to this period: “Nietzsche.” In A Biography of Ordinary Man, one finds in Theorem 7 the following explanation:
The task of contemporary thinkers, the forced march of frontier intellectuals, is well known: the hunt after the ‘beyond’. Beyond the pleasure principle, the power principle, the principle of being: everything began with ‘beyond essence’…This indestructible ideal that exhausts so many thinkers still dares to appear on the threshold of minoritarian thought: beyond the ‘political vision of the world’, to find and determine the common people [la plèbe]? The last resistance? The most secret margins…minorities? … ‘Stato-minoritarian’ thought, Nietzschean and post-modern, already distinguishes factual minorities – defined by criteria of culture, language, history, sex – and minorities as continuous multiplicities, as reciprocal differences relative to one another, as differends that cannot be inscribed within the social fabric and on known political chessboards, but that still form exceptional and fluid regularities. From this point of view, we would call minoritarian, or more precisely, ‘stato-minoritarian’ ‘the individual who is the entire chain’ (Nietzsche), the singular case that is identical – without mediation – to a regularity…There is a minoritarian amphibology that derives from the amphibology found in dominant Greco-unitary thought: it is condemned to remake minorities as a beyond of power, a beyond of the power principle. This is the contemporary solution whose arguments and foundations come from Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the great seducers of the individual as such: the beyond of power remains in the web of power that merely has been loosened.[7]
Given this extremely complex formulation, what exactly of the stato-minoritarian makes it Nietzschean, on the one hand, and, at the same time and perhaps more importantly, why does Laruelle sign the name ‘Nietzsche’ to describe this seemingly self-critical move? I find it to be self-critical precisely for before the break from philosophical sufficiency, the transition from Philosophy I to Philosophy II, there is a text called Au-delà du principe de pouvoir, Beyond the Power Principle, the last text of Philosophy I.
This [essay] intends to provide the basis for this Nietzschean signature along with a brief overview of the texts comprising this period. I will ask, from what do we gather in Laruelle’s earliest writings this signature, noted above, as the monumental formation of one single chain in the struggle of individuals, forming a mountain range of humankind through the millennia,[8] and how does one break this chain?
In his Philosophy III book, Principles of Non-Philosophy, Laruelle notes that Philosophy I “placed itself under the authority of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy but already sought to put certain themes to work; themes that would only find their definitive form, a transformed form, in Philosophy III: the individual, its identity and its multiplicity, a transcendental and productive experience of thought, the theoretical domination of philosophy, the attempt to construct a problematic rivaling that of Marx, though mainly on Nietzschean terrain and with Nietzschean means.”[9] Four of the five texts that form this period are indicative of the Nietzschean thematic, though the first of the five, Phénomène et différence: essai sur l’ontologie de Ravaisson (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971) draws specifically from Félix Ravaisson’s work to describe him as “the most Nietzschean of the line of pre-Bergsonians.”[10] Although a separate text from the four others, this work is a fundamental underpinning of Laruelle’s thought, for according to Anne-Françoise Schmid, the notion of the serpentine line (or figura serpentinata) is found almost everywhere latently in Laruelle’s work.[11] In the meantime, I want to focus on these four other books: Machines Textuelles: déconstruction et le libido-d’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1976), Le déclin de l’écriture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977), Nietzsche contre Heidegger: thèses pour une politique nietzschéenne (Paris: Payot, 1977), and Au-delà du principe de pouvoir (Paris: Payot, 1978).[12] These four texts present novel interpretations of Nietzsche towards the express purpose of bringing about a fusion of Deleuzean metaphysics of Difference with the différance of Derridean deconstruction, crafting post-Marxist (Nietzschean) politics that challenge existing forms of political practices and forms of knowledge of power (such as hermeneutics of power, whether it be the juridical, biblical, philosophical, etc. means of interpretation) that are generated by the engine of Différance (here, a fusion of Derrida and Deleuze) rather than contradiction. According to Laruelle, it is Nietzsche who alongside Plato, Galileo, and Marx (according to Althusser) that invents, not discovers, the Continent of Politics. Between Marxist politics and Nietzschean politics, Laruelle states three theses:
Thesis 4: Marx discovers the Continent of History, but Nietzsche invents the Continent of Politics, a Break distinct from the Marxist one because it is specifically political both by its object and its conditions, and that it implicates a new definition of politics.
Thesis 5: As a theoretical-practical process, Marxism produces a secondary political benefit; as a process of production, Nietzsche-thought is the only one to produce a primary political benefit.
Thesis 6: Marx grounds the practical representation of politics and the relations of power, Nietzsche invents the production of specifically political agents. Marxism subordinates production to practice, but, with the inverse hierarchy, Nietzsche invents the theoretical instrument necessary for the exploration of the Continent of Politics.[13]
It is through the two practices of both political materialism and machinic materialism that Laruelle seeks to complete and resolve the problems that have been posed by historical materialism and dialectical materialism respectively that they could not solve. Political Materialism, on the one hand, is a “general analytic of power” that results from the “major Nietzschean discovery that power is no longer a generically or specifically qualified object within the element of an indifferent generality [that poses power as] no longer a set of secondary properties of a global or specific object (the State, the person, the People, class) or a homo politicus [and] it cannot draw its possibility within a fundamental ontology which would claim to be politically neutral.”[14]Machinic Materialism, on the other hand, has “the philosophical generality [for object] in which it poses the relations of matter and the ‘machinic’ syntaxes cannot mask [dissimuler] the duality (duplicity) of its objects and the problem of their necessary hierarchy.”[15] Both happen within and without philosophy, political or otherwise, for what is latent is nevertheless within the manifest but cannot be extricated through the manifest. The machinic[16] is the proper causality of this analysis which expresses an early, yet philosophically riddled form of unilaterality: “We ‘oppose’ to [Dialectical Materialism] a theoretical-instinctual apparatus, both theoretical and material (its unity is precisely différantial rather than ‘contradictory’) which has the property of always being universal and partial, ‘general’ and ‘minoritarian’ at the same time: both the multiplicity of possible theoretico-libidinal positions and one position in this multiplicity.”[17] Having Différance and the Other as the genetic engine of power, rather than the contradiction and Being, [Laruelle] inverts the hierarchy from the manifest and the surface level appearances of power towards its desiring, libidinal latent power, its sense or meaning [sens] as the determinant in the last instance. At a later time, Laruelle disavows this period of thought, not for the sole purposes of it being reducible to the principle of sufficient philosophy; rather, he signs the name Nietzsche as this period as indicative of stato-minoritarian thought. Indeed, as the above quote from Le déclin de l’écriture notes, by expressing both the multiplicity of possible positions and one position in this multiplicity, the circularity and impossibility of radically breaking the ties that bind the human with the world required a change of posture. Différance, with its duplicitous and latent power, became no different than the contradiction that sublated and subsumed the differences and identities into a unity. Yet the underlying factor that nevertheless drives Laruelle’s work from hereon is the problem that frames Machines textuelles: “how does one draw new effects from the transcendental without oneself being ‘ein transzendentaler Philosoph’…?”[18] To this day, the without-oneself-being-X is the key function of a non-philosopher, for one necessarily borrows (or draws) these new effects from some source that nevertheless cannot extricate, extract, exorcise without it constituting a vicious circle, in order to then invent new uses from them.
It is with the following problematic in Le principe de minorité that a break is striven for but not yet carried out until A Biography of Ordinary Man. Laruelle writes at the very start of Le principe de minorité:
Can we define parts before the Whole and independently from the Whole? Differences before their repetition and independent from the Idea, the Logos, and Being? Minorities before the State and independent from the State. The entity or the being [l’étant] before Being and independently from Being? Can we think events before their placement in history, subjects before objects and deprived of objectivity? Time without temporality? Singularities or multiplicities before any universal and independently from a universal? Etc. We do not respond to each of these questions in particular. We strive to elaborate a matrix which is valid for these types of questions and a matrix of responses that philosophy may hope to bring them. Therefore, the point is to establish a theory, in the strict sense of these terms, of the essence of multiplicities and, thereby, to reprise on new bases the oldest problems of truth, being, the absolute and the relative, transcendence, the method of philosophical thought, etc.[19]
This text presents a major breakthrough in Laruelle’s thought, but still proposes the idea of multiplicities as beyond the continua that they are nevertheless before. In other words, although the One presented here is unreflected [irréflechi] and non-thetic or independent from the mixture and blend that it forms with these generalizing universals, the One is still presented as an Other to Being. This “step beyond” [pas au-delà] required a further breakthrough, inaugurated with A Biography of Ordinary Man. As a “treatise of Human Solitudes,” Biography strives to ground a rigorous science of mankind, not only as necessary but possible. Biography states that the human of the Human Sciences (in the sense of the humanities, such as anthropology) is imbricated with philosophy, and that these Greco-unitary prejudices over mankind through the generalizing universals or Authorities subjugate mankind through History, Sexuality, Race, Language, Power, etc., and that it is necessary to no longer base a science of people through these Greek prejudices like Being and the Logos. It is also possible to develop an immanent description, a science of the experience of the individual solely on condition of demonstrating that the One is the unity of science and man, a One that is no longer Greek but a finite experience that even the naming of the “One” can provisionally stand for. The ordinary man, or minorities qua minorities, minorities that are not stato-minoritarian, requires a theoretical defense, and this text presents the basis for that defense. Rather than the One being beyond Being or beyond the World and authorities, it is Being, the World and authorities that are beyond the One.
Above, I posed four distinct questions: what exactly of the stato-minoritarian makes it Nietzschean, why does Laruelle sign the name ‘Nietzsche’ to describe this seemingly self-critical move, from what do we gather in this signature as the monumental formation of one single chain in the struggle of individuals, forming a mountain range of humankind through the millennia, and above all, how does one break it? If there is one thing to learn from Laruelle’s interpretation of Nietzsche, which is as generative, problematic, and productive of new forms of thought within thought, the stake that the problematic invented is both at once the multiplicity of theoretical-libidinal positions and one position within the multiplicity. Given the nature of the stato-minoritarian, one can presume that the minoritarian is but one position within the multiplicity of the State, that is, the minoritarian is co-extensive and a part of the State rather than being thought independent and before its blend. Though later on in his work, Laruelle will come to state that this period of thought, Philosophy I, placed itself under the authority of the principle of sufficient philosophy, and the goal to break the individual from this part of the Whole was to conceive of the individual as a part, even without the Whole, a unit without unity, one may say. Instead of conceiving of this problematic as within thought, it is without thought, which does not mean divorced from it; rather, the problematic that is inaugurated and to this day still not fully carried out from the instantiation of the minority principle as a paradigm is to conceive of this part qua part, unit qua unit, and minoritarian qua minoritarian on the basis of a thought adequate or determined in the last instance (or the last authority) by and from the human.
Above all, Laruelle retains something from Nietzsche that is productive on the basis of the critique of philosophical sufficiency, and it is found in the first human theorem of Biography (“man really exists and man is really distinct from the world”). In Book V of The Gay Science, aphorism 346, one will read the following:
The whole pose of ‘man against the world’, of man as a ‘world-negating’ principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds its wanting––the monstrous insipidity of this pose has finally come home to us and we are sick of it. We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of ‘man and world’, separated by the sublime presumption of the little word ‘and’.[20]
‘And’ is the amphibological gesture par excellence, the mixture-form that confounds what the human can do with what the world and the images projected back onto the human do, as indicative of ‘experience’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘existence’. Through the inversion and the break from the myth-making counter-mythos of philosophy, the non-philosophical science is able to describe and conceive of the human qua human who is no longer surrendered (or even sur-rendered) towards the World or thought. It is not that man is against the World, nor even man is no longer measured by the World or has ever been measured by the World; in-the-last-instance, man does not measure the World, but only measures what man, the One, can do, to which the World and no other generalizing universal or Authority can know.
Still, two other questions linger in the background: what can we learn from Philosophy I? And, most importantly, are there latent powers of Philosophy I that have yet to be conceived in the manifest content of the later writings? I hope to have provided somewhat of an answer to the first, in the hopes that there is some interest generated in terms of ‘returning’ to Laruelle-the-philosopher. As for the second question, it is that problem that I mentioned from Machines textuelles above: how does one draw new effects from the transcendental without oneself being a transcendental philosopher? The democratic gesture of non-philosophy is not in the statement that all thoughts are equal; democracy, or, better yet, communism,[21] is rather what occurs for those subjects within the division of labour (material and immaterial, or intellectual and physical labour does not matter, for both are determined in the last instance by the prior-to-priority of man-in-person) when the work that they perform is no longer dictated by the capital-form that they are subjugated by to continue to produce and reproduce, when the capital-form no longer harasses and bewitches the subject. Though the point is to transform the World, this cannot be done in the World. Non-Philosophy strives to invent a subject that is capable of disalienating themselves from the World, but equally, too, the World from itself in order to transform it. The latency of Philosophy I in the later writings is this being-oneself-without-being-X, and rather, the invention that is to come is human destiny: “You shall become the person you are.”[22]
[1] For the original post, you may check my blog: En-demic Theory, https://endemictheory.wordpress.com/. As for my dissertation, follow this link: https://uwo.scholaris.ca/items/909efd92-4a9f-4dac-984e-5277433c12ff
[2] See my translation published by Techniques here: https://techniquesjournal.com/homo-ex-machina/. NB: As I mention in my dissertation, there is a great emphasis on what Laruelle calls bio-political parallelism with the hyphen to indicate the coinciding of power and life. This translation and its editing removed the hyphenation for a reason that I am unaware.
[3] See Theory of Strangers, 24-7.
[4] Jacob Vangeest, “Nietzschean Problematics,” Western University, Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository < uwo.scholaris.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/772d7779-2d26-4a13-a7fa-5552133acb08/content >
[5] Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Nietzsche’s Political Materialism: Diagram for a Nietzschean Politics,” in Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Manuel Knoll, Berlin: De Gruyter, p.77-89.
[6] Arnaud Villani, “Poststructuralist Alternatives to Deconstruction,” in The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and its Differences, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Gary E. Aylesworth, Albany: SUNY Press, 1990, p.223-230. [NB 2026: another area of interest is in the work of Gilles Grelet, especially his essay “Un bréviaire de la non-religion: du théorisme, gnose rigoureuse comme antidote au nihilisme,” in Discipline hérétique : esthétique, psychanalyse, religion (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1998), 182-216.]
[7] A Biography of Ordinary Man, p.38-40. Emphases mine.
[8] Nietzsche, “The Utility and Liability of History,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p.97.
[9] Principles of Non-Philosophy, p.33.
[10] Phénomène et différence, p.9. “Despite his blandness, his unbearable and barely modern sweetness, Ravaisson is the most Nietzschean of the line of pre-Bergsonians, such at least I have implemented, seeking affirmation and positivity within the reclamation of the sensible concrete, expression within the manifestation of the absolute, and even – pushing re-interpretation beyond reasonable limits – something like the eternal return within the serpentine circularity which forms the essence of life and grace: the eternal return of grace and beauty…” [“Malgré sa fadeur, sa douceur insupportable et si peu modern, Ravaisson est le plus nietzschéen de la lignée des pré-bergsoniens. Tel du moins je l’ai mis en œuvre, cherchant l’affirmation et la positivité dans le revendication du concret sensible, l’expression dans la manifestation de l’absolu, et même – poussant la ré-interprétation au-delà des limites raisonnables – quelque chose comme l’éternel retour dans la circularité serpentine qui fait l’essence de la vie et de la grâce: l’éternel retour de la grâce et la beauté…”] [NB: To compare, see Lindsay Lerman’s translation, Phenomenon and Difference, 4]
[11] Anne-Françoise Schmid, “A Mood for Philosophy,” in Labyrinth 19.2 (Winter 2017), p.15. “François has made the serpentine line live again in philosophy within his first published work, Phénomène et Différence…One can find it everywhere, in his whole work, and it is the dynamic of his latest work: The Last Humanity…where ecology, habitually reduced to horizontal movements of the planet, finds its vertical dimension. François cites from time to time the Irish writer Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars as a way to recall to us that he is the son of a farmer who became a philosopher and as a title that he transforms into “From the Cave to the Stars” according to the serpentine line.” [Cette ligne serpentine, François l’a faite revivre en philosophie dans son premier ouvrage publié…On la retrouve partout, dans toute son œuvre, et elle est la dynamique de son dernier ouvrage…où l’écologie, habituellement réduite aux mouvements horizontaux de la planète, trouve sa dimension verticale. François cite de temps en temps “La charrue et les étoiles,” du poète irlandais Sean O’Casey, manière de nous rappeler qu’il est fils de paysan devenu philosophe et titre qu’il transform en “De la caverne aux étoiles,” selon la ligne serpentine.”]
[12]I would title each respectively as the following: Textual Machines: Deconstruction and the Libido-of-Writing, The Twilight of Writing, Nietzsche Contra Heidegger: Theses Towards a Nietzschean Politics, and Beyond the Power Principle. For the purposes of the post, I have chosen to retain the original titles and to follow this legend: MT, DE, NcH, and APP.
[13] NcH, p.21. [“Thèse 4. Marx découvre le Continent Histoire, mais Nietzsche invente le Continent Politique, une Coupure distincte de la marxiste parce qu’elle est spécifiquement politique à la fois par son objet et ses conditions, et qu’elle implique une nouvelle définition de la politique. Thèse 5. Comme procès théorique-pratique, le marxisme produit un bénéfice politique secondaire; comme procès de production, la pensée-nietzsche est la seule à produire un bénéfice politique primaire. Thèse 6. Marx fonde la représentation pratique de la politique et des rapports de pouvoir, Nietzsche invente la production d’agents spécifiquement politiques. Le marxisme subordonne la production à la pratique, mais, avec la hiérarchie inverse, Nietzsche invente l’instrument théorique nécessaire à l’exploration du Continent Politique.]
[14] APP, p.23. [“Notre problème est de définir une analytique générale du pouvoir, qu’on appellera si l’on veut « Matérialisme politique », sur le cas tout à fait singulier, mais non exemplaire, du pouvoir-interpréter, c’est-à-dire d’une herméneutique, et qui, sans s’opposer contradictoirement aux thèses marxistes ou encore à l’Archéologie du pouvoir, procéderait en les différant de l’objet (r). Justement si la découverte nietzschéene majeure, c’est que le pouvoir n’est plus un objet qualifié génériquement ou spécifiquement dans l’élément d’une généralité indifférente, n’est plus un ensemble de propriétés secondaires d’un objet global ou spécifique (État, personne, Peuple, classe), ou d’un homo politicus, il ne peut puiser sa possibilité dans une ontologie fondamentale qui se prétendrait neutre politiquement.”]
[15] NcH, p.32-33. [“Quant au Matérialisme machinique (M.M.), la généralité philosophique dans laquelle il pose les rapports de la matière et des syntaxes « machiniques » ne peut dissimuler la dualité (la duplicité) de ses objets et le problème de leur nécessaire hiérarchie.”]
[16] [NB 2026: In the original text, this referred to a hyperlink. The link is as follows: https://endemictheory.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/translation-of-francois-laruelle-positions-from-le-declin-de-lecriture/%5D
[17] DdE, p.14. [“Nous lui [M.D.] « opposons » un appareil théorico-pulsionnel, à la fois théorique et matériel (son unité est précisément différantiale plutôt que « contradictoire ») qui a la propriété d’être toujours en même temps universel et partiel, « général » et « minoritaire »: à la fois la multiplicité des positions théorico-libidinales possibles et une position dans cette multiplicité.”]
[18] MT, p.10. [“Car tel est sur ce point mon problème: comment tirer du transcendantal de nouveaux effets sans être soi-même « ein transzendentaler Philosoph »…?”].
[19] PM, p.5. [“[Peut-on] définir des parties avant le Tout et indépendamment du Tout? des différences avant leur répétition et indépendamment de l’Idée, du Logos, de l’Être? des minorités avant l’Etat et indépendamment de l’Etat? l’étant avant l’Être et indépendamment de l’Être? peut-on penser des événements avant leur mise en histoire, des sujets avant les objets et dépourvus d’objectivité? un temps sans temporalité? des singularités ou des multiplicités avant tout universel et indépendamment d’un universel? etc. On ne répond pas à chacune de ces questions en particulier, on s’efforce d’élaborer une matrice qui vaut des questions de ce type et une matrice des réponses que la philosophie peut espérer leur apporter. Il s’agit donc d’établir une théorie, au sens strict de ces termes, de l’essence des multiplicités et, par là, de reprendre sur de nouvelles bases les très anciens problèmes de la vérité, de l’être, de l’absolu et du relatif, de la transcendance, de la méthode de la pensée philosophique, etc.”]
[20] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974, p.286.
[21] Introduction aux sciences génériques, p.98-99. “The democracy of-the-last-instance could very well after all be called ‘communism’ and to subtract the latter from any historical hastiness as much as from spontaneism – if the ‘common’ of communism was comprised as the generic, if communism was comprised as the generic constant of history.” [“La démocratie de-dernière-instance pourrait bien après tout s’appeler « communisme » et soustraire ce dernier à toute précipitation historique autant qu’au spontanéisme – si le « commun » du communisme était compris comme le générique, si le communisme était compris comme la constante générique de l’histoire.”]
[22] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Kaufmann translation, p.219.
Leave a Reply