some quick marginal thoughts on Laruelle

Laruelle doesn’t write like the other recent French thinkers. He writes more like a 35-year-old German who’s really into recent French philosophy. There’s a technical precision and density there that we’re more accustomed to finding in German authors, and his literary gifts are more in the area of wise aphoristic sentences surrounded by much professorial bookkeeping (think Hegel or Husserl) than in the extended stylistic ballets that one is used to finding in French philosophers, for better and for worse.

Laruelle is also a clever reader of people like Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, picking up things that others miss, and I think he is often brilliantly on target.

That said, while the central idea is pretty clear, I don’t find it especially powerful. (Some of the people who want to know what the “payoff” is for OOO are Laruelle fans, but if there’s any recent author whose “payoff” is unclear, it’s Laruelle himself– who makes a point of trumping everything in sight, but often without much of a pot on the table when he throws down the trump card.) But maybe I’m still missing something. I’ll think it over a good deal before actually writing the review, because you never want to misfire on an emerging thinker of significance.

I don’t know Rocco Gangle at all, but he seems smart and to the point. His preface isn’t a boring waste of time as some prefaces are; you actually learn from it, and it’s readable.

But I’d better save the details and my broader conclusions for the bigger audience.