Laruelle

Day off from Lovecraft, back to Laruelle. I’m still struck by how much more German he seems than French. If you were handed a book by Laruelle with no name on the cover, who would you think wrote it? My own guess would be that it was probably written by some up-and-coming 40’ish German who had spent a lot of time in Paris, had come to admire Deleuze and especially Derrida greatly, and was now trying to sum up what it all meant for contemporary German thought. Both his virtues and vices are of the sort that we would normally expect from somewhere other than France.

I think he gets Heidegger pretty much right. Husserl isn’t presented in nearly as much detail, but few people use Husserl for anything other than a foil these days, so that’s not too surprising. I’m largely in agreement with what he does with Hegel, of course.

He’s also one of the densest prose stylists in the philosophy of our time. It’s not bad writing, exactly. He’s keeping us pointed towards the topic at hand, not gibbering about himself or speaking in clichés, both of which can happen with truly bad writing. But it’s really unnecessarily painful to read, and in my opinion often unnecessarily long, since the point in any given chapter is generally fairly simple once the terminology is boiled down.

What will be the fate of Laruelle’s work among the younger generations? It’s too early to say, since we’re really just getting started with the full-blown translation of his works into other languages. My worry for him is that the demands of his prose are so great that many will simply be turned off from the start. If he catches on, it could provide a sort of counterweight to the deeply Hegelian presuppositions of Badiou, Žižek, and now Meillassoux. Another effect would be at least a partial revival of Derrida, seen through Laruelle’s own lenses.

The other problem is that I’m still not sure how much one can do with his central idea, which still feels to me a bit like an empty triumph. Morton once joked that the use of Badiouian set theory at its worst moments is like kids at recess saying “Googolplex!” to win an argument. In Laruelle’s case it’s more like kids saying “Not!” at the end of someone else’s 30-minute speech. I could still be missing something, of course.

My guess is that Laruelle probably won’t catch on in the Anglophone world as extensively as Badiou has, but surprises do occur.