Materials for a Non-Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Utopia

Abstract

This article examines François Laruelle’s (non-)materialism construed as a philosophy of nature in terms of its own methodology and applies Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading of Schelling’s work as a reference point for Naturphilosophie. Despite the evident divergences between Schelling’s and Grant’s philosophical aims and Laruelle’s, all these thinkers oppose binary constructions in philosophy in which one of the terms inevitably is pejorative and in some fashion subordinate to the other. To avoid that outcome, Schelling employs a depotentiating generative abstraction which in Presentation of My System (1801) reduces the philosopher to the immanent level of nature - a kind of “non-place” or utopia of identity. Laruelle, however, uses Schelling’s methods of abstraction to produce a methodological “impoverishment” of the philosophical concepts he began from and to start “thinking from” the non-place of matter. He also arrives at a utopia that he understands as a certain movement combining within itself subject and method. It is deterritorializing, but this deterritorialization is distinct from that which takes place within philosophy because here the agent of deterritorialization is Real, and philosophy is to be overcome (brought into utopia). Here the article makes critical use of Deleuze to clarify the contrast with Laruelle’s non-philosophy inasmuch as Deleuze often smuggles idealism and the transcendence into his thinking. Laruelle relies on Deleuze’s critique to eventually reject the entire materialism-idealism duality because it subordinates materialism to idealism as is typical for such binary categories. Instead of the materialism-idealism duality, Laruelle offers materialism and idealism correlated with matter (which is foreclosed from thought), and identical (but only in the last instance) with Real.