In 1988, following a conference in Paris, François Laruelle took to the stage alongside Jacques Derrida for a gentlemanly exchange of responses to Laruelle’s presentation. Derrida’s tenor was one of polite bafflement, registering places where he would have imagined the two thinkers to agree but puzzling, then, over Laruelle’s evident disinterest in joining the deconstructive project. At the very end of his questions, Derrida posed the place of his own work in Laruelle’s schema: “Why, in this or that approach putting forward propositions very similar to yours ... why class these gestures among everything you dismiss? It is obvious among movements of the deconstructive type ... there is among other things a movement to deconstruct the model of constitution, ... which you identify with everything you want to reject” (The Non-Philosophy Project, 80). We have a common enemy, mulled Derrida. Why is deconstruction not your friend?
His question lands all the more pointedly because, indeed, deconstruction was something like Laruelle’s first intellectual home. Had Derrida been responding to Laruelle’s work from the late seventies rather than the late eighties, the conversation would have been very different. But by the 1980s, Laruelle had launched the trajectory that would mark out the rest of his career—a career he would spend repeatedly consigning deconstruction to the wreckage of Greco-Occidental philosophy, tossed on the pile alongside Parmenides and Plato.
The casual confidence with which Laruelle dispatches deconstruction is puzzling in many respects. Much like Laruelle’s own work, deconstruction scopes the entire discipline of philosophy, entails a posture of indifference, punctures metaphysical pretensions, and attends to the way the world fails to coincide with itself under the influence of a certain real. It takes any and all texts and archives as contingent material for showcasing presence and logocentrism, not unlike Laruelle’s own treatment of philosophy as contingent material for showcasing the logic of Philosophical Decision. Derrida’s 1988 bemusement limns a posture that continentally-inclined readers are likely to share when approaching Laruelle’s work.
This paper takes the measure of Laruelle’s discontent with deconstruction and puts it in conversation with the larger field of religious studies—in part simply to sharpen understanding of Laruelle, but also because so much of religious studies still bears the imprint of postmodern and deconstructive methods. Laruelle’s work asks scholars of religion to confront the same realities that it offered to Derrida nearly forty years ago: the inhumanity of critique (the way that it transits in authority and remains complicit in metaphysics) but also the emergence of new alternatives when we take up another stance. What are the risks of a still-deconstructive study of religion? If our task is not to identify the slippages that betray ideology’s unstable footings, or to highlight the incoherent justifications behind religious logics of oppression, or even merely to explore the ways that religion has been used as a differential category for mapping the contingencies of human history, what are we to do in their place? For his deconstructive forebears, Laruelle offered a new posture based on philosophical contingencies. For contemporary religion scholars, Laruelle offers much the same: a new posture—not toward religion but rather on the basis of its available materials. If deconstruction and differential thinking are not, in the end, properly human practices, this paper asks, what might be humanly done with religion instead?
This paper takes the measure of Laruelle’s discontent with deconstruction and puts it in conversation with the larger field of religious studies—in part simply to sharpen understanding of Laruelle, but also because so much of religious studies still bears the imprint of postmodern and deconstructive methods. Laruelle’s work asks scholars of religion to confront realities like the inhumanity of critique (the way that it transits in authority and remains complicit in metaphysics) but also the emergence of new alternatives when we take up another stance. What are the risks of a still-deconstructive study of religion? If our task is not to identify the slippages that betray ideology’s unstable footings, or to highlight the incoherent justifications behind religious logics of oppression, what are we to do in their place?