Laruelle: Against the Digital

Description

"Laruelle" is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker Francois Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle's concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital.In "Laruelle," Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle's concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of "the One" as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view "the digital."Digital machines dominate today's world, while so-called digital thinking--that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world--is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker--perhaps the only non-digital thinker today--and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.

Alexander Galloway is professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. His many books include The Interface Effect and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007).

"Laruelle: Against the Digital is a compelling read for any form of investigations in today's conditions of power, aesthetics, and thought. Alexander R. Galloway's lucid writing takes us on a thrilling journey into the details of Laruelle's uncompromising thought of the One. It offers us challengingly fresh material for developing a non-representational view of computers, capitalism, art and ethics. Galloway's profound critique of the discrete is an unmissable intervention into the thought of the digital today." -Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths University of London "This daring and original treatise outlines an anti-dialectical, analog, generic, utopian, and static 'last philosophy' that affirms a new ethic of the one against a logic of capital and of the digital. Galloway positions his stunning synthesis of Laruelle's thought provocatively alongside yet at odds with Deleuze, Badiou, Heidegger, Levinas, and Henry." -Eleanor Kaufman, UCLA