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What happens when a new philosophy emerges from a supposedly non‐philosophical field? Must it follow the norm whereby a form of philosophy is recognized to be at work in this area (by a recognized philosopher, but one operating as an outsider), or by some kind of philosopher manqué (a native within the field) being discovered at work there (by this same outsider)? In other words, can something only be deemed “philosophical” in view of an implied subject who thinks in a particular way, discovering thoughts similar to those found in established positions of philosophy? What, alternatively, would it mean to think of a supposedly non‐philosophy realm, such as process organization theory, as immanently philosophical? This chapter explores the conditions by which, far from merely illustrating or applying extant philosophy (“Theory”), Process Organization Theory might actually be seen to create its own novel philosophical thoughts, immanently. By examining the non‐philosophy forwarded by François Laruelle, and the manner in which time and process resist any attempts to theorize them (to make sense out of them), we will outline a way of seeing process as a kind of resistant thinking (an idea first put forward by Henri Bergson) and, therewith, Process Organization Theory as a new form of philosophy. Interdisciplinary thought, on this view, is not about applying philosophy, but consists in philosophy renewing itself (making itself unrecognizable) by acknowledging how non‐philosophical realms (art, technology, science) might be capable of creating new philosophical thoughts. With that, however, must also come a transformation of what we mean by philosophy and even thought itself.

The Introduction outlines the main sections of the book, while also providing a general sketch of Laruelle’s method, its materialism, its relationship to nonhuman thought, and the merits of using the structure of a film to explain consistently what is unique in non-philosophy.

This chapter explains why Laruelle thinks that philosophy is the very form of domination in thought by showing how a range of philosophers, from Locke and Kant through to Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou and the “new realists”, each replicate – in different ways – a structure of power that victimizes individuals who do not fulfill their definitions of objective, detached, human thinking.

This chapter examines the relationship between paraconsistent logic and Laruelle’s apparently anarchic approach to epistemology and thought, utilizing the idea of the rate of cuts (film edits) to show how various speeds of thought are possible, some of them nonhuman.

Chapter Three analyses the behavioristic language of Laruelle’s approach – its use of posture, orientation, withdrawal, and position to materialize philosophy – in order to transform the exemplary thinker into an actorly pose, a kind of body rather than a state of mind.

Chapter Four explores all the implications of a non-standard approach to thought for both animal and film (animation) studies, explaining how Laruelle’s humanism is actually a form of non-standard humanism that reforms what philosophers have previously thought about the animal.

Chapter Five draws together ideas from the previous chapters on objectivity, editing, acting, and animation to engage with performance art as one final model to explain Laruelle’s heterodox approach, one that appears to perform its ideas bodily rather than express them discursively.

This is a review on the positive argument concerning the nonhuman, which it accomplishes by drawing together Laruelle’s ideas about the dystopias of philosophy. Specifically, it brings together ideas about the human and the nonhuman with ideas about philosophy and non-philosophy.

This essay applies François Laruelle’s thinking of nonphilosophy to theology, to imagine what a nontheology would look like in contemporary terms of political theology and political ecology. Nontheology does not think to God, but posits God as the Real or what Laruelle calls a “vision-in-One,” and thinks from it. Political theology can be characterized by postsecularism. The return of religion in thought, politics, and culture deconstructs any simple opposition between religion and the secular. This return is also tied to the breakdown of modern liberalism and the crisis of global capitalism in terms of ecology, economics, and energy because of the demands for perpetual growth conflicting with the increasing scarcity of natural resources. I introduce some reflections for political ecology based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, concerning repetition, intensity, entropy, and thermodynamics. Repetition is the creation of entropy, but entropy is not heat death and irreversible loss of order but rather the reduction of gradient differentials. What Deleuze calls repetition can be related to what Laruelle calls unilateral duality. Finally, I offer a reading of Lacan’s Seminar XVIII in which Lacan discusses the objet petit a in connection with entropy. Just as Laruelle attempts to think about religion and Christianity in terms of gnosis, heresy, and insurrection, here I deploy nontheology in insurrectionist terms, an insurrection with and against theology, to think about what happens when God dies in symbolic terms as Other and becomes manifest along the lines of an objet petit a.

This chapter is in the form of a personal letter, allowing for reminiscences on travel and study, along with explorations of questions of cultural and diasporic identity, while at the same time investigating the vocabulary of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics as a possible structure for these questions. The text interrogates itself, describing itself as a “writing which shifts registers,” consistent with Harmolodics itself. The Harmolodic theory is expounded in a technical manner and given a novel interpretation which draws on the vocabulary and thought of the (non) philosopher Francois Laruelle.

This essay articulates a threefold typology of subjectivities (broadly derived from Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard) and their relevance to political theology. Each thinker refuses to dialectically unify self and world. Instead, in different ways, they “reduplicate” and intensify the gap between subject and object, and within the subject itself. This reduplication, the essay argues, exposes and expresses the inconsistency of the immanent real itself, which cannot be mastered and defined by any transcendent perspective. This in turn opens the possibility of articulating theories of political subjectivity and resistance outside the parameters set by the discourse of sovereignty.

This chapter argues that the dichotomy between sex and gender reflects and reproduces the opposition between the real and the unreal. It considers Judith Butler's attempt to deconstruct the dual structure of sex and gender in Bodies That Matter. It then examines two concepts, one central for a philosophical line of thinking and the other for the non-philosophical striving to create an opening for thought that escapes the binary clench. Deleuze proposes a way out of the confinement of thought within a stable structure and, consequently, out of the binary of opposites that is the most elemental compulsory constituent of any structure. Laruelle proposes a thesis about an exit from dualism, which means exiting philosophy altogether. The exit from the dual autoenclosure of thought is enabled by the non-philosophical method of “thinking in terms of the real.”. The proposals of Deleuze and Laruelle are discussed and compared; the need to compare them stems from one central element they have in common—the goal to produce theorizing that is determined by immanence.

This chapter first discusses the thought of Alain Badiou and François Laruelle, both of whom shared the aspiration for radicalism in method, routed in a form of realism. It then espouses the non-philosophical line of thinking in correlation with the real, and considers the possibility of conceiving of a love of the other's radical solitude (that is to say, of the real) and in correlation with the real. It further argues that every thought is immanently universalistic since the pretension to universality is constitutively inbuilt in the desire of thought. This pretension is unavoidable, as is the naïve or prelingual compulsion in every thinking endeavor to attain “the most accurate truth,” “the most truthful truth” of an event or of the world. This naïve compulsion is what gives birth to thought, and it is certainly prior to any self-reflection, to any autoreferential self-correctives of the thinking process that introduce criticality and political responsibility into itself.

The non-philosophy of Laruelle establishes theoretical grounds for a thinking that can escape the impasse of “specularization,” of autoreflexivity and autolegitimization as the defining constituent of philosophy. The unavoidable route of accomplishing this, according to non-philosophy, is establishing a unilaterally situated thought. This involves a cognitive posture devoid of any relationism produced by and situated within the doctrinal horizon(s), producing a thought of singularity that only unilaterally correlates with the real. This chapter attempts to make use of this Laruellian proposition in order to create a thinking stance that is faithful to the reality of the lived identitary subjection. It is also faithful to the reality of the transcendental identitary frame (the identity subjugation as prescribed by the world) acting in such a compelling way upon the real ([of] the human-in-human) that it itself acts as an instance of the real.

Chapter compares Laruelle’s ‘non-standard philosophy’ with Bergson’s immanent metaphysics of art. In complementary ways, they both radicalise the relations between philosophy and art, Bergson seeing philosophy as a kind of general art, Laruelle making each of the arts (non-standardly) philosophical. They both ‘de-philosophise philosophy’ in the sense of making philosophy strange through what Bergson calls ‘penser en durée’, ‘the immanent thinking-in-time that makes philosophy a generic art and the arts specific, new, philosophies’

Using François Laruelle’s non-philosophy of definitional mutation, this chapter examines Deleuze’s theory of stupidity (in Difference and Repetition) in order to deconstruct the difference between the ‘wise’ philosopher and the ‘idiot’ as his transcendental stooge. The result is a non-philosophical ‘unlearning’ which involves something more radical, namely the idea that thought is not the intrinsic property of humans that serves to define their essence, an essence that would then indeed be ‘local’; rather it is a universal milieu. By emphasizing animality, bringing it within the sphere of culture, we can emphasise the most elevated humanity, so as to bring it into the universe; and, through a paradoxical example, re-examine its links with animality, of which it will then be a matter of knowing whether it, also, is universal. Ultimately, the chapter enquires as to whether Laruelle is entirely fair to Deleuze’s account of the idiot in respect to philosophy and non-philosophy. In particular, it asks whether Deleuze’s notion of becoming-animal can be used outside of its Deleuzian philosophical context – one that disrupts the differences (set out in What is Philosophy?) between philosophy, science, and art.

A brief overview of the concept of “the One” within contemporary continental philosophy. Three questions structure the discussion: What is philosophy? Where did philosophy come from? And what is it like without philosophy?