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François Laruelle’s decades-long development of “non-philosophy” remains among the most distinctive and significant intellectual projects in contemporary Continental thought. Non-Standard Philosophy is one of his most important works, at once the culmination of non-philosophy and a radical breakthrough that redefines philosophical concepts by way of quantum mechanics.
Non-Standard Philosophy integrates philosophy, science, and poetic invention in a powerful new theoretical framework. Non-standard philosophy is to philosophy as quantum mechanics is to physics: a revolution in what can be known and how it can be known. Laruelle puts non-standard philosophy into practice, constructing a laboratory of experimentation with philosophical and scientific concepts that is modeled on the role of particle colliders in physics. Quantum mechanics provides Laruelle with a means both to instantiate non-philosophical research and to explain its particular form of practice. At once scientifically rigorous and philosophically inventive, this approach offers a systematic alternative to conventional modes of thinking.
Non-Standard Philosophy stands alongside Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Badiou’s Being and Event as one of the towering works of contemporary French thought. The theoretical ambition, interdisciplinary scope, and future potentialities of this book make it essential reading for scholars and students in the critical humanities.
— Ray Brassier, American University of Beirut
What happens when philosophy gives up its final authority over the real? This long-awaited translation of François Laruelle’s Non-Standard Philosophy enacts a relentless thinking practice that refuses the structure of representation, the authority of thought as the self-posited decision of splitting, dividing, separating. A daring escalation of conceptions that don’t fall short of rigor in offering us an adventure in science, this exciting translation is an unmissable contribution to the theoretical, ethical, technological, and artistic struggle against norms that limit the possible.
— Luciana Parisi, Duke University
François Laruelle (1937–2024) taught for many years at the Université de Paris X: Nanterre as well as the Collège International de Philosophie. His innovative theoretical approach, first called non-philosophy and later non-standard philosophy, is one of the most important movements in French thought in the past fifty years.
Taylor Adkins is an independent scholar who has translated works by Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and François Laruelle.
Rocco Gangle is professor of philosophy at Endicott College and translator of Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (2011).