LARUELLE AND SCIENCE FICTION (2): Structure, characters, themes

​by Terence Blake

We have seen that certain of the key terms and concepts used to characterise the literary genre of science fiction can also be used to describe Laruelle’s non-philosophical project in TETRALOGOS: amplitude, inventiveness, mega-text, cognitive estrangement, futurality, neologism and transformed language. In this section we continue the investigation into the parallels between Laruelle’s philosophy and science fiction.

2) Static Presentation: structure, characters, and themes

​The subtitle of TETRALOGOS is an opera of philosophies. We can already see an allusion to Laruelle’s concept of philo-fiction as a generalization of science fiction, since one of the great subcategories of science fiction is Space Opera. As we have seen TETRALOGOS is conceived as the libretto of a conceptual opera, composed of an Overture, four « books » and a Coda. All is 622 pages.
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1) The Overture (84 pages) introduces the main themes and object of the work:

« to describe, through a montage of philosophical theories and of central references to music, the harmonic and contrapuntal amplitude of the epic of human life as a function of its sites, which go from the Cavern to the Stars, and the diversity of its stages and its intrigues, which go from Birth to Messianity  » (11).

​2) Book I (76 pages) constitutes the Prologue, it presents the conceptual characters, the landscapes, the acts and the structure of the work. In the de-schematized dramatization of François Laruelle’s TETRALOGOS, there are four main conceptual characters: « forced » philosophy or « Reminscience », generic thinking, the quantum model, the « forced subject » or generic messiah. We can abbreviate this as NGQM: the noetic, the generic, the quantic, the messianic. The landscapes are the Earth, the World (or rather the worlds), and the Universe. The acts correspond to the disciplines that can condition philosophy (art, love, poem, politics, science, religion).
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3) Book II (132 pages) is the Organon, it articulates Laruelle’s theory of « Reminiscience », a « fusion of philosophical memory and contemporary science ». Reminiscience allows us to see that the state of the standard world is the forgetting of the sutures that enclose it in a fixed and exclusive framework. I propose to call this standard state « amnescience, » or sutural forgetfulness.

4) Book III (the longest, 231 pages) is titled THE HUMAN EPIC OF THE NON-PHI FROM THE CAVERN TO THE STARS. It deals with the full amplitude of the human experience, ranging from « the cave to the starry sky », from the hell of the world of amnescience to the paradise of reminiscience. It presents the de-anthropologizing ascent from the Earth to the stars.

5) Book IV (59 pages) is the Ritorno: this is the most difficult movement, it presents the anthropic descent, the « musical return from heaven to earth ».

6) The Coda (15 pages) is entitled « For a treatise of speculative music (thus without effective music but not without ideally philosophical musicality) » (593).

Comment: this is an ambitious project, Dantesque, the scope of which covers the sites, the stages and the intrigues of human life as a cosmological epic. The book is a secular and conceptual DIVINE COMEDY, beginning in the cave of amnescience (the Inferno), ascending the stages of Reminiscience (Purgatorio), to the Stars (Paradiso). It ends with a descent to the Earth (Ritorno). We are very lucky to have such a book. Nevertheless, we can make certain observations, resulting from various interrogations.

1) Given (I) the operatic image of thought developed by Laruelle, (II) his new topology of de-anthropologized knowledge, (III) his philo-science-fictional methodology, and (IV) his concern for a compositional practice, we can consider that TETRALOGOS is a work of Space Opera or Conceptual Universe Opera. It bears the same mark of cosmicity.

The question that arises here is whether Laruellean Space Opera belongs more to the genre of « hard » science-fiction, which makes an informed and integrated use of modern physics or if its use of science tends more towards the « soft » end of the science fiction spectrum. However, Laruelle has ensured the inclusion of the principles of the quantum paradigm in the hard core of his thought in TETRALOGOS

2) The dramaturgy of conceptual characters and the dramatic structure of actions and intrigues reveal here a greater proximity to the thought of Gilles Deleuze than Laruelle’s earlier writings could have led us to think. However, we can consider that TETRALOGOS relativises and overcomes some of the problematic features and some of the limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, while being indebted to that book and to Deleuze’s work in general. In particular, Laruelle’s use of de-schematized conceptual characters shows the still overly empirical aspect of Deleuze’s conceptual characters.

3) Reminiscience is at the heart of this new book. It refers to the « forced » generic mixture of philosophy as a transcendental de-foundationalised act with quantum physics as the foundation of the transcendental dimension. Here we can see the apparent contradiction between a desire to defeat foundationalism and the call to a scientistic foundation.

4) To achieve the goal of « amplitude », describing the passage from the Cavern to the Sky and encompassing the stages of the epic of human life, Laruelle’s project must be totally generic, rather than partisan or parochial. We have seen that his scientism constitutes a lack of genericity, and the same goes for his concept of messianity. If it is only a question of terminology, Laruelle should then be ready to combine it with other terms to express the telos of the descending subject, for example with Buddhahood.

5) Laruelle is a materialist in his emphasis on the dialectic of descent, just as important as the dialectic of ascension. Descent means that we acquire in the real a new practice of philosophy and of life, a new inventiveness, and not just a new manifesto of beautiful intentions.
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6) This new practice of non-philosophical composition aims to produce a dramaturgy of philosophy conceived as an inaudible and insonorous music. We must then ask ourselves if the « descent » really succeeds in producing a new marriage between the virtual and the real, including at the music level.

As we have seen above, the modest posture claims the book as a libretto for a conceptual opera. The ambitious stance asserts that the book is itself a « philosophising music ». Seen in quantum terms, modesty is decoherent, i.e. we have in front of us a macroscopic book, which according to the musical spirit can only be at best the libretto. The ambition would be to make us hear/understand the book according to the quantum spirit, coherently, as a superposition of concepts and music.

It is thus a dramaturgy that is musical in spirit but philosophical in « letter », whose « libretto » is provided by this text and its philosophico-scientific « dialogues ». But, let us repeat, it is a drama without sonorous or auditory actuality (TETRALOGOS, 11).

​François Laruelle aims to create a musical drama through a conceptual libretto based on philosophical-scientific dialogues. It may be noted that it aims to replace the monological sutures by dialogical exchanges. In particular, it stages a series of dialogues between the generic and the quantic.

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terenceblake