Affect within the coordinates of non-philosophy

Abstract

The article aims to solve a double task. On the one hand, it attempts to clarify some of the concepts of François Laruelle’s non-philosophy; on the other hand, it identifies in the foundations of science an affective plan which is ignored by non-philosophy itself. Resorting to Spinoza, the author shows affect to be something that confronts our ability to think about the world in terms of essence and representation, i.e., our habit of «doubling the world» (Laruelle). Affect belongs to the plane of immanence because it bears witness to the realm of thinking without a subject and to that of perception without an object. The very introduction of the concept of immanence, however, requires constant acts of differentiation. The philosophy of difference has two poles: firstly, immanentism, which resists the domination of transcendence, and, secondly, the deconstruction of onto-theology where the relationship between the transcendental order and the formal semiology of language and text generates numerous aporias. In the last instance, Deleuze’s immanentism is committed to replacing philosophical concepts with signs of art, while Derrida’s deconstruction unveils the obscure axiomatic foundations of European thinking, which raises the question of the affective foundations of any axiomatic model whatsoever. These two incompatible lines achieve their «quantum» unity in the artistic practice as theorized by Marcel Duchamp, who seeks to minimize the sensual characteristics of a work of art and to identify the affective content of abstraction. Just like Duchamp in contemporary art, François Laruelle treats the apparatus of philosophy as ready-made objects, which, albeit losing their depth, retain the trace of a philosophical desire for transcendence.