Sunday, September 21, 2008

Reversing the Critical Turn

Continuing with the series I began here: , I want to look now at how Francois Laruelle attempts to move beyond the Kantian critical turn. I'm going to avoid going too deeply into his project, and focus mostly on how he justifies his work.

The Axiomatic Approach:
Laruelle’s general stance towards the critical injunction can be summed up in his claim that, “It is necessary to start from the real, otherwise you will never get to it.” (Derrida & Laruelle, “Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy”) This directly opposes the numerous attempts to work within language, discourse, philosophy, culture, consciousness, subjectivity, etc. and discern a way to escape the correlationist circle.