On truth and gossip: The position of ‘communication’ in Laruelle’s non-philosophy

<p>In an essay from the early 1990s, François Laruelle characterizes philosophy as ‘that rumour which, speaking with itself and speaking only of itself, extends itself across the entire boundaries of the West’, a discourse which ‘propagates itself on the basis of its menacing vacuity and impending ruination’ (‘La rumeur et le savoir’), counterposing it against a more rigorous science or knowledge of the One. And although he would soon abandon such recourse to scientificity, his derisive description of philosophy as a constantly circulating form of rumour, gossip, or hearsay remains consistent.Accordingly, in this paper, I argue that Laruelle’s critique of ‘mediatic communication’, which he views as having supplanted sophism as the nihilistic abyss into which philosophy leads us, representing a total unification of worldly experience under the aegis of a universal exchangeability, as well as his broader characterization of philosophy as a kind of gossip, maintains a rather common philosophical presupposition: namely, the inadequacy of both everyday speech and technologically-mediated communication in accounting for the real. Of course, Laruelle does not claim to wholly reject such communication – instead, at various times across his oeuvre, he makes gestures toward a uni-lateralization of the ligature between philosophizability and communication, which would treat the latter term as a philosophical material from which a non-philosophical practice might be realized – and yet, ultimately, he stills appeals to a pre-communicative experience that claims to determine all communication in the last instance, and a pre-worldly subject unsullied by any logos that would situate them as a Being-in-the-world. By considering this attempt to both disrupt and reappropriate the communicative, dialogic function of philosophy in relation to the Heideggerian notion of ‘idle talk’, I propose that Laruelle’s non-philosophy is beholden to a markedly philosophical distinction between truth and doxa that ultimately comes to regard all communication and exchange as a transcendence that alienates us from the radical immanence of our lived existence.</p>