Alexander R. Galloway
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816692125
- eISBN:
- 9781452949574
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692125.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
François Laruelle, the idiosyncratic French thinker and promulgator of “non-standard philosophy,” is currently experiencing a renaissance in the English-speaking world. In the first extended analysis ...
More
François Laruelle, the idiosyncratic French thinker and promulgator of “non-standard philosophy,” is currently experiencing a renaissance in the English-speaking world. In the first extended analysis of Laruelle’s work available in English, Alexander R. Galloway suggests that we collide Laruelle’s concept of the “One” with its binary counterpart, the Zero, in order to explore the relationship between philosophy and the digital. Part exegetical monograph on the work of Laruelle, part exploration of the nature of digitality, this book argues that the digital is a philosophical concept not simply a technical one. It uses a detailed reading of Laruelle to make the case, with help from others in the French and continental tradition including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. Digital machines dominate the world, while so-called digital thinking–binarisms like presence and absence, or self and world–is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. By exploring Laruelle and digitality together, the goal is not to forge a new digital Laruelle. On the contrary, the goal is to show how, even in this day and age, Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker, perhaps the only non-digital thinker we have. With chapters on computers, capitalism, art, the ethical, and the political, Galloway shows how a withdrawal from the digital reveals an immanent and material universe.Less
François Laruelle, the idiosyncratic French thinker and promulgator of “non-standard philosophy,” is currently experiencing a renaissance in the English-speaking world. In the first extended analysis of Laruelle’s work available in English, Alexander R. Galloway suggests that we collide Laruelle’s concept of the “One” with its binary counterpart, the Zero, in order to explore the relationship between philosophy and the digital. Part exegetical monograph on the work of Laruelle, part exploration of the nature of digitality, this book argues that the digital is a philosophical concept not simply a technical one. It uses a detailed reading of Laruelle to make the case, with help from others in the French and continental tradition including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. Digital machines dominate the world, while so-called digital thinking–binarisms like presence and absence, or self and world–is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. By exploring Laruelle and digitality together, the goal is not to forge a new digital Laruelle. On the contrary, the goal is to show how, even in this day and age, Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker, perhaps the only non-digital thinker we have. With chapters on computers, capitalism, art, the ethical, and the political, Galloway shows how a withdrawal from the digital reveals an immanent and material universe.
