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In The Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, the French thinker François Laruelle does something unprecedented for philosophers: he provides an enormous dictionary with a theoretical introduction, carefully crafting his thoughts to explain the numerous terms and neologisms that he deems necessary for the project of non-philosophy. With a collective of thinkers also interested in the project, Laruelle has taken up the difficult task of creating an essential guide for entering into his non-standard, non-philosophical terrain. And for Laruelle, even the idea of a dictionary and what a dictionary is become material for his non-philosophical inquiries. As his opening note begins, “Thus on the surface and within the philosophical folds of the dictionary, identity and its effect upon meaning are what is at stake.”

Following the collapse of the communist states it was assumed that Marxist philosophy had collapsed with it. In Introduction to Non-Marxism, François Laruelle aims to recover Marxism along with its failure by asking the question “What is to be done with Marxism itself?”

To answer, Laruelle resists the temptation to make Marxism more palatable after the death of metaphysics by transforming Marxism into a mere social science or by simply embracing with evangelical fervor the idea of communism. Instead Laruelle proposes a heretical science of Marxism that will investigate Marxism in both its failure and power so as to fashion new theoretical tools.

In the course of engaging with the material of Marxism, Laruelle takes on the philosophy of Marx along with important philosophers who have extended that philosophy including Althusser, Balibar, Negri as well as the attempt at a phenomenological Marxism found in the work of Michel Henry. Through this engagement Laruelle develops with great precision the history and function of his concept of determination-in-the-last-instance. In the midst of the assumed failure of Marxism and the defections and resentment that followed, Laruelle’s non-Marxism responds with the bold declaration: “Do not give up on theory!”

Each generation invents new practices and new writings of philosophy. Ours should have been able to introduce certain mutations that would at least be equivalent with those of cubism, abstract art, and twelve-tone serialism: it has only partially done so. But after all the deconstructions, after Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida, this demand takes on a different dimension: What do we do with philosophy itself? How do we globally change our relation to this thought, which keeps indicating that it is increasingly conservative and repetitive? These two questions together have prompted what we call “non-philosophy.”

Non-philosophy is not the negation of philosophy. It is the suspension of philosophy’s claim to think the real (Principle of Sufficient Philosophy), and it is the invention of new usages of thought and language that disrupt the rational narrative of the real, which is precisely what every philosophy is. Non-philosophy should rather be understood à la the “non-Euclidean,” namely, as a generalization of the philosophical beyond its traditional limitation by the unitary or “Heraclitean” postulate. From then on, an infinite number of philosophical decisions that are no longer mutually exclusive will correspond with any real phenomenon.

Philosophy and Non-Philosophy is widely considered the first fully explicit elaboration of non-philosophy and one of its most important introductory texts.

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.

Very few thinkers have traveled the heretical path that François Laruelle walks between philosophy and non-philosophy. For Laruelle, the future of philosophy is problematic, but a mutation of its functions is possible. Up until now, philosophy has merely been a utopia concerned with the past and only provided the services of its conservation. We must introduce a rigorous and nonimaginary practice of a utopia in action, a philo-fiction—a close relative to science fiction. From here we can see the double meaning of the watchword, a tabula rasa of the future. This new destination is imposed by a specifically human messianism, an eschatology within the limits of the Man-in-person as antihumanist ultimatum addressed to the History of Philosophy. This book elucidates some of the fundamental problems of non-philosophy and takes on its detractors.