About HYPER-THINKING THE ABSOLUTE: Badiou, Laruelle, Zizek
This is a philosophical hyper-book, a work in progress aimed at giving the first book length commentary on Alain Badiou's THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, François Laruelle’s A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN, Laruelle's TETRALOGOS, and Slavoj Zizek's SEX AND THE FAILED ABSOLUTE. A classical scholarly or academic approach to reading these books is inappropriate to their subject matter, so a thought-in-the-making approach may show itself more suitable. The hyper-book form, composed of video-book, audio podcast, blog posts, and interviews is particularly adapted to this read-along, think-it-through approach.
In the 1980s, Laruelle’s radical thought experiment led him to a thought of the Absolute as primary and to envisage the Absolute as subject. He analyses the failure of symbolisation to capture the real, both in the failure of structuralist signification and in the failure of Deleuzian « sense ».
Subjects discussed: the Absolute turn, the Subject, bio-materialism and democratic relativism, Badiou and Zizek, Laruelle in the 1980s as vanishing mediator, repeating the 80s today.
22 Aug 2021
ANNEX 2: Badiou with Laruelle
Alain Badiou in his IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS (French 2018, English 2022) took the « Absolute turn », deciding to show how mundane multiplicities appeared when viewed from the Absolute as point of departure. François Laruelle made a similar turn in 1985, beginning with the Absolute as transcendental field and as perspective on mundane multiplicities. What are the points of convergence and divergence between the two approaches?
22 Aug 2021
ANNEX 1: Deleuze with Laruelle
Laruelle’s radical thought experiment using Deleuze’s philosophy as raw material identifies an agon between multiplicities and difference in the most radical thought of Contemporary Continental Philosophy and attempts to think the pure transcendental field extracted in Deleuze’s LOGIC OF SENSE as composed of multiplicities without difference.
22 Aug 2021
Episode 3: Foreword
This audiobook is an attempt at a linear reading of François Laruelle’s A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN. In this chapter I discuss the Foreword, concentrating on elucidating the « transvalued » or non-authoritarian meanings of a set of seemingly familiar words: biography, system, principle, foundation, rigour, science, order, and linear reading.
21 Aug 2021
Episode 2: Motivations
In this episode I discuss why one should read Laruelle from the point of view of six criteria: anti-authoritarianism, hyper-deconstruction, positivity, the Absolute, synthesis of humanity and rigour, and de-schooling philosophy.
19 Aug 2021
Episode 1: Presentations
This is the first audio chapter in a hyper-book devoted to a reading of François Laruelle’s A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN. I plan to make the first book-length Reader’s Guide, in Hyper-Book form, to a book by François Laruelle, A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN, which was translated into English only recently, in 2018. I think it was translated at the right time, in a certain sense. Although the book came out in French 36 years ago, in 1985, it has acquired a new contemporaneity, in relation to various types of philosophical work and projects that have come up recently, notably in relation to the turn to the "Absolute" that was instantiated in Deleuze and Guattari's WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? and continued in major works in dialogue with this turn: François Laruelle's TETRALOGOS, Alain Badiou's IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, and Slavoj Zizek's SEX AND THE FAILED ABSOLUTE.
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