What are we doing when we do philosophy? A critical engagement with the limits of philosophical practice via Foucault, Deleuze and

Abstract

In this mini-dissertation I argue that the disenchantment of philosophy – the extraction of the remnants of its idealist and transcendent metaphysical core – is not just possible, but also ethically important and existentially advantageous. I interrogate the claims of philosophy to a status it does not warrant and put forward a revised account of what we are actually doing when we do philosophy. To begin, I examine Foucault’s work, with a focus on the early archaeological period in which he describes various epistemes that serve to situate the forms, contents and interrelations of knowledge practices within specific power-knowledge assemblages. While Foucault does not apply his archaeological or genealogical methodologies to philosophy itself in a sustained way, we can employ them to perform an initial delimitation of philosophy, viewing it as an open set of imbricated heterogeneous practices taking the form of various singular historically situated diagrams. I then turn to Deleuze and his critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought’, which gives rise, he argues, to the various transcendent illusions philosophy has long laboured under. Developing Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of ontogenesis, Deleuze eschews the ontological primacy of identity in favour of becoming and difference without identity. Difference, for Deleuze, should be seen not as a simple dialectical reversal of said primacy, but instead as a constant process of self-differing wherein we seek to encounter being and thought in their genesis, as complex processes of actualisation and counter-actualisation. I argue that this account is rigorously immanent and materialist and proposes a view of thinking as a shock to thought. Finally, I examine the work of François Laruelle and his project of non-philosophy. Non-philosophy argues that all philosophy begins with what Laruelle calls the Philosophical Decision. This is a deceptive have-your-cake-and-eat-it move whereby philosophers determine philosophy’s relation to the Real through an initial decision about how to think the split between thought and what it reflects on and then redeploy this split-structure philosophically as a description of the inherent traction a given philosophy has on the Real through the mending of this split. In closing, I argue that Foucault, Deleuze and Laruelle each develop, in their own way, a critique of philosophy that acts on behalf of real, living beings and against the domination of any abstract principle that would separate life from its radical immanence.