Book review: The Poverty of Philosophy: Readings in Non and Other Philosophies or Arts of Immanence

Philip Beitchman’s latest effort makes a decisive intervention in our understanding of François Laruelle’s work and its implications for contemporary theory. Before situating Beitchman’s book, it will be useful to briefly outline the substance and implications of Laruelle’s project of ‘non-philosophy’ (alternatively designated ‘non-standard philosophy’). Laruelle’s non-philosophical program has been underway since the 1970s. But only in the last decade has it begun to make inroads into Anglophone scholarship. The implications of his project are massive. Laruelle axiomatically insists that philosophy in the broadest sense is defined by a singular element common to every mode of its existence: decision on the real. From the classical search for essences to the postmodern emphasis on language and communication, philosophy has consistently arrogated to itself the right to decide what is real. But this ‘real’, according to Laruelle, is not reality but a philosophical fiction. Philosophy never captures the real. Philosophy does not decide the real; it is decided by it. Laruelle’s singular achievement is to have turned the tables of philosophical critique on philosophical practice itself. His ruthless questioning of philosophy’s self-appointed authority has forced open a space for rethinking the contemporary status of philosophy, its future prospects and radical alternatives.

The Poverty of Philosophy is divided into three sections: a brief introduction, part I (an anthology) and part II (five review essays: two on Laruelle and three on figures close to his orbit). The anthology – titled ‘An anthology of non and other philosophies and arts of immanence’ – is a 170-plus page collection of non-philosophical terms such as ‘generic’, ‘matrix’, ‘the real’, ‘superposition’, ‘victim’, ‘world’, among others. Each term is accompanied by a selection of quotes drawn from the work of Laruelle, his commentators and others.

Beitchman’s grasp of the basics of non-philosophy reflects that he has done the reading. Most importantly, he understands what non-philosophy means by ‘philosophy’. Despite the fact that many philosophers, at least since Marx, have mounted assaults on teleology, presence, on metaphysics as such, one faith has remained largely unchallenged: ‘they all accepted the supreme being of philosophy itself’, writes Beitchman, ‘its self-appointed and self-ascribed authority, reality, hegemony, and legitimacy’ (p. xv, emphasis in original). Beitchman here correctly indexes non-philosophy’s objection to what Laruelle calls ‘standard philosophy’. This objection is at once ethical and political. It accuses philosophy of propagating a self-satisfied intellectual aristocratism. But Beitchman also correctly grasps that this critique is not simply a critique of philosophy in the narrow academic sense. Any discourse that arrogates to itself the authority to subjugate other knowledge practices is ‘philosophy’ for Laruelle. On this score, academic philosophy is hardly the most threatening figure of philosophy as such. Philosophy ‘distilled, disseminated, and disguised in the forms it reaches most of us’, writes Beitchman ‘as in sports, politics, economy, entertainment, even much of what goes by the name of art urges, or if need be, compels conformist and compliant behavior’ (p. xvii). Philosophy as it operates in the field of entertainment, for example, compels its viewers to accept that fame and money are universal desires whose manufacture is to be celebrated by all as a rare and precious achievement of the human spirit.

Non-philosophy authorizes non-authorities to open spaces for thought beyond the policed borders of the philosophical as such. Aesthetics, in particular, is a ‘domain where Non-philosophy has had the most to say’, writes Beitchman, ‘for artists are more likely to get its immanence’ (p. xxix, emphasis in original). Beitchman is right I think to note this. Artists and those interested in art (myself included) have been attracted to non-philosophy’s axiom that thought can (and does) take non-linguistic forms. Indeed, non-philosophy’s insistence on the immanent materiality and aesthetics of thought serves to remind us all that standard philosophy might do well to admit its own dependency on writing and thus on the aesthetics thereof rather than playing the role of the voice of pure logos.

Beitchman’s book makes for an interesting ‘guide for the perplexed’. It is not in any sense ‘authoritative’ in its tone. Rather his voice inhabits a ‘superposed’ space of commentary questioning, and even exasperation. He gives voice then to many a reader who will find themselves perplexed and may be exasperated in the face of non-philosophy. And I think that is the book’s strength: to voice perplexity rather than voice its supposed antidote, which is to say the voice of philosophy in the last instance.

The four review essays are responses to two texts by Laruelle and three by thinkers influenced by him, including Katerina Kolozova, which I will focus on. The essays offer close-readings of these texts. Even when his exasperation is evident, so too is Beitchman’s admiration for non-philosophy’s capacity to uproot philosophical sureties and inherited verities. For example, Beitchman writes of Laruelle’s Tétralogos something that seems to capture the spirit of his commentary throughout the book:

If, still following Deleuze, and I do not think Laruelle would demur, the worth of a book may be judged by the questions it raises more than by the answers it supplies, this one…must rate very high indeed. (p. 207)

I want here to focus the remainder of this review on Beitchman’s essay on Kolozova whose work has been crucial for my own. Beitchman is quick to note the divergences between Laruelle and Kolozova. But that is a sign of strength in my view. A good theory (or theoretical framework) should enable such divergences, which is to say development.

Kolozova is one of the most gifted theoreticians working in the non-philosophical register today. Her powers lie precisely in her ability to transform the terms of Laruellian discourse where needed in order to pursue the logic of non-philosophy beyond the terrain signed and authorized by Laruelle himself. Kolozova does not reify the texts of Laruelle nor those of Marx nor those of Wittgenstein nor those of Butler nor any that she has drawn upon to articulate her project. That is precisely the point: it is her project. In my book, The Real Is Radical (Fardy, 2023), I devoted an entire chapter to her under the title, ‘The Kolozovan variant’. I was keen to mark the places where her work, in my view, departs from, builds upon and transforms Laruelle’s work in order to touch on questions that she has examined with formidable rigor and startling originality, including ‘physicality’, ‘the automaton of language’, ‘the real’ (her version) and others in the context of an ethically rooted and politically cogent concern for lived realities under capitalist and patriarchal modes of domination.

Beitchman also tracks what he reads as inconsistencies in some of Kolozova’s positions, for example, on the analytical value of ‘class’. But it is not an inconsistency as such to question (as does Antonio Negri, for example) the analytical value of ‘class’ as it has been articulated in the classical Marxian tradition and at the same time call out, as Beitchman notes, the absence of ‘class consciousness’ when that is warranted in order to rectify the spontaneous theoretical drift of certain mass movements. The point is that Kolozova does not reify the concept of ‘class’ precisely so that she can do meaningful theoretical and political work without being hamstrung by ‘philosophy’, which in to say that she works non-philosophically with concepts like ‘class’. Likewise, Beitchman questions Kolozova’s invocation of Michel Henry in her theorization of ‘non-standard Marxism’. Beitchman cannot endorse the reference to Henry on the grounds that the latter was an ‘anti-communist’ and an ‘anti-socialist’ as well as a ‘devout Catholic’ (p. 247). But these objections are precisely philosophical objections of the kind that do not concern Kolozova. She is interested (following Laruelle) in treating philosophy as mere material that can (and should) be torn asunder from the determining matrix of standard philosophy. Her project is an exercise in the liberation of concepts via a creative and insurrectionary assault against philosophy’s imperium. And this is not a defense of ‘anything goes’. No, indeed it is to highlight the extraordinary tact and strategic intelligence of Kolozova’s approach. She appropriates and ex-appropriates what she needs to organize and propel her projects. But the takings are organized and theoretically rigorous and the proof is the theoretical consistency and political cogency of her work, which stands on its own alongside (never derivative) of Laruelle’s. For one, and this does not get the attention it should in Beitchman’s reading, Kolozova has sketched the contours of a genuinely non-philosophical materialism. Kolozova has argued that ‘Marxian materialism’ has in fact little to do with what Marx himself was aiming at. She has radically reframed the debate by her insistence on physicality – of the body, the real, the political – and that has profoundly opened new spaces for thought and political contestation on the terrains of gender, anti-patriarchal politics, class struggle and animal rights.

The Poverty of Philosophy, notwithstanding my reservations about Beitchman’s reading of Kolozova, is a useful book. And I mean that sincerely. It is a book that can (and will) be used to help readers of non-philosophy make their way through this peculiar and powerful thicket of thought. It gives its readers a survey of the field, a map, an itinerary. But, as always, it falls to each of us to read carefully and where possible take the risk to open spaces beyond or in defiance of philosophy’s hegemony. Beitchman’s book is an honest attempt to work through non-philosophy without reifying it or those that have followed in Laruelle’s wake. The best aspect of Beitchman’s book is that he is unafraid to question. I heartily endorse that impulse. Posing questions of non-philosophy and those that work within its orbit is a good way to prevent non-philosophy’s slide into just another ‘French theory’.