Philosophy is a syntax of the real. There are many possible syntaxes (Laruelle,1 Hjelmslev,2 Benveniste3).

There is one real. Naive contact with the real makes philosophy possible—touch, perception, thought, philosophy (Merleau-Ponty4, Harney and Moten5). Any syntax is but a mapping, or better, a feeling, a feeling out of things.

The twentieth century French philosophers and their successors are at work on a metaphysical research program (Blake6). As a fundamentally plural program, concerned with the multiplicity of the singular real, no one “master” holds the key. Any momentary intuition can help elucidate the whole, and can also be revised or discarded if better intuitions come along.

Close reading affords precision and depth. Summative breadth is the lure of the expert (Certeau7). Insofar as we are all in touch with the real, we are all “scientists” (Laruelle8), we are all “artists” (Ranciere9), we are all philosophers.


Notes

  1. François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). ↩

  2. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1943, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). ↩

  3. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 1966, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971). ↩

  4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, trans. Donald A. Landes (London, UK: Routledge, 2012). ↩

  5. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013). ↩

  6. Terence Blake, “Pluralist Metaphysical Research Programmes: Feyerabend, Deleuze, Laruelle, Zizek, Serres, Stiegler, Badiou, Latour,” Agent Swarm, November 17, 2016, https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/pluralist-metaphysical-research-programmes-feyerabend-deleuze-laruelle-zizek-serres-stiegler-badiou-latour/. ↩

  7. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). ↩

  8. François Laruelle, Theory of Identities, 1992, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016). ↩

  9. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1987, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). ↩