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TOWARDS A RADICAL METAPHYSICS OF SOCIALISM

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François Laruelle’s non-Marxist reading of Marx, executed in Introduction au non-marxisme, is accomplished by allowing Marx’s text to speak for itself, without placing it into the history of philosophy.1 A non-philosophical reading of Marx operates with the “use-value” of concepts that have been radicalized to expose their unilateral correlation with the effect of the real. In non-philosophy (also called non-standard philosophy), the “real” is the instance of unilateral, indifferent effect of a radical exteriority with respect to the signifying subject. In other words, one does not refer to the abstraction of “the Real,” but rather to concrete instances of an effect of the real, of that which always already escapes signification but is nonetheless out there. In the case of Marx’s science of society, the “out there” is the practice of the workforce, the lived of wage labor as envisaged praxis of socialist emancipation. Radical concepts are “affected by the real”; they have “use-value” in the sense that they correlate and effect a reality that is, as Laruelle would say, “lived” and “experienced,” or, as Marx would say, a reality that is “physical and sensuous.”2 Philosophical recreation of Marx’s thought entails production of “surplus value,” assuming an independent “life” and acting as if self-sufficient reality is detached from the material real, which is precisely how capitalism operates.
Following Laruelle, I argue that philosophy is constituted
in a fashion perfectly analogous to the one which grounds capitalism—philosophy constitutes a reality in its own right and a reality that establishes an amphibology with the real (acts in its stead, posturing as “more real than the real”). In the split of the physical from the real of sensations of pain and pleasure, the detached body and mind meet in order to produce “material” effects—an instance which we shall call “the real,” following the terminology of non-philosophy—which constitutes estrangement as oppression, a characteristic of both philosophy and capitalism. Alienation is at the heart of the great (existentialist) torment of modern Man (therefore, in some form/s, Woman’s too), the source of spiritual and physical suffering. Its source, however, is one of the ruses of social reason (i.e., the reason of modernity): the illusion of philosophy and of capitalism about a self-sufficiency and “endowment with reality” that is greater than the reality of the real or of the material, which hasn’t been reinvented through reason and technology.

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Series Title

TOWARDS A RADICAL METAPHYSICS OF SOCIALISM

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Publisher

New York : Katerina Kolozova., 2015

Collation

1-120

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13: 978-0692492413

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NONE

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Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Governance

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