Laruelle

Laruelle is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker Franois Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelles concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In Laruelle, Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelles concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of the One as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view the digital. Digital machines dominate todays world, while so-called digital thinkingthat is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and worldis often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinkerperhaps the only non-digital thinker todayand engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.