A couple of my favorite contemporary thinkers, Alexander Galloway and Rocco Gangle both wrote books on Laruelle and he keeps coming up in recent discourse, so I thought I would take a look. Galloway frames Laruelle within his digital/analog motif which is a deep interest of mine. Laruelle seems like the end of the line for the post Heideggerian Era of French philosophy. Whereas Badiou is just the longing for an event of rebirth that will never come, Laruelle seems like a conscious acknowledgment of futility.
I feel like Derrida and Deleuze truly brought that French cogito development of modern thought to its conclusion and transcendence and then handed the baton off to Anglophone pragmatists and social scientists. Deleuze and Guattari say something suggestive in WIP: that the French build deductive structures while Germans create foundations and the English play on and apply the structures. I am sure some type of culture will continue for a long time but my reading of Spengler haunts me with thoughts that European high culture is over and therefore philosophy may be over. But thought will no doubt continue. Maybe Heidegger and Spengler were both right, but so is Deleuze, that philosophy not as a tradition but as creation of concepts will continue; but I think thought’s future is alongside science and mysticism. Whether this a decline as Spengler says or a necessary development as Steiner would think, or a reinvention of spirituality and its cultural function as I think Deleuze was trying to do, I do think the regional flavor of national culture that defined modern philosophy is over.
John Deely characterizes the “postmodern” in his own progressivist terms as the overcoming of modern ideas rooted in national languages and the discovery of semiotics. It makes sense that the difference engine driving novelty in European culture is almost gone and the new epistemological horizon is a decidedly virtual semiotic; that is, it is driven by gradients in a more universal or even cosmic register than the merely cultural and material differences fueling the earthly colonization driving modern knowledge.
Perhaps the 21st century will be Deleuzian as Foucault joked, but only because, owing to his appreciation of science, pragmatics and English philosophy, Deleuze artfully transcribed back into his European culture the nascent science of complexity—that virtual semiotics that promises to be a historical stepping stone to the endless journey of cosmic civilization. That is, only if we don’t mess it up and confirm those pessimistic German predictions of a return to superstition and a fall into mechanized formality, from which only a God can save us.
