HYPER-THINKING THE ABSOLUTE: Badiou, Laruelle, Zizek

In the 1980s, Laruelle’s radical thought experiment led him to a thought of the Absolute as primary and to envisage the Absolute as subject. He analyses the failure of symbolisation to capture the real,  both in the failure of structuralist signification and in the failure of  Deleuzian « sense ».

Subjects discussed: the Absolute turn, the Subject, bio-materialism and democratic relativism, Badiou and Zizek, Laruelle in the 1980s as vanishing  mediator, repeating the 80s today.

Alain Badiou in his IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS (French 2018, English 2022) took the « Absolute turn », deciding to show how mundane multiplicities appeared  when viewed from the Absolute as point of departure. François Laruelle made a similar turn in 1985, beginning with the Absolute as transcendental field and as perspective on mundane multiplicities. What are the points of convergence and divergence between the two approaches?

Laruelle’s radical thought experiment using Deleuze’s philosophy as raw material identifies an agon between multiplicities and difference in the  most radical thought of Contemporary Continental Philosophy and  attempts to think the pure transcendental field extracted in Deleuze’s LOGIC OF  SENSE as composed of multiplicities without difference.

This audiobook is an attempt at a linear reading of François Laruelle’s A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN. In this chapter I discuss the Foreword, concentrating on elucidating  the « transvalued » or non-authoritarian meanings of a set of seemingly  familiar words: biography, system, principle, foundation, rigour,  science, order, and linear reading.

In this episode I discuss why one should read Laruelle from the point of view of six criteria: anti-authoritarianism, hyper-deconstruction,  positivity, the Absolute, synthesis of humanity and rigour, and  de-schooling philosophy.

This is the first audio chapter in a hyper-book devoted to a reading of François Laruelle’s A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN. I plan to make the first book-length Reader’s Guide, in Hyper-Book form, to a book by François Laruelle, A BIOGRAPHY OF ORDINARY MAN, which was translated into English only recently, in 2018. I think it was translated at the right time, in a certain sense. Although the book came out in French 36 years ago, in 1985, it has acquired a new contemporaneity, in relation to various types of philosophical work and projects that have come up recently, notably in relation to the turn to the "Absolute" that was instantiated in Deleuze and Guattari's WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? and continued in major works in dialogue with this turn: François Laruelle's TETRALOGOS, Alain Badiou's IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, and Slavoj Zizek's SEX AND THE FAILED ABSOLUTE.