Laruelle and ordinary life

Non-philosophy is a discipline of thought that works to sustain a certain affect within thinking that is at once rigorously theoretical and radically indifferent to philosophy and thus supportive of a scientific, experimental use of philosophical materials that is itself neither philosophical nor anti-philosophical. In Laruelle s Biographie de l'homme ordinaire, there is an explicit call 'to create a non-philosophical affect: to render sensible what there are of immediate givens, of non-hallucinatory reality, of finite transcendental experience in humans'.3 How is such an affect generated and sustained? How is it transmitted or relayed? With philosophical materials but not philosophical means; it will be rather by means of a new theoretical practice that takes the materials of philosophy as experimental data. In the present context we will work with a pair of discrete philosophical instances drawn from two texts engaging the problematic of the ordinary. These texts are extracted from distinct philosophical standpoints: Edmund Husserl's late phenomenological turn to the experiential life-world in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and Gilbert Ryle's therapeutic examination of self-knowledge via language in The Concept of Mind. We will see that in both texts, despite every intent to include its own activity in the range of its object of inquiry and determination, to problematise - and thereby resolve - itself, philosophy remains blind to the very ordinariness of what it really presupposes, the flat or ordinary real, and is nonetheless obsessed with the irreducible exteriority of its operational act to its powers of sufficient determination. Experience and language are not meant here to exhaust the fields into which philosophy may insert itself according to this structure, but together these should be sufficient to indicate the concrete generality at issue.