[D66] What are the most philosophically important numbers?

[J.N.]

[ Derrida, Critchley, Badiou, J.N. : ~66 ]

http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/one-two-three-four


One, Two, Three, Four
April 24, 2015	

What are the most philosophically important numbers? Heidegger evokes
the fourfold; Deleuze and Guattari a thousand (but it could have been
more). For Badiou, the multiple plays its role, as does infinity. For
Hegel the triad and the operation of the negative. For Irigaray it is
sometimes two, and sometimes not one. For others the binary. For others
still the key numerical concept is simply nothing. Only two numerical
concepts are necessary for Laruelle: the one and the dual.

As Laruelle explains, there is no synthesis or dialectic of the world,
only the one and its various identities: “In immanence, one no longer
distinguishes between the One and the Multiple, there is no longer
anything but n=1, and the Multiple-without-All. No manifold watched over
by a horizon, in flight or in progress: everywhere a true chaos of
floating or inconsistent determinations . . . between Identity and
Multiplicity, no synthesis by a third term.”

Here is an easy shorthand for remembering some of the figures already
discussed. Deleuze is n + 1. Badiou is n - 1. Laruelle is n = 1. Deleuze
is the thinker of propagation and repetition, of additive expression
(never negative or dialectical expression). For Deleuze, the One is the
additive product of pure multiplicity. Hence the plenum is Deleuze’s
ontological terminus.

Badiou, however, is a subtractivist. The Badiousian event is never
counted as part of the situation; it is always subtracted from it, as
something apart from being. Hence Badiou’s terminus is the void, the
absent one.

Laruelle, by contrast, is neither additive nor subtractive; his operator
is neither plus nor minus, but equals. Laruelle is the great thinker of
radical equality, what he calls identity (from the Latin pronoun idem
meaning “the same” or “the very same”). He cares little for the plenum
or the void; his terminus is identity, the one as radically immanent and
same without ever having to go outside itself.

In sum, if Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” framed critique as
paranoia, and Deleuze and Guattari painted modern thought as
schizophrenia, Laruelle renders non-philosophy as autism. Like the
autist, we are not neuro-normative in our relations with the real.
Abstract philosophical concepts do not help much. The one is absolutely
foreclosed to us. Instead we move alongside it, committed to its
sameness, a life “of science and of the reality that science can
describe, naively in the last instance.” If Deleuze’s heroes are
Spinoza, Hume, and other philosophers of radical materialism, Laruelle
descends from a different line, the autistic philosophy of Fichte (I =
I) or Henry (ego).

“Yes, I am autistic in a certain sense,” Laruelle admitted once, with a
sparkle in his eye. “Like a particle that passes through a mountain.”

(Excerpted from Laruelle: Against the Digital [University of Minnesota
Press: 2014], pp. 47-48.)