http://tripleampersand.

org/toward-a-generic-aesthetics-a-non-philosophy-of-art/

As he has with Parmenides, Laruelle acknowledges Kants influence in the critique

of pure reason specifically (and on continental philosophy in general) without
being beholden to a precedent that might cause him to get in formation with a
grand narrative stitched seamlessly together into yet another representation of the
real. Laruelle positions his non-standard model as the ultimate in non-
representational thinking, therefore foreshadowing (in retrospect) such major
figures of philosophies of difference such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In
his book The Philosophies of Difference he openly rejects the dialectical model of
synthesizing two opposite viewpoints as a bad habit of what he terms the Greco-
Occidental or Judeo Occidental style of philosophical reason by formulating:

A critique that would no longer be a compliment, a rectification, a

deconstruction, a supplement, one of these innumerable experiences (through
Being, Text, Power, Desire, Politics, Ethics) that the Occident has invented in
order to cleanse itself of its congenital defect- to think through unifying
duality, through a synthesis of contraries, through the One as All or as unity of
contraries, through dialectic and difference-and through which it would be content
to re-infect the wound. [14]

It can be astonishing to fully grasp the extreme hubris of a statement like this,
iterated by Laruelle as far back as 1986, prior to his more fully developed program
of Non-Philosophy in the present. Perhaps this was the necessary escape velocity
for him to conceive of a mode of thinking unfettered by the interminable tennis
match of dialectical argument that has characterized most post-war continental
philosophy. For our purposes in figuring what and how the generic comes into being
and is evident as an influence on contemporary aesthetics, Laruelles radical
declaration of independence from the dialectical model helps to make clear a way to
identify the generic with the real without thinking of the real or ourselves as
contingent points of argument for the generic. In other words, in Laruelles
vision-in One there is nothing to turn ourselves inside out to get at other
than the One itself, or a radically immanent real. He sees this vision not so much
as an option or another philosophical turn but more as a necessity due to a:

congenital decline of philosophy- a decline which is neither its death nor its
end- (and that) non-philosophy opposes not the beginning of a new philosophical
position, but the undertaking of a unified theory of science and philosophy,
unified under minimal conditions. [15]

In this statement Laruelle is careful to qualify his non-philosophical method as

one expressly underdetermined in relation to previous philosophical decisions or
turns and as a mode that is unified only under minimal conditions. This
underdetermined and minimal aspect of non-philosophy is a quality it shares and
expresses in an aesthetics of the generic, a quality which we will now explore in
art historical and contemporary visual examples.

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In addition to repetition, difference, and similarity, the generic shares a special

relationship to chance, since in an undifferentiated universe the odds would be
eventually quite predictable, since any variables would dissolve in its
underdetermined whole. Duchamp played with chance ironically as a standard in his
Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14). Jean (Hans) Arp employed chance operations to
arrive at his poetically simple compositions and reliefs. This dependence upon the
aleatory as a given to materially generate form relates to Laruelles take on the
given, which he re-calibrates in his non-philosophical method as the given
without- givenness. Laruelle explains this concept as: The sphere of reality
which is non-real or real-in the last-instance and comes after the given, (which)
will globally be called Givenness, and therefore thoughts transcendental essence
which finds its cause in the One-Given. [21] To roughly translate how this may
relate to Arps Untitled, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-
17), by employing the laws of chance one calls forth a universal givenness, rather
than taking compositional propriety for granted (a traditional given) In calling
forth a universal givenness the artist avoids making his decision about how the
composition might fall, one that would limit its finitude (ironically) to the
caprice of chance, which in any case cant possibly exist in a generic and
undifferentiated universe.

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Laruelle would never cast, withholding the die as a radically immanent, sheer
potential ( somewhat like Smiths ultimate intention in his sculpture) in order to
evade the necessity of philosophical decision for the greater goal of acknowledging
the pre-immanent One. In a sense Smiths single die, fully cast yet impossible to
throw (or project, like quantified shadows on a platonic cave wall) is a figurative
representation of Laruelles Vision-in-One. Both the artist and the philosopher
call forth from the generic a multiplicity of readings, rather than a fixed thesis,
acknowledging the unfaithful science of aesthetics.