Abstract

Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One