Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics
François Laruelle
Distributed for Univocal Publishing
Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on François Laruelle’s current explorations into photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making.
Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.
$24.95 paper ISBN 978-1-937561-11-6
160 pages, 7.625 x 5, November 2012
François Laruelle is professor emeritus at the University of Paris West Nanterre La Défence and the inventor of the science of philosophy, non-philosophy.
Drew S. Burk is a cultural theorist and translator of contemporary French philosophy.