New Books Network Interview with Alexander R. Galloway

New Books Network Interview with Alexander R. Galloway, author of 'Laruelle: Against the Digital'

“The chief aim of [philosopher François Laruelle’s] life’s work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so.”

What is non-philosophy, what would it look like to practice it, and what are the implications of doing so? Alexander R. Gallowayintroduces and explores these questions in a vibrant and thoughtful new book. Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) uses François Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a foundation for considering the philosophical concept of digitality. In a series of ten chapters (plus intro and conclusion) and 14 theses, Galloway offers an exceptionally clear and provocative treatment of digitality as a way of thinking about and with difference. In addition to offering a critical encounter with some of the most fundamental aspects of Laruelle’s work as they open up ways of thinking about identity, distinction, and exchange, the book also contains some wonderful discussions of brightness and obscurity, representation and aesthetics, computation, photography, music, ethics, and capitalism, while putting the work of Laruelle into dialogue with Deleuze, Badiou, Marx, Althusser, and others. It’s an exciting work, and I will be re-reading and thinking with it for some time to come.

 

Click here to listen to the interview.

Published in: New Books Network
By: CARLA NAPPI