conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Intellectuals and Power about Fran&#231;ois, Professor, Emeritus with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Fran&#231;ois the author is Professor Emeritus of the University ofParis X (Nanterre) and former director of the International Collegeof Philosophy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Intellectuals and Power
  However, breaking that scripted dialog by demanding that intellectuals, philosophers, and theorists of all kinds turn to the victim is not some fetishization of victims that would turn them into a transcendent term that stops all conversation. But it is a recognition that these intellectuals and philosophy almost always turn away from the victim. The victim-in-person, as Laruelle calls her to highlight her real character, her lived or flesh-and-blood character, does not inspire philosophers and intellectuals in the same way that heroes, or brave resisters, or those who turn the tide and heroically vanquish their enemies, do. So, the victim becomes the unthought of philosophy, a stumbling block to its standard practice. She must then become a presupposed for any attempt to think ethics and politics anew, in defense of the human.
  There are a number of choices I have made in the course of translating this text that should be highlighted here so that the reader can keep them in mind. In general, there are inherent difficulties in translating Laruelle's work that go to the heart of his theoretical practice. Laruelle has highlighted in many of his publications the importance of non-philosophical syntax in combating the standard syntax of philosophy. This means that the way he writes in French is often experimental, with a certain disregard for ease of reading. In order to capture this syntax, I always tend toward a more literal translation of his works. At times I have aimed for a freer translation, but in general I prefer the way in which a literal translation causes the reader to slow down in the same way a reader is suddenly slowed by Laruelle's French prose.
  Finally, Laruelle marks a difference between what he terms dominant intellectuals, who carry various adjectives like engaged, humanitarian, right-wing, left-wing, etc., and what he terms the determined intellectual. A reader going too quickly might confuse this with an intellectual who is particularly dedicated to some task, but the adjective expresses a theoretical point Laruelle is making. The determined intellectual is an intellectual whose character is determined in the sense of conditioned or driven by his or her relationship to the victim. Laruelle's understanding of determination owes much to his study of Marx, who in turn was influenced in his thinking by Hegel, and so readers should bear in mind the Hegelian meaning of "determined" as found in the master–slave dialectic when coming across this term.
  He describes what would be a new cause for man, a new destination for the intellectual, in a world submitted to the laws of the philosophically thinkable (world, history, and thought)...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: FL: Yes, of course. There is no identity, in the strong sense of the term, which would not be simple desire or image, except for the Real. It is the Real that is able to be defined by its identity. I do not define it by its alterity as the psychoanalyst does, even though the latter says that the Real returns to the same place. But Lacan just did not get to the bottom of immanence, he was happy with the Real in its own place, within spatiality or on the "other scene." Since the concern here is with the intellectuals, it is important to be precise that this radical identity – without the slightest fissure or even spatiality – is the surest destruction of demands for recognition of "identity"...
  FL: The portrait of the dominant intellectual, which I will later contrast with the determined intellectual, can be characterized along several points. First, he has some philosophical basis, a cause which is specific to him or, better still, a principal affect. This principal affect is the primacy of division, the primacy of the rupture which is over unity and over the system. So much so that philosophy, in the full concept of its practice, is pushed into the background, in danger of becoming repressed. But as it is a forced hand, it returns under two concealed forms that constitute symptoms − we have seen them, mediation and the mediatized. The second point is that the primacy of division, which signals the intellectual's abstract character, must necessarily be clothed with a more empirical, more historical existence, so much so that this abstraction always has some ideological aspect for politics, morality, art, law. This complementary empirical aspect provides for the exercise of analysis or the division of its material means of existence. The third point is that of justice, which is certainly the dominant value for the "humanitarian" intellectual, a value favored at the expense of the ultimate end of philosophy: man. This way of conceiving justice makes it dominant in relation to man itself − this is one of the problems linked to the intellectual's abstraction. Fourth, the intellectual has causes other than justice to support: the earth, the land, blood, race, freedom of thought, the proletariat, human rights, etc., these are the values which motivate, foremost, his action and give him the opportunity to practice. So that the intellectual depends always on values and causes that he defends as absolutes and that he refuses to question. This is also true for academic intellectuals, Raymond Aron for example, who rests upon sociology and defends a kind of critical thinking and understanding that is close to the Enlightenment.
  FL: It is already happening... As regards the conditions they are never wrong... But we would be wrong, ourselves, to take the situation's moments of dreaming or frivolity at face value. We do not have to dream with the situation.
  FL: There is always an initial or final moment, though often a fantastical one, of frivolity, of peace and utopia in any such situation. But we suspect it is not the only one...
  FL: Being in the midst of the fray, but starting off with verbal values, like humanism? The dominant intellectuals scarcely suspect that they will bring about effects, effects of a reticular nature, different from those that they proposed to do or saw themselves doing; they relay exploitation and universalize it in struggling locally against it – this appearance is their true object. How is this practice alone satisfying and how dare it be given an absolute value? This is how I would define the problem more succinctly. Philosophy is only a superior form of the system of opinion. Hence the necessity of moving to a practice, what I call a pragmatics of philosophical opinion, based upon principles other than the principles of philosophy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: FL: Yes, of course. There is no identity, in the strong sense of the term, which would not be simple desire or image, except for the Real. It is the Real that is able to be defined by its identity. I do not define it by its alterity as the psychoanalyst does, even though the latter says that the Real returns to the same place. But Lacan just did not get to the bottom of immanence, he was happy with the Real in its own place, within spatiality or on the "other scene." Since the concern here is with the intellectuals, it is important to be precise that this radical identity – without the slightest fissure or even spatiality – is the surest destruction of demands for recognition of "identity"...
  FL: The portrait of the dominant intellectual, which I will later contrast with the determined intellectual, can be characterized along several points. First, he has some philosophical basis, a cause which is specific to him or, better still, a principal affect. This principal affect is the primacy of division, the primacy of the rupture which is over unity and over the system. So much so that philosophy, in the full concept of its practice, is pushed into the background, in danger of becoming repressed. But as it is a forced hand, it returns under two concealed forms that constitute symptoms − we have seen them, mediation and the mediatized. The second point is that the primacy of division, which signals the intellectual's abstract character, must necessarily be clothed with a more empirical, more historical existence, so much so that this abstraction always has some ideological aspect for politics, morality, art, law. This complementary empirical aspect provides for the exercise of analysis or the division of its material means of existence. The third point is that of justice, which is certainly the dominant value for the "humanitarian" intellectual, a value favored at the expense of the ultimate end of philosophy: man. This way of conceiving justice makes it dominant in relation to man itself − this is one of the problems linked to the intellectual's abstraction. Fourth, the intellectual has causes other than justice to support: the earth, the land, blood, race, freedom of thought, the proletariat, human rights, etc., these are the values which motivate, foremost, his action and give him the opportunity to practice. So that the intellectual depends always on values and causes that he defends as absolutes and that he refuses to question. This is also true for academic intellectuals, Raymond Aron for example, who rests upon sociology and defends a kind of critical thinking and understanding that is close to the Enlightenment.
  FL: It is already happening... As regards the conditions they are never wrong... But we would be wrong, ourselves, to take the situation's moments of dreaming or frivolity at face value. We do not have to dream with the situation.
  FL: There is always an initial or final moment, though often a fantastical one, of frivolity, of peace and utopia in any such situation. But we suspect it is not the only one...
  FL: Being in the midst of the fray, but starting off with verbal values, like humanism? The dominant intellectuals scarcely suspect that they will bring about effects, effects of a reticular nature, different from those that they proposed to do or saw themselves doing; they relay exploitation and universalize it in struggling locally against it – this appearance is their true object. How is this practice alone satisfying and how dare it be given an absolute value? This is how I would define the problem more succinctly. Philosophy is only a superior form of the system of opinion.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: FL: The term "action," as I have already told you, bothers me because of its idealist character which assumes a space of simultaneity, indeed of unity, between action and the event itself. And so of a break between an action and a reaction, because, if things are really simultaneous, there is inevitably a reaction which follows on from the action. I prefer the term "practice." Practice never truly has the totality of its conditions in itself. Man determines practice, meaning that if there is a decision it will have its identity at that time, an identity that we can call non-decisional (of) itself. This is not a decision that grounds itself upon itself like the decision for action. If we turn the multiplicity of practices, with their heterogeneous characteristics, their own languages, and their own objects, if we turn that multiplicity towards the general idea of a praxis, we risk drowning all this diversity in a philosophy of action. Action is a thought with presuppositions, it has presupposeds that action itself claims to posit and that it recovers. But the presupposeds are irreducible or untransformable through practice itself, which must let itself be determined by them. The dominant intellectual has an action that comes with all the reflections, idealizations, and redoublings which are linked to belief in the all-powerfulness of action, while the non-humanitarian intellectual simply has a more modest practice which does not have the ambition to totalize itself.
  FL: Yes and no. Because the future is also what is sent ahead of the subject. This is not what is before us, because it comes from nowhere, but it comes ahead of... I am close enough here to certain themes of Levinas, except that this is not an Other, it is Man-in-person who manifests and who opens the philosophical closure of history through a radical immanence, not by way of some transcendence.
  FL: From nowhere, rather than from elsewhere − that would be to redouble it. The subject only escapes the auto-alienated times of philosophy because he is snatched or determined by a future that comes towards him, in front of historical time. Man-in-person is not an escape, is not a flight. On the other hand, the Intellectual-subject is at the same time thrown into history and separated, forced to withdraw, to dis-alienate himself from history by way of his always future subject position. The non-humanitarian intellectual is not necessarily someone who would refuse to go to demonstrations, someone who would refuse to sign petitions. He looks for another usage. He can absolutely participate in these things, but he will not limit his own action to the belief that sustains them. 
  But the duality of the intellectual would be meaningless if it amounts to denouncing a transcendental dialectic in the work of the dominant intellectuals, a transcendental dialectic based upon an apparent and confused conception of the Victim's reality. The practice of the intellectual is only determinate if the kinds or schemes of action are proposed in other ways, which are those of the dominant intellectual. Each time it is a problem to be resolved rather than a typical framework to be reproduced. The practice consists in re-employing the dominant techniques of intervention or assistance concerning concrete victims as variables or arguments within a function, the constant of which is the Victim-in-person.
  FL: The list is vast, of course, where each of us freely forms their intellectual menu (every blending is permitted), but these combinations are no longer pertinent from the moment when they are no longer considered to be universally valid for victims, meaning for all humans in the grip of the major institutional bodies like History, Economy, Philosophy, Democracy, the State, etc. But the determined intellectual can put a lot of work into each of these problems, which are very real in their "materiality," and stop treating them like absolutes, "individuating" them in-the-last-victim. Everything can be used, even certain lawful protests, even an action of a revolutionary or insurrectionary kind, provided that all of this is provided "provisionally" under the ultimatum of the determining Victim. Even certain forms of terrorism − certainly not all, and the religious kind even less so as they are based on absolute beliefs − but provided that they do not in turn engender, in a circular manner, other forms of terror.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: FL: The term "action," as I have already told you, bothers me because of its idealist character which assumes a space of simultaneity, indeed of unity, between action and the event itself. And so of a break between an action and a reaction, because, if things are really simultaneous, there is inevitably a reaction which follows on from the action. I prefer the term "practice." Practice never truly has the totality of its conditions in itself. Man determines practice, meaning that if there is a decision it will have its identity at that time, an identity that we can call non-decisional (of) itself. This is not a decision that grounds itself upon itself like the decision for action. If we turn the multiplicity of practices, with their heterogeneous characteristics, their own languages, and their own objects, if we turn that multiplicity towards the general idea of a praxis, we risk drowning all this diversity in a philosophy of action. Action is a thought with presuppositions, it has presupposeds that action itself claims to posit and that it recovers. But the presupposeds are irreducible or untransformable through practice itself, which must let itself be determined by them. The dominant intellectual has an action that comes with all the reflections, idealizations, and redoublings which are linked to belief in the all-powerfulness of action, while the non-humanitarian intellectual simply has a more modest practice which does not have the ambition to totalize itself.
  FL: Yes and no. Because the future is also what is sent ahead of the subject. This is not what is before us, because it comes from nowhere, but it comes ahead of... I am close enough here to certain themes of Levinas, except that this is not an Other, it is Man-in-person who manifests and who opens the philosophical closure of history through a radical immanence, not by way of some transcendence.
  FL: From nowhere, rather than from elsewhere − that would be to redouble it. The subject only escapes the auto-alienated times of philosophy because he is snatched or determined by a future that comes towards him, in front of historical time. Man-in-person is not an escape, is not a flight. On the other hand, the Intellectual-subject is at the same time thrown into history and separated, forced to withdraw, to dis-alienate himself from history by way of his always future subject position. The non-humanitarian intellectual is not necessarily someone who would refuse to go to demonstrations, someone who would refuse to sign petitions. He looks for another usage. He can absolutely participate in these things, but he will not limit his own action to the belief that sustains them. 
  But the duality of the intellectual would be meaningless if it amounts to denouncing a transcendental dialectic in the work of the dominant intellectuals, a transcendental dialectic based upon an apparent and confused conception of the Victim's reality. The practice of the intellectual is only determinate if the kinds or schemes of action are proposed in other ways, which are those of the dominant intellectual. Each time it is a problem to be resolved rather than a typical framework to be reproduced. The practice consists in re-employing the dominant techniques of intervention or assistance concerning concrete victims as variables or arguments within a function, the constant of which is the Victim-in-person.
  FL: The list is vast, of course, where each of us freely forms their intellectual menu (every blending is permitted), but these combinations are no longer pertinent from the moment when they are no longer considered to be universally valid for victims, meaning for all humans in the grip of the major institutional bodies like History, Economy, Philosophy, Democracy, the State, etc. But the determined intellectual can put a lot of work into each of these problems, which are very real in their "materiality," and stop treating them like absolutes, "individuating" them in-the-last-victim. Everything can be used, even certain lawful protests, even an action of a revolutionary or insurrectionary kind, provided that all of this is provided "provisionally" under the ultimatum of the determining Victim.