conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Fran&#231;ois, Professor, Emeritus with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Intellectuals and Power'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide 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: Provide another paragraph.. Start with the sentence 'FL: I absolutely agree, but the problem is that of the relation between decision and the point of indecision! In philosophy, this relation is necessarily continuous or closely related despite every rupture, despite the differences in terms of the levels of reality that one may set between the instance of decision and this point of indecision, whether it is the Other or whether it is neutral regarding the serene unity of the battle of opposites as in Heidegger'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: FL: I absolutely agree, but the problem is that of the relation between decision and the point of indecision! In philosophy, this relation is necessarily continuous or closely related despite every rupture, despite the differences in terms of the levels of reality that one may set between the instance of decision and this point of indecision, whether it is the Other or whether it is neutral regarding the serene unity of the battle of opposites as in Heidegger. There is always a point of serenity, so of indecision and abandonment of duality, but this point of indecision is in continuity with decision. It is as if there were a recto and a verso. The point of indecision is never radical within philosophy. My problem is one of positing a point of radical indecision or not cutting into it with different kinds of philosophical decisions. On the other hand, this point of radical indecision is going to determine them. This is the point of the Undecided rather than of indecision, which I am going to call the Victim-in-person, not the Victim as absolute, because she no longer comes from the absolute, but comes from what I call the radical or the Real. The Victim is no longer debatable or contestable, no longer taboo, yet this is what will come to determine a subject capable of driving philosophy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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.