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 five 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)...
  By what right? From his point of entry, which is a true point of departure that we will not talk about as if Laruelle found it like a revelation, an illumination − rather it is what he has discovered gradually over the course of a long – a very long – research program that from the beginning has been related to the forgetting of the One. From a discovery tested in a method, previously "trans-valued" and generalized, since the immanence of the One would subsequently become the Real and then the "Name-of-Man." And he will supply the key to understanding the "Principle of Sufficient Philosophy," this infinite philosophizability, which governs, according to Laruelle, the function of the dominant intellectuals and their relation to current affairs and to their urgency, incapable of resisting the World except in a relationship of non-conformity that would have to be invented with that World. The eternal treason of the intellectuals...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide 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: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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. 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.FL: Yes, of course.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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.. 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. 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.
  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. 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. Each time it is a problem to be resolved rather than a typical framework to be reproduced. 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. 
  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. He can absolutely participate in these things, but he will not limit his own action to the belief that sustains them. He looks for another usage. The non-humanitarian intellectual is not necessarily someone who would refuse to go to demonstrations, someone who would refuse to sign petitions. 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. Man-in-person is not an escape, is not a flight. 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.
  FL: From nowhere, rather than from elsewhere − that would be to redouble it. 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... This is not what is before us, because it comes from nowhere, but it comes ahead of. Because the future is also what is sent ahead of the subject.FL: Yes and no