Neutral Thought: An Introduction

What is thinking? In the history of philosophy there have been essentially two heterogeneous solutions to this problem. (A) Thought is one of the names of Being, the lived relation of Being to itself, localized in the form of a Subject, a process of subjectivation, or a non-subjective Universal. (B) Thought is a determination of Being, which cannot be totalized to the whole; it thus overturns the equation Being=thought, but at the price of folding itself into Being as an immanent and non-localizable event. On both sides of the duality, thought is vital: it draws its power from Being in order, by eternally returning to it, to reaffirm its ground (A) or to invest it with new distributions (B). Vital thought animates Being, it engenders a creative dynamism. But it is always Being that renews and animates itself in thinking; Being folds and doubles Being. From this viewpoint, thought is the site or the effect (the two are ontologically indiscernible) of the self-folding of Being. We are thus left, despite appearances, with a passive thought condemned to remain in its relations outside of itself (partial transcendence) and to constitute in its logic the immanent outside of Being (partial immanence). Nevertheless, as Varèse showed through music, there always exists a third dimension in which the poles of a duality are displaced, where they go beyond their coupling and enter into in-determinate and reversible relations. What happens to thought in the third dimension? In essence, it becomes neutral: thought neutralizes Being, de-potentializes its self-movement. By denaturing, thought ceases to constitute the hinge for the doubling of Being on itself and reaches the active threshold at which this doubling runs aground, giving way to an absolute milieu where bodies and ideas cast off their nature as effects and emerge thoroughly unhinged. This absolute milieu is immanence. And immanence is neutral.

Laruelle’s most general project operates in this orthogonal dimension. It has two correlative moments. Along one axis it decouples thought and Being, heterogenizing them in a critique of their natural or spontaneous determinations. Along the other it elaborates the consequences of an immanence that arises from this inaugural decoupling; it thus opens the way to a thought of the neutral. These are, to sum up quickly, the critical and positive vectors of this enterprise. Its method goes further than that of philosophy, positively speaking. Philosophy forces vacuums or voids into fields of thought by virtue of which it establishes the necessity of its enunciations. Art cannot think itself, ethics lacks a ground, and it falls to philosophy to furnish the vacuum, to raise the murmur of the void. Neutral thought does not suture this rift within things, but on the contrary bears it to its point of maximum extension, until the void covers the field in its entirety, and thereby reveals that this void is itself the identity and essence of the field. Although the operation is everywhere the same, one void cannot be reduced to another. Each void is effectively populated but manifests a neutral immanence. The texts presented here attest to this asymmetry: a field (ethics, aesthetics) is neutralized through a critique of philosophy that maximizes its site of enunciation so as to give place to a void-immanence peculiar to the field at stake. We are no longer dealing with a method of production (a creative dynamism), for the void cannot be produced; it is, in effect, the unproduceable or the undeterminable par excellence. But nor is this, on the other hand, a method of demystification that would discover in its objects an image of itself and discover, through this self-reflection, the resemblance or identity of those objects. The void is not the Same, but rather the Neutral whose upsurge is always in itself and for it-self. That is why, in any field, in any world whatever, immanence is inseparably singular and absolute.

It is in order to foreground this asymmetry at the heart of the method that we juxtapose here two texts of Laruelle from disparate fields of thought. They seek new types of immanence...