The International Non-Philosophical Organization (ONPhI)

François Laruelle and non-philosophy

François Laruelle, born in 1937, is a French philosopher who devoted several decades to elaborating a radically new thought which he named non-philosophy. Professor emeritus at the University of Paris X–Nanterre, from the 1980s he developed an intellectual project of great originality: to treat philosophy not as an absolute or an unsurpassable horizon, but as a material that can be transformed from an instance he calls the Real — an instance which precedes and determines in-the-last-instance every theoretical or practical position. Non-philosophy refuses the global authority of philosophy and its transcendental claims. It replaces them with a procedure that treats philosophy as one material among others — on the same footing as science, art, mysticism or psychoanalysis — in order to produce a unified thought that is a genuine theory-practice of Man-in-person. It is in this intellectual context that the ONPhI came into being, with the ambition of giving this theoretical practice an organizational form capable of spreading it, defending it and experimenting with it collectively.

The ONPhI: sketch of a non-institutional utopia

The International Non-Philosophical Organization (ONPhI) is an association created in the direct wake of François Laruelle's work. In its founding texts it defines itself as a non-institutional utopia: neither a political party, nor an academic philosophical school, nor an ordinary association, but an organization of existing-Heretical-subjects engaged in the practice of non-philosophy. What fundamentally distinguishes the ONPhI from an ordinary institution is its refusal to reproduce the institutional mechanisms of control, co-optation and authority that characterize traditional philosophical organizations. The ONPhI does not seek to manage or to select thoughts; it seeks to create an open space in which non-philosophical practices can develop freely, while maintaining the rigor proper to the axioms of non-philosophy.

Struggle and Utopia — Laruelle and the ONPhI

The chapter devoted to the ONPhI in François Laruelle's Struggle and Utopia (La Lutte et l'Utopie) is one of the founding programmatic texts of the organization. Entitled “The International Non-Philosophical Organization (ONPhI) — Sketch of a non-institutional utopia” (pp. 126–143), this text sets out with great conceptual precision the reason for being, the nature and the aims of the ONPhI.

• The a priori defense of non-philosophy: how to protect and develop non-philosophy in the face of philosophical reappropriations that seek to neutralize it. The defense is not that of a besieged fortress but an active and transformative defense, which turns the arguments of philosophical critique back by showing that it is philosophy itself, in its authoritarianism and its transcendental claims, that produces the illusion it claims to criticize.
• The coup of the One, or the uni-cutting: the decisive practice — the non-philosophical gesture par excellence — which allows non-philosophy to operate without letting itself be absorbed by the system it criticizes.
• The non-institutional nature of the ONPhI: an organization that refuses the norms of control and co-optation proper to traditional academic institutions.
• The positive utopia of the ONPhI: its vocation to be a force of transformation within the World, embodying the role of the Stranger in the Cave — Plato's metaphor, revisited by Laruelle, for the one who descends into the world of philosophical appearances in order to work at their transformation.
• The international encyclopedia of heresies: the project of a repertory of heretical thoughts, marginal and unconforming to the dominant philosophical dogmas.

Fundamental aims

The ONPhI pursues five fundamental aims that structure its action and define its organizational identity.

• Defending non-philosophy: its first mission is to ensure an a priori defense of non-philosophy: not the defense of a fortress, but an active anticipation of philosophical reappropriations. The task is to turn philosophical material around by showing its conditions of possibility from a point of view exterior to it — that of the Real determining in-the-last-instance.
• Gathering the forces of resistance: the ONPhI aims to gather the subjects engaged in the struggle against philosophical domination and to constitute a space in which heresies — marginal thoughts, non-conforming practices, excluded knowledges — can meet, articulate one another and grow stronger together.
• Being a non-institutional organization: the ONPhI does not seek to control or to co-opt. It keeps a critical distance from the material and institutional conditions which it uses as mere means, without ever identifying itself with them.
• Spreading non-philosophy in the World: the ONPhI has an explicitly worldwide and utopian vocation. It is not folded in upon itself, but turned toward the World as a space to be transformed.
• Building an encyclopedia of heresies: this project aims to establish a radical relative autonomy of non-conforming thoughts with regard to the dominant philosophy that has disqualified them.

Activities and organization

The organization is marked by a double status: inscribed in certain material and institutional conditions (publications, teaching, seminars), it at the same time keeps a radical critical distance from them. It uses these conditions as mere means, without ever identifying itself with them.

• Seminars in non-philosophy, open to audiences not necessarily trained in academic philosophy
• Schools that allow an initiation into non-philosophical practice
• The publication and circulation of non-philosophical texts
• Collaborations with other forms of practice (art, science, psychoanalysis, political and social engagement)
• The development of an international network of Stranger-subjects engaged in the practice of non-philosophy

A utopia for our time

The ONPhI is fundamentally a utopia — but a positive utopia, not in the sense of an imaginary projection of a better world, but in the sense of a real and present practice of transformation. As Laruelle writes in Struggle and Utopia, the ONPhI embodies the Principle of human non-sufficiency: it starts from the observation that the world as it is — dominated by philosophy as ideology and as institution — is not sufficient for Man-in-person, and that a radically different practice is not only possible but necessary. The ONPhI is thus at once a critique in act of dominant philosophy and the proposal of a form of human organization — intellectual, practical, relational — that takes seriously the question of what it means to think and to act otherwise. It projects no imaginary world of forced happiness, but, by force-without-forcing, brings the World to its simply human salvation. In this sense the ONPhI is less an organization in the institutional sense of the word than a philosophical form of life: a way of being in the World that fully assumes heresy as a mode of existence, and that bets on the transformative power of a thought determined not by the principles of philosophy but by the Real in-the-last-instance.