Telos Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle, edited by Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic. Pre-order your copy in our store, and it will be shipped as soon as it is available.
Are the things of this world given to thought? Are things really meant to be known, to be taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental constitution of the real—a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated recipient of the transcendental gift. Philosophy knows what things really are because things—all things—are given to philosophy to be known. Laruelle’s trenchant essays show how this presupposition controls even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these critiques persist in assuming that the disruptive other is in some way given to their own discourse—which shows itself thereby to be still philosophical. An effective critique of philosophy must be non-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of the One. From this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the question of another kind of thought—one that, instead of differentially relating to the world that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh, at One with what it can never know.
Anything of worth is worthy of criticism. A Journal of No Illusions: Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory traces the history behind the journal Telos, which contained many writings discussing the new direction of the American left, with much discussion of European social theory and its future and applications to our world. Paul Piccone created the journal and never expected it to grow to the place it has, and Timothy W. Luke and Ben Agger present an intriguing literary history behind the publication and where it has came from. A Journal of No Illusions is a fine pick for any journalistic studies collection discussing historic publications. 
In its “soft” meaning multiculturalism is, according to these authors, quite compatible with the idea of democracy and liberal-democratic political culture. It concerns the freedom of an individual to choose culture, religion, worldview and identity that suits him/her, as long as that person does not represent an obstacle to freedom of others who also wish to affirm, or determine, themselves within their own individual rights, values, proclivities and norms. However, problems arise in the context of a “hard” interpretation of multiculturalism seen as a system that advocates inviolability, and even sovereignty, of collective cultural rights. In other words, as Eriksen and Stjernfelt argue, this is a version of multiculturalism based on the holiness and immunity of different cultures as their collective rights. . . . 
