Kirk Wetters’s “Working Over Philosophy: Hans Blumenberg’s Reformulations of the Absolute” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.

This essay underscores Blumenberg’s braking effect with respect to the sheer continuation of preexisting philosophical and theoretical traditions. Wetters sees Blumenberg’s metaphorology as a meta-reflection that produces interference within the modes through which philosophical and theoretical works traditionally produce their operative and authoritative effects. A major impetus of Blumenberg’s method is the anti-authoritarian de-classicization of traditions that, virtually by definition, are instrumentalized and homogenized as soon they are made into the vehicles for “claims” (Behauptungen) and theoretical “self-assertions” (Selbstbehauptungen). Wetters argues that, beyond Blumenberg’s own claims, the specificity of his work depends on deeply embedded nuances and details of the argumentation that are not easily detachable from their immediate context. Narration emerges as the key source of the power of both myth and philosophy. For Wetters, narrative choices reflect the relation to power, and philosophy becomes inseparable from myth whenever it attempts to narrate its own story or history. Blumenberg is extraordinarily sensitive to the effects not only of others’ implicit narratives and motives but also of his own. Wetters thus hypothesizes that this sensitivity may explain and justify the increasingly literary style of Blumenberg’s works.

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Helmut Müller-Sievers’s “Kyklophorology: Hans Blumenberg and the Intellectual History of Technics” appears in Telos 158 (Spring 2012). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.

This essay seeks to identify the elements in Hans Blumenberg’s work that could constitute an “intellectual history of technics” (Geistesgeschichte der Technik). While examples of Blumenberg’s deep engagement with technological discovery and artifacts can be found throughout his oeuvre, his project of counterbalancing metaphorology, conceived as technological history of the intellect (Technikgeschichte des Geistes), never came to systematic fruition. Unlike theological and philosophical language, which confronts the “absolutism of reality” with a surplus of metaphors, technics, in Blumenberg’s estimation, has remained mute to the present day. The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) comes closest to identifying the “essence of technics” in the divergence between orbital motion of the planets and axial rotation of the earth. Axial rotation is unnatural, technical motion, as it requires for its induction the convergence of two oppositional forces on an extended body; only machines within a fixed frame are able to impart such forces. And yet the history of cosmology and technology consistently elides the difference between orbital motion and axial rotation—and thus parallels the elision of the difference between metaphors and concepts. Just as metaphorology seeks to write the history of this difference, kyklophorology seeks to open technical artifacts to historical and philosophical interpretation.

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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.

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