ABSTRACT
Philosophy is, in Laruelle's words, "the oldest prejudice". To do philosophy means to harbor a secret stance toward the world – pursing it, eating and digesting it, beating it down, then building it back up again. And philosophy itself is forever a glutton for punishment, eager to be re-enlisted for future abuses. The first difficulty is that the terms a priori and a posteriori, defined by Kant as "prior to or independent of experience" and "posterior to or dependent on experience", do not make much sense within non-philosophy. Likewise the analytic/synthetic distinction is only partially applicable to Laruelle. To begin, the synthetic, defined by Kant as a judgment containing an additive predicate, is roundly refused by Laruelle. There are few concepts more antonymic to non-philosophy than synthesis. In sum, if Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion" framed critique as paranoia, and Deleuze and Guattari painted philosophy as schizophrenia, Laruelle renders non-philosophy as autism.
