The Concept of Non-Photography

Of what do these essays speak? Of photography in the flesh €“ but not the flesh of the photographer. Myriads of negatives tell of the world, speaking in clich©s among themselves, constituting a vast conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Even so, this real lingers on the negatives€ surface, at once lived and imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an ungraspable identity that only shines €“ and at times faintly €“ through something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret.

If philosophy has always understood itself and its World according to the model of the photograph, then how can there be a €œphilosophy of photography€ that is not viciously self-reflexive? By thinking the photograph €œnon-philosophically€, Laruelle discovers an essence of photography that precedes its historical, technological and aesthetic conditions.
Challenging the customary assumptions made by any €œtheory of photography€ that leaves its own €œonto-photo-logical€ conditions uninterrogated, and utilizing the concept of a €œgeneralized fractality€ to interrogate artistic creation, The Concept of Non-Photography develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle€s €˜non-philosophy.€

FRAN‡OIS LARUELLE, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris X (Nanterre), is the author of more than twenty books, including Biography of the Ordinary Man, Theory of Strangers, Principles of Non-Philosophy, Future Christ, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, Anti-Badiou, and Non-Standard Philosophy. His From Decision to Heresy is also published by Sequence and Urbanomic.


€œWhat excites Laruelle is that photography incarnates a decisionless move from original to copy. Hence, contrary to the whole modern history of photography theory that assumes a wholly specular relationship between photography and its referents, photography is, in itself, a fundamentally anti-specular mechanism...€
JOHN ROBERTS
PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY