Identity and Event

the Real or One – rather than to abstraction. The One is an abstract-without-an operation-of-abstraction, abstraction follows after and is imposed upon thought, as its form, by the Real. 4. I lay claim to theory, but I understand it in terms of the radical identity of science and philosophy, which is to say, the radical identity of the two aspects: knowledge on the one hand, and a transcendental usage or pragmatics of philosophy on the other. It is thus a transcendental theory or science, one providing a non-empirical, identical or ‘unified’ knowledge and pragmatics of the philosophy-object as form of the World. 5. Lastly, it is a theory without a primacy of the theoretical. It is, on the contrary, anti-idealist and anti-theoreticist because it is subordinated to the primacy of the Real which, in this context, has never been of the order of cognition or even of thought, of consciousness, etc. Its determination-inFrançois Laruelle 189 the-last-instance by the Real does not indicate the philosophical position known as ‘realism’. This type of Real excludes realism. In virtue of its nature as a radical identity, it is more of the order of a kind of performative, or more exactly, a Performed-without-Performance. Nonphilosophy is a theory, but one which is practical-in-the-last-instance or determined by such a practice. Translated by Ray Brassier