TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

At present, there are a number of sophisticated theoretical introductions to the works of François Laruelle available in English, so here we will limit ourselves to questions of translation.1

In the French original, three of the text’s key terms are brought into even closer dialogue by their parallel, rhyming forms: mystique, pragmatique, topique. Unfortunately, the structure of English means we have not been able to preserve these echoes consistently. When mystique is an adjective we have rendered it as “mystical,” when it is the noun le mystique as “the mystical,” and when it is the noun la mystique as “mysticism.” When pragmatique is an adjective, it is “pragmatic,” when it is the noun le pragmatique, “the pragmatic,” and when the noun la pragmatique, “pragmatics.” When topique is an adjective, we have rendered it as “topical,” when the noun le topique, “the topic” and when the noun la topique, “topics.” What is thereby obscured in English is the parallelism between la pragmatique (pragmatics) and la topique (topics), on the one hand, and la mystique (mysticism), on the other. Although others have translated la mystique as “mystics” (in the works of Michel de Certeau, for example), “mysticism” remains closer to the meaning that la mystique normally carries in French. For example, la mystique rhénane, the thirteenth and fourteenth-century mystical movement that includes Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Johannes Tauler, among others, is usually referred to in English as “German Mysticism.” The one time in the text that Laruelle uses the term mysticisme it is polemical, along the lines of the term “obscurantism”; we have made this different usage clear in the text.

In another case, the differences between French and English grammar and the precision of Laruelle’s terms have forced us to stretch English conventions. Laruelle uses three different French terms – individu, individuel(le), and individual(le) – for which the English “individual” is the appropriate translation. However, because each of the three terms does different theoretical work, we have found it necessary to distinguish between them in our translation, in one case using a neologism that echoes Laruelle’s French and evokes what we take to be his debt to Heideggerian terminology. Our terms are as follows: First, we translate the standard French noun for “individual,” individu, as “individual.” Second, we translate the standard French adjective for “individual,” individuel(le), as “individuel,” preserving the –el of the French. Third, Laruelle coins the peculiar adjective individual(le), a term we suspect is modeled after Heidegger’s distinction between existenziell and existenzial. Like the noun individu, we translate this form as “individual.” Context will make clear which is the noun and which the adjective. Of primary importance for the reader is the fact that the awkward English “individuel” is in fact a translation of the common French adjective individuel(le), whereas the deceptively familiar adjective “individual” translates the neologism individual(le). This counter-intuitive distribution of familiar and unfamiliar is necessitated, at least in part, by the stress Laruelle puts on the “a” in individuality when he writes it as individu-a-lity. Moreover, by translating Laruelle’s term individual(le) as “individual,” we avoid what Laruelle himself is trying to avoid, namely, leaving the duel, or “duel” – the contest between two adversaries so central to philosophy – in the individual.

Laruelle’s particular use in French – and thus our distinctive translations in English – of a group of terms related to thought and reflection also deserve explanation. While irréfléchi has a standard meaning of “thoughtless” or “unconsidered,” we have rendered it as “unreflective” so as to capture the critique of the specular found throughout the text, and also to retain some of the strangeness of Laruelle’s usage. Whenever “unthought” appears it translates impensé(e), while réfléchi usually becomes “reflected” or “reflective” rather than its more common definitions.

A number of terms that are likely to stand out to the reader are indebted to Heideggerian thought and the way it has been translated from German into both French and English. Indeed, translating this book has made us realize that the responsible translator of contemporary French philosophy really ought to have read at least Heidegger and Kant in French translation. We outline some of the most important Heideggerianisms here so that the reader understands their philosophical baggage.

• Although the standard meaning of the French éloignement is “remoteness,” when Laruelle uses the hyphenated term é-loignement he is referencing a Heideggerian terminology that has its own highly particular meaning and translation history: é-loignement is the standard French translation of Heidegger’s Ent-fernung (§23 of Being and Time) which we have, following Joan Stambaugh’s English translation of the same text, rendered as “de-distancing.” For the same reasons, we translate é-loigné as “de-distanced.”
• Laruelle draws a distinction between things comme tel and tel quel. The former is the standard French translation of Heidegger’s als solche, which is usually given in English as “as such.” (For example, Chapter V of Division I of Being and Time, “Das In-Sein als solches,” is translated into English by Stambaugh as “Being-in As Such,” and by Emmanuel Martineau into French as “L’Être-À Comme Tel”.) We have respected this, rendering comme tel as “as such,” in contrast to tel quel and its variants, which we translate as “as it is” (“as they are,” “as he is,” etc.). A similar term, which appears less frequently in the text, en tant que tel, we translate as “as is.”
• We have rendered originaire as originary, but it should be noted that in Martineau’s translation of Heidegger, originaire often translates ursprünglich, which is usually given in English translations of Heidegger as “primordial.”
• The French sens can be translated into English as both “sense” and “meaning.” Thus, for example, the phrase logique du sens is most commonly known to English audiences as the title of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, while le sens de l’être is the standard translation of Heidegger’s Sinn von Sein, which in English is usually rendered as “meaning of being.” (Both of these are obliquely referenced in the exposition of Theorem 113 below.) Unfortunately, in English there is no way to capture in one word the divergent denotations “sense” and “meaning,” so we have rendered sens as “sense” when it is used in colloquial expressions (“in the sense that,” etc.), but when sens is used technically (as in Chapter IV) we translate it as “meaning.”

As is clear from the mention of Deleuze in the final bullet point, Laruellian terms are also frequently related to the terminology of French thinkers. While “Other” is almost always a rendering of the French Autre, the several times Autrui (“other person” or “other people”) appears in the French original it is either in implicit or explicit reference to Levinas’s ethical thought. When necessary, we have drawn attention to the distinction between Autre and Autrui. And for the verb survoler, which has the standard meanings of “to fly over” and “to skim through,” we have followed the precedent of other translators (for example Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell’s in their translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?) and rendered it as “survey” throughout. The other meanings of the term should, however, be kept in mind. More generally, we have translated the prefix sur-, which appears throughout the text, sometimes as “sur-” and sometimes as “over-,” depending on readability.

A few final translation decisions should be noted: We have rendered scission throughout as scission for consistency, but readers should keep in mind the more common meanings “division,” “separation,” “split.” We have rendered occidental(e) as “western,” but compounds such as gréco-occidental have retained their original inflection and have become “Greco-occidental.” Additionally, we have rendered the French mixte in two different ways: in the...