Worldly Non-Philosophy, pt. 1: The Principle of Sufficient Economics

[I’ve decided to write the intermediary steps of my interpretation of Economics through Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy, rather than wait until completing the sequel to my Sraffa essay.]

The key component of François Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy is its identification of the ‘Principle of Sufficient Philosophy’, which he claims has been presupposed by all philosophies throughout history. It is surprising, then, to see how simply it can be formulated: “Everything is philosophizable.” The PSP adopts its name from the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ propounded by Leibniz, which stated that everything has a reason for being the way it is. The ‘sufficiency’ of philosophy, then, lies in its purported ability to apply itself (as a discourse) to every element of the Real: with philosophies of  ’culinary materialism‘, the human voice, and even economics, the list of possibilities for “philosophy of x” seems limitless.

Laruelle’s innovation lies in his denial of the PSP: he states that the structure of philosophy is so constituted that it precludes itself from accessing certain elements of the Real, or more simply, that its methodological presuppositions lead to an overly constrained definition of what constitutes thought. Thus Laruelle posits that there exists a Non-Philosophy going beyond philosophy’s boundaries: his project aims to create new forms of thinking, as well as to comprehend the structure of philosophy by means of examining it from an outside perspective.

As this brief essay will endeavour to show, there also exists a Principle of Sufficient Economics (PSE), one identical in content with the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy (PSP), albeit different in its linguistic form. The following will describe why it is that the PSE takes a different linguistic form from the PSP (rather than being the simple transposition ‘everything is economizable’), how Sraffian theory demonstrates that the PSE is false, how Keynesian theory provided the initial break with the PSE, and how Austrian economics’ tacit assumption of the PSE entirely invalidates their criticism of Keynesian macroeconomics.

Instantiating Theory: An Introduction

Out of all the blogs I have encountered, I have rarely come across an initial entry devoted solely to an introduction. As this is my first blog, however, I think that such an entry would be at the very least useful for those who want a means of quickly judging whether this blog will be worth following.

Wordsmith Praxeology will primarily be a theory blog, though it will incorporate commentary on current events as well as attempts at predicting the outcomes of contemporary inventions & innovations (e.g. interpreting through Hjelmslev/McLuhan the implications of a new gadget). It will incorporate material from economics (particularly the Austrian school), schizoanalysis, psychoanalysis, politics, sociology, philosophy, and linguistics, though I also hope to utilize material from the sciences & history. It is my dearest hope not to theorize from an ivory tower, nor to be autobiographical, nor to even be overbearingly intellectual (I prefer to regard intellectualism as Freud did―a defense mechanism).

I would like to make this clear: I do not care about art, nor about pop culture, nor about ‘the subject’. If you are fixated on any of these things at the exclusion of everything else, I suggest that you leave. As well, I feel I ought to note that I do not want to be a professor; rather, I intend to become a market analyst. Though this latter may seem to be a trite autobiographical detail, I divulge it in order to express my concern not to become intellectually decadent, as well as my focus on the actual & the macroscopic, presided over by a capitalist mentality.