The City of Nowhere: Laruelle and Urban Studies

Abstract

What happens to urban studies when it is confronted with the radical, yet non-relational immanence of François Laruelle’s non-philosophy? This is not a simple question of illuminating the and of our title, because for Laruelle this and is a non-, forcing us to ask how we engage with the relations constituting both the urban and its various forms of study through an approach that denies and rejects the constitutive possibility of relation itself. This question gives us a sense of the radicality of Laruelle’s thought, but also of the wreckage left in non-philosophy’s wake. Non-urban studies, if there should be such a thing, does not have, or emerge from, a relation to urban studies, but from its denial and destruction. This is a process that does not produce romantic objects of aesthetic appreciation, as in Jacques Derrida’s love of ruins, but is instead a violent ruination that seeks a tabula rasa, a scorched-earth-policy applied to the very foundations of philosophy. This will be the story told here, one that begins with nonphilosophy’s unusual version of radical immanence.