Can the Utopia of Strangers Be a City?: A Radical (Re-)Reading of Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy

Abstract

In the troubled and very uncertain times that we experience [connaissons], there is a great temptation to want to (re-)construct a secure space, imagining new forms of human existence that carry hope... What is more natural? As such, the reflections can be led towards the city as an ancestral crucible for our inter-human relations and exchanges which occupies a prominent place. What is the city for tomorrow? is a major theme that occupies, or at least preoccupies, our contemporaries worldwide. And as non-philosophers, surely, we are tempted by adventure. It is also the question of what non-philosophy can do in this context that is ineluctably posed. But the pitfalls of the Thought-World, if this is not philosophy, appear just as ineluctably and inevitably, ready to (ac)cept [(ac)cueillir] us in our wanderings. Thus, notably, the very term of the city employed by François Laruelle himself several times in his writings, which could seem to legitimate its use in this approach in view of carrying out a concrete reflection of this order, must be analyzed more profoundly and precisely. What impact can non-philosophy have concretely upon the World? As nonphilosophers, must we totally resolve ourselves to a non-acting indifferent to worldly motion and therefore to a sealed fate of present and future humans? What is a utopia that comes unilaterally into the World and does not rock back and forth in mirages and the belief in an efficiency and worldly materialization?