Also tonight.... The Concept of Non-Photography

T h e C o n c e p t o f N o n-P h o t o g r a p h y
Lecture by François Laruelle, Introduction by Robin Mackay
Thursday, April 7th
7 pm

Miguel Abreu Gallery

36 Orchard Street

Of what do these essays speak? Of photography in the flesh – but not the flesh of the photographer. Myriads of negatives tell of the world, speaking in clichés among themselves, constituting a vast conversation, filling a photosphere that is located nowhere. But one single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. Even so, this real lingers on the negatives’ surface, at once lived and imperceptible. Photographs are the thousand flat facets of an ungraspable identity
that only shines – and at times faintly – through something else. What more is there to a photo than a curious and prurient glance? And yet it is also a fascinating secret.
—From Preface, The Concept of Non-Photography

This objectivity so radical that it is perhaps no longer an alienation; so horizontal that it loses all intentionality; this thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this semblance so extended that it is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, a ‘representation’ of what is photographed.

The Concept of Non-Photography develops a rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy and art, and introduces the reader to all of the key concepts of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy.’

François Laruelle, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris West Nanterre La Défence, is the founder of ‘non-philosophy’ and the author of around twenty works, including Une biographie de l’homme ordinaire, Principes de la non-philosophie, Le Christ futur: Une leçon d’hérésie, and Philosophie non-standard. An introductory collection of his essays, From Decision to Heresy: Introduction to Non-Philosophy, will be published by Urbanomic/Sequence in 2011.

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