Translated by Robin Mackay Second, revised edition. What excites Laruelle is that photography incarnates a decisionless move from original to copy. Hence, contrary to the whole modern history of photography theory that assumes a wholly specular relationship between photography and its referents, photography is, in itself, a fundamentally anti-specular mechanism. — John Roberts, Philosophy of Photography If philosophy has always understood its relation to the world according to the model of the instantaneous flash of a photographic shot, how can there be a ‘philosophy of photography’ that is not viciously self-reflexive? Challenging the assumptions made by any theory of photography that leaves its own ‘onto-photo-logical’ conditions uninterrogated, Laruelle thinks the photograph non-philosophically, so as to discover an essence of photography that precedes its historical, technological and aesthetic conditions. 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’. A Czech translation was published by Fotograf in 2010.
