Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo