François Laruelle's work has recently found a North American audience, resulting in a bloom of English translations over the past five years. Intellectuals and Power, Laruelle's long interview with Philippe Petit, joins the list of Laruelle translations in 2015, which also includes his General Theory of Victims (Polity), Introduction to Non-Marxism (Univocal), and Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem (Columbia University Press).

The translator's preface by Anthony Paul Smith immediately situates the book in relation to the media frenzy that followed the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013. Smith highlights Laruelle's critique of public philosophers' ignorance of victims in favour of “media friendly concepts,” thereby situating the book in relation to a contemporary event characterized by violence and injustice (vii). Laruelle's critique of what he calls the ‘dominant intellectual’ constitutes a critique of the self-styled experts and pundits who take refuge in abstraction while claiming to care about the victims and injustices of the world. Philippe Petit's interviewer's preface then summarizes Laruelle's recasting of the role of intellectuals in the context of his pursuit of ‘non-philosophy.’

The Prologue of the book begins the interview, with Petit setting the stage for the exchange by placing Laruelle in the long line of French intellectual self-reflection (alongside Aron, Sartre, Lyotard, and Debray). While Laruelle joins this lineage he also seeks to radicalize it, particularly by his distinction between the ‘dominant intellectual’ who prefers to act and separate, and the ‘determined intellectual’ who rejects the simple bifurcations of political discourse on victims and perpetrators. The Prologue sees Laruelle responding to Petit's questions about the controversies surrounding French intellectuals from Michel Foucault to Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Chapter 1, “The Name-of-Man of the Identity of the Real,” begins with a lengthy definition of the Real, moving through explanations of Laruelle's terminology such as the ‘Name-of-Man’ and ‘unilateral duality’ each of which is important to his larger system of non-philosophy, as presented in his Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (Univocal, 2013) and Principles of Non-Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013). A frustrating pattern that emerges early on in the Prologue and Chapter 1, and which continues throughout the book, is Laruelle's evasion of Petit's questions. When asked about responsibility for the Shoah, Laruelle critiques the intellectual refuge in slogans, but offers no constructive suggestion regarding ethical responsibility in return, and when asked about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Laruelle only mentions his “critique of philosophical appearance” (24-25 and 34).

Chapter 2, “Portrait of the Dominant Intellectual,” seeks to critique dominant intellectuals for being too media-friendly, impatient, and reductive in their popular reflections on war and politics. Critiquing dominant intellectuals for either taking sides or searching for “some small mediation,” Laruelle advocates for a more critical treatment of “the relation between decision and the point of indecision” (60 and 63). While this relationship is indeed important, and the rush to decision in the wake of disastrous events on the part of dominant intellectuals is no doubt opportunistic and deplorable, Laruelle's distance and hesitation in the face of present issues of justice risks the opposite violence. For example, Laruelle responds to Petit's question about the war in Iraq by exempting himself from the conditions of the question and returning to his philosophy of “radical indecision” (64). It is very possible that Laruelle's refusal of Petit's questions regarding concrete issues of war, violence, and injustice is a consequence of his non-philosophical critique of the conditions of discourse about these issues. However, Laruelle's refusal to engage with these questions risks complicity with exactly the sort of transcendent power that he associates with the dominant intellectual.

Chapter 3, “The Victim and the Understanding of Crime,” critiques Alain Badiou's concept of the victim, implying that Badiou's Ethics reduces victims to the assurance of their predicated identities as victims (82-83). Laruelle follows this with a critique of the victim as an essentialized singularity that can be represented politically, instead suggesting that victims must be the determiner of their own interplay between representation and non-representation (93). Chapter 4, “The Practice of the Determined Intellectual” then defines the determined intellectual as someone who executes the reflective discipline of “practice” over the reactivity of “action” (121). Searching for a way out of the knee-jerk reactions of the dominant intellectual, Laruelle suggests the possibility of an intervention strategy that could act without the reductive problems of “philosophical urgency” (126-127). Chapter 5, “Criminal History and the Demand for Justice,” then concludes with Laruelle's critique of the popular emphasis on “judgment and punishment,” instead seeking to place justice beyond these courtroom decisions (135).

For claiming to be a book about justice and victimhood, Laruelle goes to great lengths to avoid Petit's questions about current events and contemporary political situations, and so the risk is that Laruelle himself becomes that dominant intellectual who detaches himself from the everyday reality of victims in an effort to detach himself from the violent methodology and vocabulary of dominant intellectuals. Because of the impenetrability of Laruelle's vocabulary (especially present in Intellectuals and Power), and because the discourse on Laruelle's work invites so much partisanship, the first-time reader of Laruelle would be better off to begin an acquaintance with his work by reading the essays collected in From Decision to Heresy (Urbanomic, 2013), or the secondary work of Katerina Kolozova in Cut of the Real (Columbia University Press, 2014) or Alexander Galloway in Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minnesota University Press, 2014). For a book that claims sensitivity to power imbalances, the epistemological power that Laruelle exerts is immense, running roughshod over the questions posed to him. However, a lesson that Laruelle provides, in the words of Smith, is that encouraging a turn towards the victim should not entail “some fetishization of victims that would turn them into a transcendent term that stops all conversation” (x-xi). So, let the conversation continue.