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Description of  All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy

All Thoughts Are Equal is both an introduction to the work of French philosopher Franois Laruelle and an exercise in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his "non-standard" approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking including the nonhuman are equal. John Maoilearca examines how philosophy might appear when viewed with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. And he does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions as an example of the non-standard method. Von Trier's film is a meditation on the creative limits set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how they can push our experience of film and of ourselves beyond what is normally deemed "the perfect human." All Thoughts are Equal adopts film's constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle's radically new style of philosophy is best presented using our most nonhuman form of thought that found in cinema itself.