For Lardreau, any unqualified celebration of ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ in philosophy of the kind with which he associates Leibniz runs the risk of collapsing into easy-going relativism. This collapse is incompatible with the philosophical task. Yet Lardreau might himself seem to be very much of the relativist party, above all, in his concept of philosophization. He takes over the Lacanian principle that there is no cataphasis, definition by positive statement, without apophasis, definition by the negative. But this assertion must also be reversible, since any definition by the negative will allow a countervailing positive statement to emerge, and so on ad infinitum. Thus any discourse whatsoever, from detective fiction to apocalyptic Syriac texts, is open to philosophization. The work of philosophization transforms a given discourse into a new set of philosophemes. The discourse may be of any kind. The philosopher scorns no material intrinsically and in itself. Thus, for example, Lardreau seeks to redeem the weird eschatology of Syriac literalism. No propositions automatically have a philosophical dignity. The dignity of philosophy is to ignore questions of what is worthy or unworthy of philosophy. Thus philosophy appropriates phrases that are strange to it, in a Foucauldian stylization of some life preceding it; not a vertical, Platonic transcendence of opinion or doxa, but a lateral transformation of it.