Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
François Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse.
Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world.
— Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje
Laruelle valorizes and rethinks the place of science for human liberation and how it may operate within philosophical practice itself. However, he thinks that science needs to tell stories, to create fictions, like the fiction of Christ, in order to stand on the side of the victims of history rather than the victors.
— Anthony Paul Smith, La Salle University
Laruelle's nonstandard philosophy in Christo-Fiction does not think about Christ philosophically to generate one more ontotheology or political theology: it is the quantum (of) Christ as it might think itself, something both ordinary and radical. This is Schrödinger's Christ, a 'rigorous fiction' where life and death are superposed, not in any theological or supernatural way unique to a deity, but in the radically ordinary of scientific nature, a nontheological messianity that is given 'materielly' through quantum wave and particle.
— John Ó Maoilearca, author of All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy
For Laruelle, Christ is pure human happening, which is also the happening of reality as the One, absolutely without any preconditioning, or any ultimate foundation or original framing fixity, which quantum physics has shown not to exist. The science of Christ therefore exceeds both philosophy and theology and is at one with nonphilosophy, which tries to think outside any fictional philosophic circles that arbitrarily claim some ontological factor as primary and another as secondary. In this sense, the 'Christo-fiction' is more true—the claim and following of one man as the whole process, as entirety. We are offered, then, a new mode of gnostic heresy, for which Christian orthodoxy should, nonetheless, be grateful.
— John Milbank, University of Nottingham
a profound contribution to a messianic and Christological thought divorced from the strictures of orthodox theology
François Laruelle is emeritus professor at the University of Paris Ouest, Nanterre la Défense (Paris X), and a lecturer at the Collège International de Philosophie. He is the author of more than twenty works of philosophy, including Principles of Non-Philosophy, Philosophies of Difference, Future Christ, and The Concept of Non-Photography.
Robin Mackay is a philosopher and editor and publisher of Collapse Journal of Philosophical Research and Development.
Preface: Christianity Stripped Bare by Christ
Introduction: A Gnostic Theology in the Quantum Spirit
1. A Generic Repetition of Gnosis: To Desuture Christ from Theology
2. The Idea of a Science-in-Christ: Christ, Science, and Their Gnostic Suture
3. From the Theo-Christo-Logical Doublet to Unilateral Complementarity
4. Construction and Functioning of the Christic Matrix
5. Algebra of the Messianic Wave
6. Christic Science and Its Occasions
7. The Two Laws of Substantial Religious Existence, and Christ as Mediate-Without-Mediation
8. The Generic Science of the World
9. Indiscernible Messianity
10. Scientific Discovery and Revelation
11. The Science of the Cross
12. The Science of the Resurrection
13. Messianity and Fidelity: The Faithful of-the-Last-Instance
14. Faith Harassed by Belief
Notes
Index