Overview

"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."

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It is no exaggeration to say that the contribution of Laruelle's entire opus and of Christo-fiction in particular will be historic. The importance of this latest work stems not only from the momentum of the emergence of a Laruellian epoch in philosophy but also from the fact that this is the first work where he reconciles the two great phases in his thought -- the scientific one and the one of non-standard theology. -- Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje Without accepting the positivism of mainstream philosophy and the everyday ideology of scientisim that many in the West operate with, 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

It is no exaggeration to say that the contribution of Laruelle's entire opus and of Christo-fiction in particular will be historic. The importance of this latest work stems not only from the momentum of the emergence of a Laruellian epoch in philosophy but also from the fact that this is the first work where he reconciles the two great phases in his thought - the scientific one and the one of non-standard theology. -- Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje Without accepting the positivism of mainstream philosophy and the everyday ideology of scientisim that many in the West operate with, 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

It is no exaggeration to say that the contribution of Laruelle's entire opus and of Christo-fiction in particular will be historic. The importance of this latest work stems not only from the momentum of the emergence of a Laruellian epoch in philosophy but also from the fact that this is the first work where he reconciles the two great phases in his thought - the scientific one and the one of non-standard theology. -- Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje Without accepting the positivism of mainstream philosophy and the everyday ideology of scientism that many in the West operate with, 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 non-standard philosophy in Christo-Fiction does not think about Christ philosophically to generate one more onto-theology or political theology: it is the quantum (of) Christ as it might think itself, something both ordinary and radical. This is Schrodinger'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 non-theological messianity that is given 'materielly' through quantum wave and particle. -- John O Maoilearca, Professor of Film Studies, Kingston University, London, and author of All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy For Francois Laruelle Christ is pure human happening, which is also the happening of reality as the One, absolutely without any pre-conditioning, 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 non-philosophy, which tries to think outside any fictional philosophic circles which 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. Thereby we are offerred a new mode of gnostic heresy, for which Christian orthodoxy should, nonetheless, be grateful. For orthodoxy was scarcely able to define itself in the first place, beyond the neoplatonic, without gnostic provocation (as Catherine Pickstock has recently shown). In order to re-express itself today and to rethink, after Augustine, Christ as the Christus totius, it can well learn from Laruelle that the thought of God incarnate must mean the thought of the assumption of created time into unity with a manifestation in that time of the non pre-manifest or pre-determined: of that which is purely its own arrival, rendering the Creation also as such and so redeemed from the demonic lures of claimed alien cntrol. The claim that the absoluteness of Christ is better thought as Trinitarian orthodoxy is then the argument with Laruelle that should genially follow. -- John Milbank, The University of Nottingham

Author Information

Francois Laruelle is emeritus professor at the University of Paris Ouest, Nanterre la Defense (Paris X), and a lecturer at the College 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.

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