A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities

by François Laruelle, Jessie Hock (Translator), Alex Dubilet (Translator)

This book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France's leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines. 

One of Laruelle’s first systematic elaborations of his ethical and "non-philosophical" thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy offers a rigorous science of individuals as minorities or as separated from the World, History, and Philosophy. Through novel theorizations of finitude and determination in the last instance, Laruelle develops a thought "of the One" as a "minoritarian" paradigm that resists those paradigms that foreground difference as the conceptual matrix for understanding the status of the minority. The critique of the "unitary illusion" of philosophy developed here stands at the foundation of Laruelle’s approach to "uni-lateralizing" the power of philosophy and the universals with which it has always thought, and thereby acts as a basis for his subsequent investigations of victims, mysticism, and Gnosticism. 

This book will appeal to students and scholars of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and cultural theory.

Genres: Philosophy

260 pages, Paperback

Published February 12, 2018

About the author

François Laruelle was a French philosopher, of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Laruelle began publishing in the early 1970s and had around twenty book-length titles to his name. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Laruelle was notable for developing a science of philosophy that he calls non-philosophy. Until his death, he directed an international organisation dedicated to furthering the cause of non-philosophy, the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale.

Reviews

[Rei K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very exciting book for me to read - it is the second work of Laruelle's "non-philosophy" that I have taken the time to work through, the first being Philosophy and Non-Philosophy, and the first thing to note about my experience here is that it is severely lacking in much of the vocabulary that comes later on in Laruelle's work. In this way the prose is significantly less dense, and so it is easier to get to the heart of what Laruelle proposes for Non-Philosophy, although the lack of certain concepts like vision-in-one, one-in-one, and the non-thetic (several objects) made the work feel a little lacking in comparison with regards to method, and relations (or lack thereof) to philosophy.

I find that this serves as both an extremely good introduction to Laruelle's thought, and also elaborates a lot of the "stakes" of his other work. Questions of "why bother with all this?" are answered through the concerns and concepts laid out here. It also serves, if you have read other Laruelle, as a sort of lens to "focus" your prior reading through.