Sight Unseen, The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

A revolutionary effort to restore the radical politics of Christianity and the inherent value of faith.

François Laruelle’s lifelong project of “nonphilosophy,” or “nonstandard philosophy,” thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations among 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 that 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 tightly to the human experience and the lived world.

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.