Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

1. Resumed (rélancé): Laruelle’s use of this word draws on the mathematical sense in which one vector can be said to resume another, that is, prolong or “relaunch” its orientation and amplitude and thereby take it further—trans.

2. Knowledge (savoir): Much of what follows depends on a distinction between savoir and connaissance, a perennial difficulty for translators. The two terms are translated here as knowledge (with the connotation of scholarly learning and established bodies of knowledge, and sometimes as knowledges [savoirs] when speaking of multiple such bodies) and cognizance (with the connotation of firsthand acquaintance or a “lived” knowledge)—trans.

3. (Connaissance)—trans.

1. Simple ones/Simple Souls (Les simples): One of Laruelle’s references in his “nontheological” works is the medieval French mystic Marguerite Porete. Her book The Mirror of Simple Souls is regarded as a major source for the autotheistic Heresy of the Free Spirit. Porete was burned at the stake in 1310—trans.

2. Vectoriell (vectorial, vectoriale): In introducing (in the French) vectorial as a counterpart to vectoriel (which means “vectorial” in the normal mathematical sense), Laruelle echoes Heidegger’s distinction between existenziell and existenzial (see the introduction to Being and Time, section 4), usually rendered in French as existential and existentiel. The traditional English counterpart is existentiell and existential, and in line with this, vectorial has been translated here as vectoriell. The Heideggerian analogy should not be taken too literally however: The vectoriell, as we shall learn, is distinct from the existentiell: although it relates to the lived of generic man in his encounter with the world, it embodies nonstandard philosophy’s insistence that the latter can be addressed through a “real (not logical) formalism.” Moreover, given that the aim is not to submit man or his religion to a “positive” mathematical science, the neologism’s main function is to distinguish the “ontologico-geometrical” vectoriell from the “psychologico-geometrical” vectorial and its positive sufficiency—trans.

3. Materiel (Matériale): Distinct from the “matter” posited by (philosophical) materialism, this term is adopted and transliterated into French by Laruelle from the work of Max Scheler. For Laruelle the materiel is the “matter” of the lived, the Husserlian erlebnis or the phenomenological hyle, which nonstandard philosophy experimentally subjects to the algebraic formalisms of quantum physics. The translation materiel is adopted so as to maintain it as a separate term both from (philosophical) matter and from the various “materials” that nonstandard philosophy makes use of in its procedures—trans.