This book is a foundational text for our understanding of Francois 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.

About the Author
Francois Laruelle is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris X (Nanterre).

Reviews
"What would it mean to craft a rigorous science of humanity based on minority rather than authority? In one of his earliest complete expressions of non-philosophy, Laruelle offers a compelling formula for generic humanity - dubbed here ordinary man - rooted not in philosophical or social difference but in real, ordinary identity, the identity of minority. The result is a form of life without authority, without state, without world, in other words, truly glorious."
Alexander R. Galloway, New York University

"A Biography of Ordinary Man shows how non-philosophy can be understood as the ongoing discovery of the human, of the ordinary, and of the lived, without recourse to the 'totalitarian spirit' of authoritarian thought. This is a science of the ordinary life that undoes what we think we know about the human."
John O Maoilearca, Kingston University, London



Book Information
ISBN 9781509509966
Author Francois Laruelle
Format Paperback
Page Count 260
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 408g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 150mm * 23mm