A Biography of Ordinary Man On Authorities and Minorities [Paperback]

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.

• Translators Introduction
• Foreword
• Introduction: A Rigorous Science of Man
• 1) From the Sciences of Man to the Science of Men
• Five human theorems. The Sciences of Man are not sciences and man is not their object. Heterogeneous sciences, not specific, not theoretically justified, and devoid of humanity. Critique of difference and of anthropo-logical parallelism. The essence of man is theoretical, not anthropo-logical.
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