Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy by François Laruelle
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Struggle Without a Cause

Laruelle is a French academic philosopher (which makes him a celebrity) who does not want to fight... with anyone. Except those who claim to know reality... who are many in the philosophical community (and other places). With them he wants to struggle. Not to prove anything; such an aim would be fruitless. But to engage in the struggle. This is a struggle without reasons in the usual sense. Things like inequality, injustice, evil in general are not part of it. This is a metaphysical struggle. It is not based upon the material alienation of man as in Marxism. Laruelle is engaged in a rebellion, not for any particular reason but as a matter of principle. But this rebellion has nothing to do with the gnostic protest of the world as inherently evil, a view echoed in dogmatic Christianity which sees the world as needing salvation from such evil.

There may be inequities and injustices in the world. Indeed it may be that the world is inherently evil. What Laruelle objects to is the mere reflexive response to these conditions, either in offence or defence. “How to make of rebellion something other than a reaction of autoprotection against aggression? That is our question.”

This is a struggle “against the World and for the World.” The World in this case includes philosophy in all its historical forms, since the “World itself has a philosophical form.” Indeed, the World includes Reason as part of philosophy and as the conquest and defence mechanisms against which Laruelle is struggling.

It is clear that this struggle is about power, but not about either gaining or losing it. Rather it seems to be about continuously worrying about it in a way that many would consider neurotic. I admit to total bafflement, especially when confronted with page-length paragraphs similar to this:

[This radical struggle] is the vision-in-One of that struggle which is determined by Man who gives himself his reality and prevents it from returning to him, as to his self-sufficiency. When it is thus dual, but from a unilateral duality – a phase of struggle and one which is no longer of revolt but of human determination of revolt – it escapes from sufficient reason and makes itself a struggle-of-the-Stranger against . . . and for. . . the World according to a considered measure. We gain in this way from the most innovative practical part of Gnostic rebellion as well as from class struggle in order to gather with faith as so many simple aspects in the figure of Future Christ as subject-in-struggle.”

I think I have sympathy with Laruelle’s project; but I really have no idea what that is. I implore anyone who can précis Laruelle’s intention and argument without jargon to step up to the plate. You owe it to the world to tell us all whether this stuff is important or a very clever French confidence trick.

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