Future Christ is out already in the UK, but isn’t slated to be available in the US and Canada until late February. For those who would like the book before then it is available from The Book Depository with free International shipping. I think the price actually works out to a little less than what Amazon is selling it for in the US as well.
Officially the UK release of my translation of François Laruelle’s Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (Amazon: UK
“Future Christ announces and enacts The Last Good News, as a non-Christian Heresy and a universal non-religion are conjoined to call forth a new Messiah or a new Humanity which is the new Christ. Laruelle here thinks philosophically and theologically to enact a universal rebellion realized through a heretical science, and if this book is above all an enactment of the heretical imperative, it not only brings a whole new meaning to heretical thinking, but sanctions it as that thinking which is now most our own.” – Thomas J.J. Altizer
“This lesson in heresy is a programme for thinking as a decent human being, thinking according to the victim each time a worldly description turns out to be a denunciation. At once Gnostic in its unlearned knowledge, heretical in its separation from the world, and Christian in its appeal to universal salvation, it performs a radically immanent struggle in the name of a future Christ that could be each and every one of us. Learning yet diverging from the centrality of the Shoah for modern thought, Laruelle makes a distinctive contribution to the political redeployment of a messianic motif.” – Philip Goodchild, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, University of Nottingham
I was quite taken with Laruelle’s calling forth of the heretical imperative in the Future Christ but disappointed with the actual heresies that he evoked, and this awakened me once again to the ultimate importance of heresy to which so few of us are open. Despite the fact that Arianism has been the most popular and pervasive of all heresies, it is not really interesting as a heresy except in its most radical expressions such as Milton, leading me to distinguish between a lighter heresy and a heavier heresy, the latter almost invariably a deeply heretical knowing of Godhead itself, such as occurs in Spinoza and Hegel. Now just as Spinoza is a far deeper heretic than is Leibnitz, and Hegel the deepest heretic in his world, Milton and Blake are the deepest heretics in the world of English literature, and yet Hegel, Milton, and Blake are all profoundly Christian. Of course, the theological world doesn’t know what to do with great heretics of this order, but at the very least they are an overwhelming challenge to faith, and to the deepest faith. Read the rest of this entry »
The last week was spent dealing with the final typeset proofs and compiling the index for Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (Amazon: US, UK
Work on my doctoral thesis has taken priority as I barrel towards the deadline and with most of my other projects out of the way (some promotion for After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, a bit more publisher work left for the Future Christ translation, and some beginning stages work for a possible new project, but nothing that will demand huge amounts of attention) I can finally focus on the writing. I find that I can still do the bulk of research and some background reading while I’m engaged with other projects, but when it comes down to the writing I put on blinders and try to shut myself off from the world (gnosis as writing). I haven’t talked about the particulars of my thesis here, but broadly speaking it is an engagement with environmental philosophies and theologies, though I tend to deal with some of the more metaphysical questions of environmental thought, rather than the ethical (which is the norm in the field). Ethics is still important and, in fact, the real goal of the thesis is to do something like Spinoza’s unified thought of ethics and ontology. Read the rest of this entry »
It transpires that well know conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is giving the Gifford Lectures this year with the title ‘The Face of God’ – the basic gist being popular science is wrecking everything. As Scruton demures “By understanding the world in the way of popular science we fortify those destructive tendencies in our culture which are wiping away the face of the world”. In an essay ‘The Sacred and The Human‘ Scruton gives a preview of what will be said. Scruton begins with a tour of reductions of religion in secular in Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Freud, Frazer and Durkheim, then he ends up at René Girard who ‘wins’, by proving a theory of religion that is positive about the role of Christianity as a unmasking of the problems of mimetic violence and proving a solution to it in positive imitation (of Jesus and of God) and the end of sacrificial violence. Contrary to Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens then, religion in general but monotheism and Christianity in particular, is not in essence violent but a refutation of most forms of violence – “Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it”. This though is problematic for what Scruton wants, and maybe reveals one of the philosophical problems of our time, highlighted to me at last week’s conference in Dundee and Adam’s recent highlighting of a post on the use of evolutionary psychology in the study of literature. He is attempting to refute one (social) science in the name of another.
The audio is now working so I’ve moved the post up a day to alert people in the feed to that effect.
Last week François Laruelle spoke at the University of Warwick, to their philosophy department, and at the University of Nottingham, ostensibly to the theology and religious studies department though I’d say the crowd was made up of maybe 7% theologians. For me it was an extremely exciting time and perhaps the most stressful five days thus far in my life. I was tasked with translating the two talks and, due to a number of other obligations, couldn’t turn to them any earlier than two weeks before the conferences. Though I finished the Warwick translation with plenty of time I came down with the flu which slowed progress on the Nottingham one, though it was finished just in time. All of this was coupled with the fact that I had to prepare introductory talks for both events and help Prof. Laruelle travel from Warwick to Nottingham via the famed British public transportation system (which chose this time to fail me).
Of course, the most important aspects of the days had to do with the ideas and I was very excited to see Laruelle take a number of new directions in his thought. He has always aimed to challenge philosophy with science but this has confrontation has become both more scientifically grounded and more philosophically interesting. He has engaged with quantum physics in a way that elucidates the philosophical conception of immanence, changing out the use of this “fuzzy” word with that of superposition from quantum physics. But he has also cast a new “generic” role for science in order to undercut the philosophy at work in the concepts used by physicists. In his presentation at Nottingham he expanded this to the ethical problem of the separation of mean/ends. This ended with a very interesting discussion of a messianity (as opposed to messianism) completely denuded of any appeal to a transcendent God. I found the discussion fascinating, though I’m still trying to deal with what it all means, especially in an ecological context.
The roundtable discussion went well, thanks to Marjorie Gracieuse of the University of Warwick and Dr. John Marks of Nottingham. It would have been nice if there had been more time to answer questions from the audience and if some of the questions had been phrased more succinctly by members of the panel, but nothing was out of the ordinary. All in all we had about 60 people attend, which is really very impressive for such difficult and unfamiliar material, and there is the possibility of some kind of publication arising out of the events. Prof. Laruelle was incredibly patient and kind to all of us and for me, as someone who has found a certain inspiration in the way he practices this thing called thinking, it was an honor to meet and work so closely with him.
It is little secret that my time at Nottingham has been in many ways disappointing, and some of that was on display here with members of staff talking about me to other students and the usual mafioso secret talks in the hall, but this event felt like something of a turning point for me intellectually. It felt, for a brief moment, like this was all worth it. Thanks to François Laruelle for that reminder of my unalienable humanity.
Audio Files [Coming soon]
Continuum has posted a mock up of a potential cover for Future Christ and given it a release date of October 1st. Very excited to see this project come to fruition.
Can anyone who knows the literature on Levinas well tell me if they are translating altérité as “alterity” or “otherness”? What does everyone prefer anyway? I’ve been leaving it as alterity, but think otherness might be more readable.
I’m nearing the end of the translation and my deadline is fast approaching for Future Christ and I’ve been struck by a certain phrase that is very central for the book. The phrase was the one that first hit me when I read the book two summers ago on a long bus ride from Paris to Nottingham. In French it is l’Homme-en-personne. As Ray Brassier’s project, which he describes as a transcendental nihilism, has been a singular influence on English language reception of Laruelle’s project I at first assumed there was some kind of kenotic element to this phrase. A kind of “Man-as-nobody”, emptying the concept. But this didn’t seem to really fit the tone of the book, which didn’t strike me then as sharing in the nihilistic orientation of Brassier, nor does it now (which isn’t to say that Ray’s work isn’t valuable for understanding Laruelle, it really is). Thus I played around with reading it as “Man-in-anyone”. But I didn’t know if that quite captured it either. I note that others have felt a similar confusion as evidenced by Noëlle Vahanian’s review of the edited volume Théorie-Rébellion [warning PDF], which includes an essay by Laruelle using this concept, translates it both as “man-as-anyone” and “man-as-nobody”. I emailed Laruelle about this question and he explained that he sees the term between the individual and the human race, a kind of species-being or proletariat or “function of humanity” that stands between the universal and the particular without mixing them. He ruled out the “nobody” idea and thought perhaps the “anyone” would work, but didn’t seem to think it was the final word on it. I’ve been translating it as “Man-in-person” but I’m still not sure this is the best way to go about it. I think it holds this radical immanence of the universal and the particular, but I’m not sure that this is so obvious to someone reading it. I thought I’d ask the readers of the blog to tell me what they think. Man-in-anyone or Man-in-person – what feels best when you read it?
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