A Biography of Ordinary Man: Of Authorities and Minorities

A Biography of Ordinary Man 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 earliest systematic elaborations of his ethical and “non-philosophical” thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, 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 the many students and scholars interested in Continental Philosophy and in the development of Laruelle’s thought, as well as to students and scholars in the philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics and cultural theory.