ABSTRACT
Recognition of Francois Laruelle’s work in the Anglophone world has come late in his career through an association made with “speculative Realism” owing to Ray Brassier’s early translations and use of Laruelle in his 2007 Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. In Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, Laruelle develops a general non-philosophy of messianism that will lead him to his conception of messianity. Laruelle’s reading of gnosis is a kind of bringing together or, more accurately, a unified theory of epistemology and ethics. The World, which Laruelle nearly always capitalizes, is another concept partially drawn from religious discourses and names that complex of sufficiency and authoritarianism that oppresses human beings. Yet, over the entire course of Laruelle’s career religious and theological themes have been at play in important ways. Laruelle’s method allows for the recognition of alterity as actual alterity, but insufficient or in-the-last-instance dependent upon the Human-in-Human.
