Ebook: A Biography of Ordinary Man: Of Authorities and Minorities

Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Translatorsâ#x80;#x99; Introduction; Foreword; INTRODUCTION: A Rigorous Science of Man; 1 From the Sciences of Man to the Science of People; 2 Man as Finite or Ordinary Individual; 3 From Philosophy to Theory: The Science of Ordinary Man; 4 The Scientific and Positive Meaning of Transcendental Naiveté; 5 Towards a Critique of (Political, etc.) Reason; CHAPTER I: Who Are Minorities?; 6 The Two Sources of Minoritarian Thought; 7 How to Think Individuals?; 8 Theory of Uni-laterality; 9 The Essence of the One or of the Finite Subject; 10 Minorities and Authorities.;This book is a foundational text for our understanding of Francois 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.