The Philosopher’s Two Bodies: Laruelle and Political Theology

According to François Laruelle, philosophy and religion are haunted by a structure of decision–one that bears no small resemblance to the one invoked by the infamous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. This paper offers a reading of Laruelle’s invitation to indecision, one intended to distinguish it from a number of more familiar political-theological tropes. In an important sense, Laruelle insists that the human has never really been captured by the decisional pretense of philosophy or religion; as a result, the human has no real need to be emancipated from it. The meaning of this non-emancipatory posture, the paper argues, can be clarified by way of an analogy to the difference between two political theologians whose criticisms of Schmitt have been habitually confused for one another’s: Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz.