This panel considers the legacy of the late François Laruelle (1937-2024) for philosophy of religion and theology. Laruelle’s work, which he called ‘non-philosophy’ or ‘non-standard philosophy,’ was from very early on interested in themes, ideas, concepts that are rightly called religious, and the later phases of non-philosophy were increasingly marked by a preponderance of religious and theological materials. The members of this panel argue that Laruelle’s engagement with the religious dimension of human life and thought should be of interest to scholars of religion. The panel consists of three papers and a response, each of which highlights an element of Laruelle’s thought, such as the political-theological overtones of the structure of what Laruelle calls ‘philosophical decision,’ Laruelle’s complex and vexing relation to Derrida and deconstruction, and Laruelle’s peculiar, ethical usage of religious and theological figures like Saint Paul and Saint Sebastian.
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.
This paper takes the measure of Laruelle’s discontent with deconstruction and puts it in conversation with the larger field of religious studies—in part simply to sharpen understanding of Laruelle, but also because so much of religious studies still bears the imprint of postmodern and deconstructive methods. Laruelle’s work asks scholars of religion to confront realities like the inhumanity of critique (the way that it transits in authority and remains complicit in metaphysics) but also the emergence of new alternatives when we take up another stance. What are the risks of a still-deconstructive study of religion? If our task is not to identify the slippages that betray ideology’s unstable footings, or to highlight the incoherent justifications behind religious logics of oppression, what are we to do in their place?
This paper considers a passage from François Laruelle’s Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. In that passage, Laruelle invokes a conflict between, on the one hand, the figure of Saint Paul and the Church, and, on the other hand, the figures of Saint Sebastian and Christ. I argue that Laruelle figures Sebastian and Christ as ‘clones’ of the Victim-in-person. Toward that end, I give an account of Laruelle’s non-philosophical project, especially his theory of the subject (i.e., the clone), with a view toward articulating a method for philosophy of religion. I call this method Sebastianism. Sebastianism is a method or style of thought that—as a non-philosophical project—proceeds strictly according-to-the-Victim, but which is distinctive in that (this is its non-philosophical ‘deviation’) it makes the critique of Christianity the fundamental vocation of philosophers of religion.