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This book reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as “the real,” “the one,” “the limit,” and “finality,” thus critically repositioning poststructuralist feminist philosophy and gender/queer studies. It follows François Laruelle's nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti. It argues that poststructuralist (feminist) theory sees the subject as a purely linguistic category, as multiple, nonfixed, and fluctuating, as something for limitless discursivity and as constitutively detached from the instance of the real. It goes on to argue that this re-conceptualization is based on the exclusion of and dichotomous opposition to notions of the real, the one (unity and continuity) and the stable. It makes the case that the non-philosophical reading of postructuralist philosophy engenders new forms of universalisms for global debate and action, and that these can be expressed in a language the world can understand. It also liberates theory from ideological paralysis, recasting the real as an immediately experienced human condition determined by gender, race, and social and economic circumstances.

François Laruelle proposes a theory of identity rooted in scientific notions of symmetry and chaos, emancipating thought from the philosophical paradigm of Being and reconnecting it with the real world. Unlike most contemporary philosophers, Laruelle does not believe language, history, and the world shape identity but that identity determines our relation to these phenomena. Both critical and constructivist, Theory of Identities finds fault with contemporary philosophy’s reductive relation to science and its attachment to notions of singularity, difference, and multiplicity, which extends this crude approach. Laruelle’s new theory of science, its objects, and philosophy, introduces an original vocabulary to elaborate the concepts of determination, fractality, and artificial philosophy, among other ideas, grounded in an understanding of the renewal of identity. Laruelle’s work repairs the rift between philosophical and scientific inquiry and rehabilitates the concept of identity that continental philosophers have widely criticized. His argument positions him clearly against Deleuze, Badiou, the new materialists, and other thinkers who stray too far from empirical approaches that might revitalize philosophy’s practical applications.

This book targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and explores the radical potential of Christ, whose “crossing” disrupts their circular discourse. It is built upon the idea of “nonphilosophy,” or “nonstandard philosophy.” This is a way of thinking that goes past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations among religion, science, politics, and art. The book describes a Christ who is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles or the Catholic Church. Instead He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. The book inserts quantum science into religion and recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so that equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, the book is a heretical experiment that ties religion tightly to the human experience and the lived world.