François Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. 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. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world.

The book is a reading of numerous contemporary continental philosophers (Badiou, Deleuze and Guattari, Laruelle and Derrida amongst others) and bringing them into conversation with each other around various ethical and political challenges of living in capitalist worlds. What can contemporary continental philosophy offer with regards to the questions of decolonial thinking, the challenges of identity politics, the formation of political identities in response to the dominant norms in the context of the struggles of victims of these norms?

Living in global villages where different world-views and cultures daily traverse each other, and the hegemonic power of the West is being challenged by other powerful role-players, numerous political and ethical challenges emerge. This traversing of narratives is interpreted and developed into a trans-fictional praxis, as a praxis that takes this global experience seriously. The book also acknowledges the role of Christianity in the construction of global villages and therefore seeks a Christ-poiēsis as a way for non-colonial spaces to emerge from the shadows of these villages.

The latest development concerning the metaphorical use of the fairy tale is the legal perspective. The law had and has recourse to fairy tales in order to speak of the nomos and its subversion, of the politically correct and of the various means that have been used to enforce the law. Fairy tales are a fundamental tool to examine legal procedures and structures in their many failings and errors. Therefore, we have privileged the term "fables" of the law just to stress the ethical perspective: they are moral parables that often speak of justice miscarried and justice sought. Law and jurists are creators of "fables" on the view that law is born out of the facts (ex facto ius oritur) so that there is a need for narrative coherence both on the level of the case and the level of legislation (or turned the other way around: what does it mean if no such coherence is found?). This is especially of interest given the influx of all kinds of new technologies that are "fabulous" in themselves and hard to incorporate in traditional doctrinal schemes and thus in the construction of a new reality.

François Laruelles non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy represents a bold attempt to rethink how philosophy is practiced in relation to other domains of knowledge. There is a growing interest in Laruelles work in the English-speaking world, but his work is often misunderstood as a wholesale critique of philosophy. In this book Anthony Paul Smith dispels this misunderstanding and shows how Laruelles critique of philosophy is guided by the positive aim of understanding philosophys structure so that it can be creatively recast with other discourses and domains of human knowledge, from politics and ethics to science and religion. This book provides a synthetic introduction to the whole of Laruelles work. It begins by discussing the major concepts and methods that have framed non-philosophy for thirty years. Smith then goes on to show how those concepts and method enter into traditional philosophical domains and disempower the authoritarian framework that philosophy imposes upon them. Instead of offering a philosophy of politics or a philosophy of science, Laruelle aims at fostering a democracy of thought where philosophy is thought together and equal to the object of its inquiry. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy, and anyone who wants to discover more about one of its foremost practitioners.

This special issue of Labyrinth is the second part of a diptych dedicated to the eminent French philosopher François Laruelle in honor of his 80th Anniversary. The included essays deal with the Origins of Laruelle's Non-Philosophy in Ravaisson's Understanding of Metaphysics, the question of Religious Pluralism, the non-philosophical mystique and the rehabilitation of heresis, the analogies and differences of Laruelle's non philosophy to Iamblichus or Martin Heidegger. The contributors to this issue are Vincent Le, John M. Allison, Eleni Lorandou, Stanimir Panayotov, Ameen Mettawa, David Bremner, and Yvanka B. Raynova.