on Generic Humanity, Civil Eschatology & the end of Philosophical politics
by Spyridon St. Kogkas
Abstract: This article constructs a non-philosophical account of democracy at the limit of representation, power, and temporal narrative. Engaging François Laruelle’s concepts of the One, the human-in-the-last-instance, and the generic, it develops the notion of a democracy of the unnameable, a civil eschatology without a time utopia, power, or decision. This democracy is not founded, declared, or presented; it is lived. It does not emerge from futurity or identity, but from the radical immanence of the human. The unnameable is not ineffable, it is that which is foreclosed to capture, to mastery, to the World. In Laruellean terms, this is not a new theory of democracy, but a stance-of-thought from within the Real, an a priori equality without representation.
“What I mean is, even if the memories disappear from the island, they’ll still be safe in his heart. They won’t ever be lost.” Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, Pantheon, 2019
Introduction: Beyond Representation, Beyond the Future
We inhabit a time when democracy has become overcoded by its own representations. The term circulates in declarations, global summits, academic discourses, and activist manifestos, yet it increasingly refers to a paradox: a name so saturated that it conceals the absence of the thing itself. The term ‘democracy’ today appears more as a spectral form than a lived condition, one deferred to the future, projected onto events, and conjured as a horizon of hope or catastrophe. But what if this deferral, this perpetual futurity, is precisely what forecloses a genuine experience of democratic life? The following thinking departs from the premise that democracy has been too long confined to the onto-political structures of Western thought. What remains under-examined is the possibility of democracy as a lived immanence: a thought, a stance, a force prior to representation.
This is where François Laruelle’s non-philosophy enters, offering not a corrective to democratic theory, but a subtraction from its very conditions of possibility. In Laruelle’s schema, thought does not grasp the Real; it lives from it unilaterally. Democracy, then, cannot be posited, legislated, or decided upon. It can only be lived as a generic condition, without predicate. Laruelle offers the provocation that democracy, in its most radical form, is not a system or procedure, but a “democracy of thought” rooted in the One. This democracy is non-declarative, non-teleological, and non-subjective. In it, the human does not act as a modern citizen, revolutionary, or bearer of rights, but as what he calls the “human-in-the-last-instance.” We will argue that this form of democracy is best understood through the logic of civil eschatology: a mode of inhabiting the end of time without apocalypse, without salvation, and without deferral. In place of philosophy’s decision and theology’s redemption, Laruelle introduces a form of lived sufficiency, where the generic human is neither subject nor agent, but a stranger to all political syntax.
The Philosophical Capture of Politics
To understand Laruelle’s departure from traditional political theory, we must first examine what he calls the “decisional structure” of philosophy. For Laruelle, philosophy’s inaugural gesture is not contemplation but splitting. The world is divided between the knower and the known, between subject and object, between the Real and its representation. This gesture of “decision” is not merely methodological; it constitutes the authority of thought over life. Philosophy declares itself sufficient to name and totalize the world. Political theory, inherited from this decisional gesture, proceeds through similar operations. Whether in liberalism, Marxism, or radical democracy, the political subject is always constituted: recognized, formed, counted. The structure of power is thereby reproduced even in its attempts to emancipate.
For instance, Badiou’s militant subject, Rancière’s part-of-no-part, and Agamben’s bare life all depend on a foundational act of ontological sorting. In contrast, Laruelle introduces a non-standard ontology where the Real is not split but immanent. There is no exterior vantage point from which to grasp it. Rather than seek representation, Laruelle suggests we suspend the philosophical claim to knowledge and instead live from the Real. He calls this unilateral duality: the subject is determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real, but cannot determine it in return. Political philosophy, then, becomes a form of capture. To name the demos, to define the people, is already to exclude. To assert the sovereignty of the subject is to reinforce the structure of domination. What Laruelle offers is not a new politics but a subtractive stance: a thought that refrains from deciding the Real, and in doing so, opens a space for the democracy of the generic.
The Unnameable and the Generic
The unnameable in Laruelle’s lexicon does not indicate a limit of language, nor an ineffable absolute. It names a non-positional immanence, a refusal to be captured by philosophical syntax. Unlike Levinas’s transcendence or Derrida’s aporia, the unnameable is not an excess of meaning but a foreclosure of structure. It is the Real itself: immanent, indifferent, unrepresentable. Here Laruelle introduces the concept of the generic. Unlike the universal, which abstracts by inclusion, the generic includes by indifference. It does not gather under a concept but subtracts from all predicates. The generic human is not a type; it is the human-without-type, the human-in-person, foreclosed to categorization. This is not a political subject; it is a lived instance of the One. Comparison helps clarify this. Badiou’s evental subject emerges in fidelity to an event that disrupts the state of the situation. But this fidelity still depends on truth procedures and ontological legibility.
Laruelle’s generic does not emerge; it is always already lived. Similarly, Rancière’s political subject is the one who disrupts the polis order, making visible a wrong. But visibility remains trapped in the logic of representation. The unnameable is not made visible; it remains lived in radical immanence. This poses a challenge to any democratic theory premised on inclusion, recognition, or even rupture. What Laruelle offers is not a new name for the people, but a lived equality that has no need of names. The generic is not a collective identity but a subtraction from all identity. Democracy, in this light, is not a regime to be instituted, but a stance to be inhabited. Laruelle’s non-philosophical methodology reinterpret Malevich’s Black Square extracting from it a model of thought freed from the sufficiency of philosophy.
What interests Laruelle in Malevich is not abstraction as style, but subtraction as method: the Black Square enacts a unilateral gesture that suspends the world of representation and installs in its place a generic plane, a clone of vision that does not claim to signify or to reveal. Laruelle would treat this square not as a symbol, but as a “fictional matrix” of the Real, a surface that resists authority, commentary, and spectacle, just as the Real resists the World’s auto-legitimation. In this sense, Malevich provides a non-philosophical material, a lived practice of vision-without-relation, which Laruelle can use as a heuristic for his own project: to think without capture, to philosophize through opacity, foreclosure, and radical immanence. Thus, Malevich’s work prefigures a democracy of the invisible, a radical equality of perception where no object or form is privileged, and where the canvas becomes a sacral plane of immanence,not to be filled, but to be inhabited as the last instance of painting.
Generic Humanity as Civil Eschatology
So, let’s ask what kind of temporality belongs to this unnameable democracy? Here we must introduce the concept of civil eschatology. Eschatology traditionally refers to the end of time, the final judgment, the telos of history. In both religious and Marxist traditions, it marks a moment of rupture: apocalypse, revolution, salvation. But in Laruelle, the end of time is not an event. It is a condition. Laruelle’s notion of eschatology marks a decisive break with the theological turns of his contemporaries such as Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry. Where Marion explores phenomenality as donation and Henry explores auto-affection as the core of the divine Life, Laruelle’s eschatology is stripped of transcendence and verticality. It is not the encounter with an invisible God, nor the saturation of intentionality by givenness. Instead, Laruelle posits a flattened eschatology: an immanent exhaustion of the World without climax, a deactivation of its power-logic through the lived stance of the generic human.
He converts eschatology from a theological or philosophical category into a non-decisional lived sufficiency of the Strangers of the Real. In this way, Laruelle constructs a kind of non-philosophical personalism. But unlike theological personalism, which often centers the dignity or uniqueness of the person in relation to God or transcendental reason, Laruelle’s human-in-the-last-instance is defined not by essence but by insistence. The human is no longer the subject of rights or recognition, but the stranger-subject, opaque to any Worldly evaluation. This opacity re-sacralizes the dimension of Non-Being, not as lack or negativity, but as the unnameable substrate of generic life. Here, Non-Being is no longer the opposite of Being, but its non-oppositional companion, lived without transcendence but in the instant transcendental realism of the last instance .
This can be seen as a radical revision of the Parmenidean axiom that “Being is and non-Being is not”. Laruelle, in fragments such as his “Axioms for Parmenides”, retools this logic by proposing a unilateral duality in which Non-Being, as the Real’s immanence, is lived but not decidable. Thus, democracy is not founded upon a metaphysics of Being, as in Castoriadis’s project of self-institution from the abyss, but rather on the generic foreclosure of foundation itself. If Castoriadis sought to ground democracy on the abyssal creativity of the imaginary, Laruelle subtracts even the abyss, leaving a democracy that insists without world, without ground, without spectacle. This has consequences for the political image of democracy. It is not a community of expressive individuals or even a society of equals, but a de-spectacularized collective.
Laruelle’s thought inherits, transforms, and ultimately subtracts from the legacy of Situationism. In contrast to Debord’s spectacle, and close to Situationist self-substractive practise, Laruelle is thinking a lived experience non mediated and non commodified, Laruelle offers a democracy that is post-spectacular: not a spectacle to resist or overthrow, but a World to be suspended through unilateral immanence. The anti-spectacular collective is not one that exposes the illusion, but one that lives without capture. It does not aim to replace the spectacle with truth, but to inhabit the radical sufficiency of generic life. It refuses visibility not as withdrawal, but as insistence-without-display. In this way, the generic human is not the citizen of a new polis, but a solitary equality whose presence subtracts from representation without demanding substitution.
Here i bring in mind the “Memory Police” novel of Yoko Ogawa, a narrative on the disappearance as a generic condition for resist and enfolded in Memory in order to keep the World’s agents away. Rather than rural or insurgent instantiations, we might see this form of lived immanence emerge in urban micro-practices of refusal and informal solidarity: anonymous mutual aid networks that bypass institutional legitimacy; collectives that provide food, shelter, or care without identity, without mission statements, without claims to visibility. Spaces such as autonomous social networks, urban commons, or civil infrastructures in cities like Athens, Naples, or Buenos Aires operate outside spectacle.The whole ocean of third sector organisms all around the planet who practice democracy in everyday life distanced from the State and Market.
These are not heroic or spectacular acts, they are ordinary resistances, indifferent to recognition, invisible to governance, and sustained by shared opacity. They do not name themselves as democratic; they simply persist as lived equality. Civil eschatology, then, is the lived suspension of teleology. It does not anticipate redemption. It does not await a new order. It does not project a future. It is a flattened temporality in which each human is already the last instance of humanity. No subject remains to inherit history. No collective awaits to arrive. This radically alters the stakes of political action.Democracy is no longer a horizon to be reached but a sufficiency already lived. We do not act to bring about democracy; we live it without condition. The generic human is not emancipated by politics, but foreclosed to its capture. This is a democracy without project, without end.
Democracy Without World: Non-Subjective Politics
It is obvious that here are generated implications for political practice. Implications really profound. A non-subjective democracy does not organize, represent, or legislate. It does not appeal to institutions or deploy critique. It lives from the One, without mediation. This does not mean withdrawal from struggle but a reorientation of thought. The question is no longer how to construct a just society, but how to live as the generic human within unjust worlds. Non-philosophy does not demand fidelity to truth, participation in deliberation, or confrontation with power. It demands subtraction. To subtract is not to negate. It is to live otherwise. The generic human is opaque to surveillance, indifferent to recognition, immune to identity. It resists not by opposition but by invisibility. It is the stranger who does not belong, yet insists. It is the equality that needs no justification. This is the democracy of the unnameable: lived by all, declared by none. It is not a politics of relation but of solitary equality. There is no people, no multitude, no vanguard. There is only the human-in-person, lived in the last instance, indifferent to every name. And here i would say that what really matters is the truth of being constantly a Nonbeing for this world.
Conclusion
I have attempted here not to construct a new theory of democracy, but to think its immanent foreclosure. In Laruellean terms, democracy is not a regime to be demanded, but a stance that persists after the World has withdrawn. This is what we call civil eschatology: not the end of history, but the end of decision, the end of naming in the field of non domination coexistence of humans- in the last instance. It is the lived immanence of the generic, the democracy that cannot be represented because it was never absent and never present. The last humanity is not tragic. It is sufficient out of the world. It does not seek a future; it lives in the last instance. It does not speak for the people; it lives the Real. This is the democracy of the unnameable.
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