Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural institutions, what seems to be needed is an affirmation of the human potential to truck with non-human or even inhuman forces and intentions, at scales of speed, slowness, or intensity that break with consensual conceptions of human limitations. The essays in this volume outline patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix from a position that takes quite seriously possible relations with the absolute, however enigmatic, that modernity has denied and postmodernity has obscured in the name of academic skepticism and humanist reservations. Beyond post-modernist pastiche and post-secular nostalgia, these essays explore the potencies of archaic spiritual disciplines as well as the passions driving the mystical, heretical, and Gnostic intimations riddling contemporary relations with the absolute.
Introduction, Joshua Ramey and Matthew Haar Farris / Part I: Speculations (I): Futures of the Absolute / 1. First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics Daniel Whistler / 2. Sorcery, Thought, and the 'Ghosts of Departed Quantities Matt Lee / 3. Mark Mason & Michael O'Rourke, Meillassoux's Messianicity Mark Mason & Michael O'Rourke / 4. A Broken Line: Lucretian Lineage in Logic of Sense" Jessie Hock / Part II Speculations (II): Visionary Conditions / 5. The Nebular Experience: Towards a Politics of Perception Juan Salzano / 6. Spectral Bodies of Evidence Erin Yerby / 7. The Inner Flesh: Michel Henry's Mystic Phenomenology Erik Davis / 8. Some Admittedly Bold Interdisciplinary 'Participatory Turn' Hypotheses for Scholarly Collaboration with the Divine Matthew Haar Farris / 9. The gods are dead. Long live the gods. Kierkegaard, Chaos, and Hermes Steven Shakespeare Part III. Heresy: Experiments / 10. More Than Human Sam Webster / 11. Red, White, and Pig: On Sexmagic, Christ, & Chthonic America Clark Roth / 12. Genericity, Convexity: Instructions Rocco Gangle / 13. Life in the Absolute': 20 Secular Philosophical Spiritual Exercises Jason Smick / 14., The Undulating Unknown Na Khar Eliff-ce Part IV. Gnosis: Creatures of Saying and Unsaying / 15. Wishbone: Animals, Absolutes, and the Connective Distinction Beatrice Marovich / 16. Unpossessed Knowledge Daniel Colucciello Barber / 17. Humiliated in Language: On Taquiyya and Translation Anthony Paul Smith / 18. Freeing Immanence from the Grip of Philosophy: On Univocity and Experimentalism in Meister Eckhart Alex Dubilet / 19. / Cosmic Pessimism Eugene Thacker / 20. Absolute Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation Nicola Masciandaro Notes on Contributors
