Abstract The concept of the “supernormal” is introduced as a means to exit from a substantive duality between natural and supernatural, or between the normal and the paranormal, by thinking in terms of differences of degree rather than of kind, of (heterogeneous) continuities: extracting the supernatural by natural means. It is opposed to the hyperbolic stance that views the supernatural in...
Abstract This essay connects the mystical concept of “supernothing” with Bergson’s notion of the image of nothingness as a movement in the making. I do this also with respect to the film The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020) – which explicitly cites Gorgias’s four-part embargo on nothing (it exists, it cannot be known, communicated, or understood): nothingness is re-rendered as movement, in...
Abstract This section asks whether such an alliance between philosophy and mysticism is plausible. It begins by looking at the philosophical tendency to demarcate what is knowledge and what is (mystical) nonsense as a peculiar form of “view from nowhere”—a self-imposed exile that makes philosophy ghostly, a part of the whole that wishes to think (of itself as) the whole, a de-parted part. This...