Solitude is at the heart of Mary Magdalene's existence, as the disciple of Christ devotes the last thirty years of her life to a hermitic retreat. While tradition associates these three decades with either a long expiation or a serie of mystical experiences, we can observe, among several contemporary French novelists, a clear questioning of this ancient interpretation of Magdalene’s solitude....
In this article, I employ methods inspired by the spectral turn and trauma studies to discuss post-memorial fictions that use the figure of the dybbuk. The theme of possession of a living person by the spirit of the dead – the dybbuk, present in Jewish mysticism as a substantial contagion – when recontextualized in 21st-century fiction, intersects with empathy as an emotional contagion. In...
Apophatism and Non-duality in the Vedanta and in Ad Reinhardt's work The Ultimate Paintings, a series of abstractions made by Ad Reinhardt during the 1960s, are coupled with writings with obvious affinities to the apophatic formulas of the commentaries of the Upanishads (the philosophical conclusions of the Vedas) known as the “nondual Vedānta” (Advaita Vedānta). The abstractions themselves...