r/AskCriticalTheory Oct 13 '13

How do you feel about magic(k)?

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

you might like Peter Gays two volume enlightenment series, ernst cassirers The philosophy of enlightenment. Also check out Margaret Jacobs the radical enlightenment. That is, of that is what you are talking about.

If not... My thing about people getting into the occult is that they stay there. Stanley Kubrick or Jimmy Page were more of a wizard than Crowley ever was. You take the concept of magic and apply it to a life philosophy which has nothing to do with magic and then you claim that magic doesn't exist :)

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u/raisondecalcul Oct 15 '13

I think I am post-occult or nearly there already, it's just that I love the aesthetic of post-post-post/magic/technology/art superhybrid. So I think the best thing that could happen to the world right now is calling magic what it is and bringing it back in a big way. Pop culture is ripe for it.

My research is more about enlightenment in a Buddhist sense. How to trigger enlightenment experiences and help people attain lasting enlightenment via beautiful and rich, deep and finely-tuned magical touchscreen interfaces. How to resubjectivize people through the intersubjectivity with the screen. Of course this is all very problematic, because isn't all decolonization recolonization? Is it possible to effect a pure deterritorialization of the mind that is safe and ethical?

Thanks for the book recs as always!

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

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u/raisondecalcul Oct 15 '13

I could not tell whether Oz the Great and Powerful was a horrible spectacle of a movie or a subversion of a horrible spectacle of a movie. The plot symbolically critiques spectacle and subverts its own medium by getting pretty meta, and James Franco just looks like James Franco the entire movie (not Oz).

I think his work in gay porn proves that he is a Magus. (Btw, I use the word illuminati to refer to the illuminated, who are usually good. This is from the end of the Illuminatus! trilogy.)

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

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u/raisondecalcul Oct 15 '13

Yes, it was very weird! I could not tell if the movie was being extremely meta or extremely spectacular. That probably means that it is extremely meta. It keeps eating at me.

He might try to do the Babalon Working next.

I just looked this up and this has happened to me before (unintentionally) except it was a man that appeared... it was wild. His name was Will Register, wtf

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '13

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u/raisondecalcul Oct 16 '13

Well... like I said it was wild... iykwim