Joshua Ramey - Böcker

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the neoliberal ideas that arguably caused the damage have been triumphant in presenting themselves as the only possible solution for it. How can we account for the persistence of neoliberal hegemony, in spite of its obviously disastrous effects upon labor, capital, ecology, and society? The argument pursued in this book is that part of the persistence of neoliberalism has to do with the archaic and obscure political theology upon which of much of its discourse trades. This is a political theology of chance that both underwrites and obscures sacrificial devotion to market outcomes. Joshua Ramey structures this political theology around hidden homologies between modern markets, as non-rational randomizing ‘meta-information processors’, and archaic divination tools, which are used in public acts of tradition-bound attempts to interpret the deliverances of chance. Ramey argues that only by recognizing the persistently sacred character of chance within putatively secularized discourses of risk and randomness can the investments of neoliberal power be exposed at their sacred source, and an alternative political theology be constructed.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the neoliberal ideas that arguably caused the damage have been triumphant in presenting themselves as the only possible solution for it. How can we account for the persistence of neoliberal hegemony, in spite of its obviously disastrous effects upon labor, capital, ecology, and society? The argument pursued in this book is that part of the persistence of neoliberalism has to do with the archaic and obscure political theology upon which of much of its discourse trades. This is a political theology of chance that both underwrites and obscures sacrificial devotion to market outcomes. Joshua Ramey structures this political theology around hidden homologies between modern markets, as non-rational randomizing ‘meta-information processors’, and archaic divination tools, which are used in public acts of tradition-bound attempts to interpret the deliverances of chance. Ramey argues that only by recognizing the persistently sacred character of chance within putatively secularized discourses of risk and randomness can the investments of neoliberal power be exposed at their sacred source, and an alternative political theology be constructed.

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.