José García Hidalgo, Levitation of St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross at the Convento de la Encarnación, late 17c.
I’ve long kept an eccentric morning habit, reading the Daily Office Lectionary followed by some philosophy tome before the distractions of the day begin.
The, often dense and ridiculous, readings have varied over the years and, if I have any regrets, its been that I’ve worked backwards rather than starting with the Greeks. Western philosophy is a long series of dialogs and disagreements. Individual philosophers are contained, like Russian nested dolls, one inside another all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.
The two authors I’ve tackled over the last few months reflect my schizophrenic reading practice: the late literary professor and philosopher Fredric Jameson and history and religious studies professor Carlos Eire. Coherency be damned, I’ve enjoyed this particular contradictory juxtaposition.
Italian School, 18th Century, The Ecstasy of Saint Joseph of Cupertino.
Flying Saints and Witches on Broomsticks
Carlos Eire’s book They Flew: A History of the Impossible is an incendiary look at levitating and bilocating saints, demons and witches. Eire dares to take narratives of the “impossible” seriously. As Eire explains, we have more credible accounts of, say, Theresa of Avila’s and Joseph of Cupertino’s many moments of ecstatic flying than we have of well accepted moments of European political history.
Personally, I had always taken a cop-out attitude towards such paranormal phenomenon, thinking that it’s not important if these miraculous events were “real,” that what really matters is what they mean in the context of history. Towards the end of the book, Eire quotes religious scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal’s irritation with this stance,
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard an otherwise admired colleague say something like, “Well, it does not really matter if Joseph of Cupertino flew up into the tree after a scream, or if Teresa of Avila floated off the floor as her sisters piled on top of her to avoid a social embarrassment.
What matters is how the popular belief in such presumed levitations was disciplined, controlled, and maintained by the church and later constructed as sanctity and as a saint…. Really? I want to pull my hair out in such moments…. A super-pious Italian man ecstatically flies into a tree and has to be retrieved with a ladder, or a raptured Spanish nun cannot keep herself on the floor in front of some visiting noblewomen, and these physical events do not matter to you? Uh, excuse me, if either of those things actually happened (and our historical records suggest strongly that they did), such anomalous events change pretty much everything we thought we knew about human consciousness and its relationship to physics, gravity, and material reality. Either single event would fundamentally change our entire order of knowledge. And you don’t care? Don’t you find that disinterest just a little bit perverse?
Inside of many of us, particularly a certain class of over-educated folks who live in big cities–I’m including myself here–is an inner, literal and very annoying Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I’ll be blunt. I no longer want to inhabit Neil’s disenchanted world. It’s flat, boring and meaningless. Call me a crank–I don’t care anymore–I want to stay open to the possibility of the impossible. Let’s fly again.
If this book floats your boat you’ll enjoy my favorite podcast Weird Studies which turned me on to Eire’s work.
I kind of wish this was real and not just a meme.
Theory Bound
As an example of just how disjointed my morning reading can be, I also just finished Fredric Jameson’s book The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a transcription of a lecture series delivered via Zoom during the pandemic.
Jameson in lecture mode is easier to read than his normal and, very dense, academic prose. In the lectures he gives you the historical context for a chain of post WWII French thinkers from Sartre to Latour. Jameson knew many of these people personally, and the lectures have an often funny, gossipy tone.
If, like me, you went to grad school in the 80s or 90s you likely got a dose of French postmodern theory. If also, like me, you studied music, or art or literature you likely got that theory secondhand, from a well meaning professor who perhaps lacked the philosophical chops to give the contextualization for theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. Jameson’s book corrects a lot of misconceptions I had about this period. Jameson has the background to engage with and explain their thinking. Let me also note here that most of the critics of postmodern theory haven’t bothered to actually read it (I’m looking at you Jordan Peterson). Admittedly it ain’t beach reading but that’s not a bug it’s a feature.
It’s true that some of these French thinker-dudes ran their conceptual ships ashore on the rocks of extreme skepticism and dense prose. In so doing they inadvertently created an anti-metanarrative-metanarraive of avoidance and rhetorical vagueness. That said, we live in a media landscape they anticipated and this is, perhaps, their most enduring legacy, despite the fact that most of them died at the advent of personal computers.
I recently stumbled on an Instagram rise and grind influencer who explained, without knowing it, Baudrillard’s version of sign theory. To overly simplify, the Mercedes logo doesn’t refer to a car, it refers to things like “luxury” and “freedom”. This influencer knows sign theory intuitively, uses it to make money and even authored a book that’s kind of what would happen if Jean Baudrillard wrote a version of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think this demonstrates why it’s helpful to have some postmodern theory in your understandin’ toolkit to navigate the moment we all find ourselves in.
If you’re a theory-head you’ll love Gilles Delueze riffing on topics in alphabetical order for six whole hours (!). Someone has thoughtfully uploaded a subtitled version to Archive.org. It’s hard to believe, in our idiotic present, that this kind of content used to be on mainstream television. Lest you think this is just a French thing I’ll point out that, when philosopher Henri Bergson came to New York to do a guest lecture in 1913, he caused the first ever traffic jam on Broadway(1). If you’ve only got an hour and a half of theory-time, there’s also a great documentary about Derrida on Kanopy.
