Video of the conference held tonight with Mens ex Machina and Psy * Co * Re with the participation of Erik Davies.
Fantastic literature, provided that all literature in its totality does not aspire to the fantastic, is a grandiose secular ceremony, a silent rite that favors the encounter with the radically other (what for Rudolf Otto is an area of โโrelevance to religion), a vehicle of radical estrangement, the way and method of the paradoxical, of a different psychic logic (and not reducible to discursive logic) which can break into the daily prison like a mysterious breach in the wall of our beliefs. The fantastic is a psychedelic that opens up to extraordinary experiences starting from a small element out of place, something wrong (as in Time out of Joint by PK Dick) or by means of a violent rupture of the worldly plan (such as that caused by the inhalation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror).
Curated byย Simone Capozzi, an online conversation with:
- Erik Davis: American writer and cultural critic, his analyzes focus on media, spirituality and psychedelics. His latest published book isย High Weirdness. Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventiesย (MIT press, 2019).
- Marco Maculotti: writer and essayist, founder and editor of the online magazine ยซAXIS mundiยป. Author ofย several contributions on Arthur Machen and the veinย Weird/ fantastic in books and specialized magazinesย and an upcoming monographic essay on the first season of the TV seriesย Tย (Carcosa unveiled. Notes for an esoteric reading of True Detective, Mimesis, 2021).