Kristeva's Thérèse: Mysticism and Modernism

Women and Psychiatric Modernism

he therapies of Rivers and Yealland represented the two modes of English psychiatric modernism which would affect women both inside and outside the asylum from the 1920s to the 1960s: psychoanalysis, which offered the twentieth century's most influential theory of femininity and female sexuality; and traditional medical psychiatry, which made rapid advances in scientific knowledge and technolog...

Drugs and Mysticism

The claim has been made that the experience facilitated by psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, can be similar or identical to the experience described by the mystics of all ages, cultures, and religions. This paper will attempt to examine and explain this possibility. There is a long and continuing history of the religious use of plants that contain psychedelic substances...

Modernism and Nation Building

Mathematics and mysticism.

Is there a world of mathematics above and beyond ordinary reality, as Plato proposed? Or is mathematics a cultural construct? In this short article we speculate on the place of mathematical reality from the perspective of the mystical cosmologies of the ancient traditions of meditation, psychedelics, and divination.

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

(NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongsid...