J. K. Birksted: Le Corbusier and the Occult (2009)

When Charles-Édouard Jeanneret reinvented himself as Le Corbusier in Paris, he also carefully reinvented the first thirty years of his life by highlighting some events and hiding others. As he explained in a letter: “Le Corbusier is a pseudonym. Le Corbusier creates architecture recklessly. He pursues disinterested ideas; he does not wish to compromise himself…. He is an entity free of the burdens of carnality.”

Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as “one unified watchmaking industry.” Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L’Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as “my guide, my choice” and as his “time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism.”

Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J. K. Birksted’s Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier’s brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives. Le Corbusier and the Occult thus answers the conundrum set by Reyner Banham (Birksted’s predecessor at the Bartlett School of Architecture) who, fifty years ago, wrote that Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture “was to prove to be one of the most influential, widely read and least understood of all the architectural writings of the twentieth century.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262026481, 9780262026482
416 pages

review (Flora Samuel, Times Higher Education)
review (James Rossant, Hyperion)
interview with the author (Rorotoko)

publisher
google books

PDF

Eugene Thacker: In the Dust of This Planet (2011)

The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre.

In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place.

Publisher Zero Books, Winchester, UK / Washington, USA, 2011
Horror of Philosophy vol. 1
ISBN 184694676X, 9781846946769
179 pages

author (Occultural studies blog at Metamute.org)

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-25)

Lynn Thorndike: A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vols. 1-2 (1923)

Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, in 8 volumes, is the premier reference work for the history of magic in the West. The first 2 volumes cover late antiquity through the 13th century. These are strong volumes, copiously researched and well-indexed, and a major source for work on the period.

The aim of the complette set is to treat the history of magic and experimental science and their relations to Christian thought down to the Seventeenth Century. The first two volumes deal with the first thirteen centuries of our era, with special emphasis upon the 12th and 13th centuries. Magic is understood under the broadest sense of the work, as including all occult arts and sciences, superstitions and folklore. The author believes that magic and experimental science have been connected in their development, and within these pages will attempt to prove the same.

Publisher Columbia University Press, 1923
ISBN 0231087942, 9780231087940 (Vol 1); 0231087950, 9780231087957 (Vol 2)
888 pages (Vol 1), 1054 pages (Vol 2)

PDF, More formats (Vol 1)
PDF, More formats (Vol 2)