Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'

Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'

Author: SpectreVision Radio January 8, 2020 Duration: 1:19:35
At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult. REFERENCES Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History Rick and Morty, American sitcom Colin, Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose Colin Wilson, The Outsider Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living? Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters Emil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection Joe Frazier, American pugilist Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory Edouard Schuré, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table" Thomas Merton, American monk Gary Snyder, American poet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of Weird Studies, a podcast from SpectreVision Radio, you’ll find long-form conversations between Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel. Their discussions aren’t simple reviews or straightforward analyses; instead, they wander through the tangled undergrowth where art and philosophy meet, giving generous time to concepts that resist easy understanding and to creative works that fracture our ordinary sense of the world. This podcast deliberately lingers in that ambiguous space, treating the “weird” not as a genre but as a particular mode of experience-one that reveals the cracks in what we comfortably assume is real. Each episode feels like joining a deep, meandering dialogue between two friends who are both deeply knowledgeable and endlessly curious, covering a vast terrain that includes literature, film, music, and esoteric thought. It’s a show for anyone who suspects that the most profound truths are often found in the shadows, the anomalies, and the strangely beautiful. As part of the SpectreVision Radio network, which specializes in content that explores the uncanny edges of creativity, Weird Studies builds a unique community of listeners who are eager to think differently. You won’t find pat answers here, but you will encounter compelling questions and a shared sense of exploration that makes each installment a distinctive journey.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 230

Weird Studies
Podcast Episodes
Episode 176: On Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' and the Medium of Comics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

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Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' com…
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Episode 173: By Heart: On Memory, Poetry, and Form [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

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In this computerized age, we tend to see memory as a purely cerebral faculty. To memorize is to store information away in the brain in such a way as to make it retrievable at a later time. But the old expression "knowing…
Episode 172: Head Over Heels: On the Hanged Man of the Tarot [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:20:27
The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he gazes back at us with…
Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:09:28
This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taki…