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The Otherworlds Review
Originally published as a monthly column on It's Going Down from 2017 to 2018, The Otherworlds Review is a bricolage of dispatches from the end times, spiritual techniques, and ways of seeing, assembled each lunar month for the benefit of discerning necromancers and starry-eyed insurgents the world over, collected here in pocketbook form.
The collection includes all seven issues (Introduction, Ghosts, Masks, Snakes, Calendars, Always Coming Home, and Spiritual Anarchism), new retrospective afterwords, and reader-submitted appendices.
The collection includes all seven issues (Introduction, Ghosts, Masks, Snakes, Calendars, Always Coming Home, and Spiritual Anarchism), new retrospective afterwords, and reader-submitted appendices.
162 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 12, 2019
I want to appreciate the effort presented with a project like this – I think spiritual traditions are important, and I understand the longing for them, but I just don't completely understand where this one is coming from.
Two big shortcomings for me:
1. The text absolutely panders to the IGD crowd, where every single small revolt is recalled as a grandiose act; where everything is a struggle against "fascism"; where the ever-ambiguous "insurrection" teeter-totters between social (in the vulgar sense) struggle and anti-politics.
2. There's a major lack of context with the people and ideas cited. Benjamin is constantly pagan-ized, as if his jewishness can be separated from his writings on messianism, revolution, etc. His theology (a complicated one, to be sure) is diluted into a generic form of "spiritualism" that can be adopted by seemingly any perspective. Similarly, all the Greek practices cited are divorced from their complete form-of-life. "Spiritual" is used as such a fuzzy category to allow for a bricolage of practices, but in the process the discursive necessity is lost.
Two big shortcomings for me:
1. The text absolutely panders to the IGD crowd, where every single small revolt is recalled as a grandiose act; where everything is a struggle against "fascism"; where the ever-ambiguous "insurrection" teeter-totters between social (in the vulgar sense) struggle and anti-politics.
2. There's a major lack of context with the people and ideas cited. Benjamin is constantly pagan-ized, as if his jewishness can be separated from his writings on messianism, revolution, etc. His theology (a complicated one, to be sure) is diluted into a generic form of "spiritualism" that can be adopted by seemingly any perspective. Similarly, all the Greek practices cited are divorced from their complete form-of-life. "Spiritual" is used as such a fuzzy category to allow for a bricolage of practices, but in the process the discursive necessity is lost.
August 12, 2020
Written for a very specific time, and also not, the magic of this book will meet you where you are.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews