This is the central site for a long-term project to research, examine, and respond to the radical collective of writers, theorists, architects, and visual artists who operated in Paris between 1829 and 1835 under the names of the Jeunes France & the Bouzingo, and through them to build a critical understanding of French Romanticist subculture through the historical lens of a continuing politically vigilant Anglophone avant-garde.

Friday, August 24, 2018

Lecture Notes: Occultism, Politics, and the Decadent Avant-Garde, Part 2: 1850–1900.

Here are the outline and powerpoint for Part 2 of Olchar Lindsann's lecture on Occultism, Politics, and the Romanticist Avant-Garde at the AfterMAF Festival in Roanoke, Virginia, 14 July 2018. (Part 1 is HERE.) The recording of Part 1 was lost; here is the video of Part II:
 
  
 
This is less concerned with explaining proto-socialist and hermetic concepts themselves (a doomed attempt of hubris in two 2-hour lectures), than with exploring precisely how the social fabric of the Parisian intellectual underground became permeated with hermetic ideas and practices – tracing the avant-occultist practitioners and groups who planted and cultivated the first seeds of what would later blossom as the Rose+Cross, the Golden Dawn, Dada and Surrealism, the Grand-Jeu, Acéphale, Vienna Aktionism, Chaos Magic, the Church of the Sub-Genius, ToPY, etc. etc. –