Bells, Books and Candles - Philosophy Seminar

 Cultural critic Stephen Alexander, writing out of the Continental philosophy tradition, is here to praise of physical objects in magic.  He launches with this: 

"According to some commentators, nostalgia for the thing is always reactionary. And perhaps there are good reasons to be suspicious of those who become too taken with the idea that things – including artworks and human beings – have a magical quality or essence. Nevertheless, my fascination with das Ding – whether in the prose poems of Francis Ponge, the philosophical reflections of Martin Heidegger, or even the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan – grows stronger by the year. In other words, for me, the thing remains an alluring object – albeit one that is rapidly vanishing in this virtual age of Undinge – and I don’t wish to live in an entirely disenchanted world where everything has been dissolved and digitalised into quantifiable data to…