Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories Of Unorthodox Ideas

462 Pages·2018·15.937 MB·English

by  Jonathan P. Eburne

Outsider Theory
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Outsider
Theory
Intellectual Histories
of Unorthodox
Ideas
Jonathan P. Eburne
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance provided
for the publication of this book from the College of Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State
University.
Portions of the Introduction and chapter 7 were previously published as “Sztuka outsiderska /
teoria outsiderska,” in Kultura Współczesna 3, no. 87 (2015): 84– 96. Chapter 5 first appeared
in African American Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 1– 19; copyright 2014 The Johns Hopkins
University Press and St. Louis University.
Copyright 2018 by Jonathan P. Eburne
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Eburne, Jonathan P. (Jonathan Paul), author.
Title: Outsider theory : intellectual histories of questionable ideas / Jonathan P. Eburne.
Description: Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008937 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0554-5 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0555-2 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Facts. | Common fallacies. | Errors. | Philosophy, Modern—20th  century. |
Intellectual life—20th  century. | Philosophy, Modern—21st  century. | Intellectual
life—21st  century.
Classification: LCC B105.F3 E28 2018 (print) | DDC 001.9— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018008937
We have reached a point where all destinations, all bright lights, arouse mis-
trust. The light at the end of the tunnel turns too quickly into the interro-
gator’s spotlight.
— W illiam Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons
There are so many questions, and so much Dogmaturd to clear aside be-
fore anything makes sense, and we are on the point of destroying the Earth
before we know anything at all. Perhaps a great virtue, curiosity can only
be satisfied if the millennia of accumulated false data be turned upside
down. Which means turning oneself inside out and to begin by despising
no thing, ignoring no thing.
— Leonora Carrington, “The Cabbage Is a Rose”
Theory is absence, obscure and propitious.
— É douard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface: Enemies of the Truth xiii
Introduction 1
Part I. Alien Gods
1. The Alien Knowledge of Nag Hammadi 37
2. Gnostic Materialism 67
Part II. Mythomorphoses
3. So Dark, the Con of Man 113
4. The Chalice, the Blade, and the Bifurcation Point 159
Part III. Sovereign Institutions
5. Garveyism and Its Involutions 201
6. The Sade Industry 237
Part IV. Products of Mind
7. Cartographorrhea: On Psychotic Maps 269
8. Communities of Suspicion: Immanuel Velikovsky
and the Laws of Science 305
Coda: Thought from Outer Space 345
Notes 365
Index 421
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Acknowledgments
This is a long book, and it took a long time to write. During the pro-
cess, my thoughts often strayed from the common authorial apprehension
about the odds of surviving the book’s completion to a more daunting anxiety
about the odds of there being a future at all. I am grateful for the scholars,
artists, scientists, teachers, booksellers, and intellectual workers who persist in
fighting not only for a political and ecological future on this planet but for an
imaginative one as well.
To this end — and by way of a deep expression of gratitude — I take the
liberty of citing something my colleague Robert Caserio wrote as we corre-
sponded about our current scholarly preoccupations: Outsider Theory, he
writes, “is not only about the romance and errantry of intellectual life, in which
we are all quixotes; it is also about vulnerability and mortality as occasions
of death as well as of birth. One can’t tell, of course, if one’s error will be
mortal or natal.” I wish to thank Robert for his tireless dedication to intel-
lectual romance, as well as for his recognition of the necessary vulnerability
of the work of scholarship — not only for the mortality that always haunts it,
but also for the inevitability of entangling error with correctness.
In this regard, Outsider Theory has come to resemble its object of study
in rather discomfiting ways. This book perpetually teeters on the verge of
becoming an iteration of some of the more preposterous ideas it studies, an
“interdisciplinary synthesis” as long on ambition and as short on credibility
as some of its more overreaching subject matter. Its aims, however, are far
more pedestrian. This book represents not an attempt to synthesize dispa-
rate intellectual fields but an exercise of indiscipline, however romantic in its
errantry. It explores how certain fields of study — and how thought itself — can
and have been deformed and reformed according to their encounters with
ways of thinking and knowing alien to their own. Such “outsider” thinking
both strains and exercises the social and epistemological mechanisms of what
ix