My review of Peter Kingsley’s CATAFALQUE so far brings out the negative aspect of my reading experience, but I hope to get to my more positive reactions.
One approach to what is positive in the book’s overall perspective would be to envision it in terms of its radical empiricism and of its uncompromising rejection of the rationalist tradition. To bring this out we can usefully compare Kingsley’s CATAFALQUE to Deleuze’s oeuvre. A « Deleuzian » aspect is present in this book, even if it is skewed, as we have seen, by Kinsley’s dogmatic image of thought.
We can see the Deleuzian aspect in
1) Kingsley’s commitment to experience over doxa, and to a wider range of experience
2) his anti-Platonism
3) his fidelity to an underground tradition stretching from the pre-Socratics to Jung
4) his critique of the orthodox Jungian analysts, of their adulteration or betrayal of Jung’s experience and message
5) his « magical » language and incantatory style
6) his appeal to dreams and visions, to altered states of consciousness and to techniques such as incubation for reaching them
7) his emphasis on individuation as de-personalisation, dis-egoisation
AGENT SWARM 