Mood Curriculum, Episode 3: Simon Critchley

In the third episode of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen speaks with philosopher Simon Critchley about his book On Mysticism (NYRB, 2024). With On Mysticism Critchley offers a roadmap to mystical practice and thought within the Christian tradition. He understands mystical experience as experience in its most intense form – mysticism is mediated immediacy. It is an antidote to melancholy, as Julian of Norwich puts it, "to the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself. " It is also a call to intensify the senses: "God is all mouth", he quotes from Madame Guyon, and a movement away from the self: to write, in the words of Annie Dillard, "without a face".

Music by bitsy Knox and Roger 3000. Cover art by Tolia Astakhishvili.