Vestiges of a Philosophy Matter, the Meta-Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson

"A highly original examination of the writings and practices of mystic and spiritualist Mina Bergson (1865-1925), in the light of her seemingly estranged brother, Henri Bergson's (1859-1941) ultra-realist ideas in the philosophies of time and of mind (the past really survives in memory). Her proposal that 'material science' was 'spiritualizing itself' just as 'occult science' was 'materializing itself' converges with her brother's attempt to overcome the duality of spirit and matter through a process metaphysics. Yet her approach comes from the tradition of Western Esotericism rather than Western Philosophy, a difference that will motivate an analysis of the ontology and methodology of the Bergson siblings. In doing so, it also engages with contemporary ideas in panpsychism, memory studies, the philosophy of time, as well as the relationship between spirit and matter within contemporary materialist thinking (Catherine Malabou, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett). This study is then able to conceptualise for the first time the relations between a non-mechanistic view of matter as heterogenous, non-local, and creative, and Mina Bergson's mystical performances of a spiritualised materiality. In this process of cross-fertilisation, a number of new concepts emerge involving the meta-spiritual, hetero-continuity, the supernormal, and the hyperbolic while also helping to side-step the duality of an immaterial or paranormal spiritualism on the one side and a reductive materialism on the other"--